Game-Changers

 Everybody knows the old French saw about how the more things appear to change, the more they actually stay the same. And mostly it’s true—we can surely all think of a dozen innovations touted in their day as societal game-changers that turned out merely to be variations on the theme they were supposed not merely to revise slightly but totally to uproot and replace. You can make scrambled eggs in your microwave slightly more quicky than in a frying pan, but you still end up with a plate of scrambled eggs. And your wireless printer does exactly the same thing as your non-wireless printer did, just without the wire. It’s nice to have fewer wires under your desk, of course. But was the world—or even just your world—really changed by the advent of wireless printers?

But then, every so often, something comes along that actually does change everything. It generally takes a while for people to understand the implications of that innovation, however. Gutenberg’s printing press is a good example: it’s hard to think of a day that more totally changed the world—and for the better—than that fateful day in 1452 on which Gutenberg produced his first printed Bible, thus opening the path for printed books to supplant hand-written manuscripts by making it possible to create hundreds, or even thousands, of  copies of a book in the time a scribe would have earlier on needed to create a single volume. And, yes, things got off to a strong start: by 1500, there were a cool 30,000 books in print across Europe. But even so it took almost a century and a half before it dawned on someone that Gutenberg’s invention could be used to publish a daily printed newspaper. (That first effort was the rather infelicitously named Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien, a German-language newspaper that Johann Carolus began publishing in Strasbourg in 1605.)

Some of these game-changing moments seem less momentous as time passes: I can remember the teenaged me thinking that nothing would ever be the same again after Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon in 1969, only later on to realize that it was a come-and-go moment that, practically speaking, changed nothing at all in terms of the way we live our lives down here on earth. Others seem only in retrospect to have been crucial turning points, but went totally unnoticed at the time: surely the invention of email counts as an innovation that permanently altered the way society functions, but I myself can’t say with certainly who invented it or when exactly. (I can now—I just looked it up and so can you: click here. But why V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai is basically unknown, while Neil Armstrong’s name is known even to young children—that would be an interesting issue to think through. Perhaps I’ll return to that one of these days and see what I can come up with.)

But I write about all this today because I noted in the paper something a few weeks ago that feels to me as though it might well be—at least in retrospect—a true game-changer moment. It surely went unnoticed by most. In the end, it may end up to have been a fancy parlor-trick that only felt momentous at the moment. Or it may be an innovation that possesses the potential to address the scourge of homelessness.

As recently as ten years ago, it was estimated that there were as many as 100 million people in the world living without roofs over their heads. Nor is this a Third World problem per se: in 2018 it was estimated by the government that there were about 553,000 homeless individuals in the United States, 65% of whom were temporarily being housed in shelters and 35% of whom were fending for themselves on our nations’ streets. Just this spring, the New York Times reported that there were about 114,000 school-age children who were or will be either permanently or temporarily homeless during the current school year. (To read more about that almost unbelievable statistic, click here.)

The roots of homelessness are complicated and vary from context to context, but the cost of owning a home is surely part of the problem. Maybe it’s the advent of Pesach that has made me especially sensitive to the whole issue: the holiday is formally about freedom from slavery, but the famous image of the Israelites yearning for home while spending forty years living in flimsy, roofless sukkot that provided no real protection from the elements, no meaningful security, and hardly any privacy at all—all those themes came together to draw my attention to an article in the New York Post last week that announced something that struck me as the kind of innovation that could conceivably take its place next to Gutenberg’s press one of these days. And it too had something to do with printing.

Or at least with a printer.

The article, by Mary K. Jacob, reported that 70-year-old Tim Shea, formerly a homeless soul living on the streets in Austin, Texas, now resides in a 400-square-foot home that was created with a 3-D printer and which is part of a community of such structures created especially to house 180 people like himself in homes they rent for $300 a month. (The community also provides work opportunities for the residents, so all who live there can earn their rent and remain permanently in place. To read the New York Post article, click here.) The cost of creating such a home, using machines called “large concrete 3-D printers” is about $10,000. But the price is expected to drop as the technology becomes more advanced and one essay I found projected the eventual cost of using such a machine to create an inhabitable home to be about $3500. Also relevant is that such a building can be constructed by four workers in less than twenty-four hours. (For a more detailed account by Adele Peters of how this unbelievable technology works, click here.) Each printer—obviously something akin to the printer on your desk but also quite different from it—costs about $100,000 and is expected to be able to produce about 1,000 homes. So that would add about $100 to the cost of each home, a more than bearable addition. The homes are made of concrete and mortar, both substances readily available in most Third World countries. The roofs are not 3-D printed.

As noted above, lots of innovations present themselves to the world as game-changers but only very few actually do alter the course of human society. The invention of the printing press certainly deserves its place on the list. So do the introduction of the personal computer and the invention of the Internet. But the thought that society could address the problems of homelessness and the extreme poverty and lack of resources that brings people to live on the street by constructing homes so inexpensively that even people with the most modest incomes could afford the rent…and then by constructing communities for such people that also provide the employment opportunities necessary to earn that rent and to survive with dignity in a secure and safe environment—that seems to me a development truly with the potential to change the world.

One of the Torah’s most chilling lines is in the fifteenth chapter of Deuteronomy. The text enjoins the Israelite to be generous and kind when it comes to charitable giving, and never to begrudge the poor their alms, “for it was precisely to grant you the ability to show such solicitude to the poor that God blessed you with whatever wealth you possess in the first place.” And then Scripture goes on to note wistfully that this shall be a permanent obligation, “for surely the poor will never vanish entirely from the land.” Ramban says to take this more as a dour observation than as an actual prophetic oracle—and thus specifically not to conclude that the eradication of poverty is something that could never actually be achieved—and I’d like to think that that is exactly correct. (Ramban, also called Nachmanides, died in 1270 and is still considered one of the greatest Torah commentators.) And that is why I responded so emotionally to that story in the paper the other day: the thought that it could be possible to address the world-wide problem of homelessness by building habitable homes for less than the cost of a car and then by constructing communities that present future residents with the kind of work-opportunities that will make residence in such homes affordable for all—that really does seem to me like a game-changer. If I had to bequeath to my lovely granddaughters a world in which no human being had ever walked on the moon, I could live with that. But to think that the possibility exists to offer them a world in which all human beings can live in dignified, secure housing—that seems to me like the kind of innovative change that really would be a game-changer in terms of the way we live in the world.