What Happens When Per Capita GDP Hits $10,000? Thirty-Three Moments From 10 Places

Every date given here for a country crossing $10,000 has been adjusted for inflation, to the equivalent of $10,000 in 2018 dollars.

On January 21, 2019, China's National Bureau of Statistics announced the previous year's GDP, which worked out to $9,500 per person, with growth expected to run 6.3% in 2019.

At Davos, Fang Xinghai, vice chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, trimmed that figure to 6%. Even so, China's per capita GDP will pass $10,000 in 2019, the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic.

Since 1970, people have kept invoking per capita GDP thresholds — first $3,000, then South Korea and Taiwan passing $5,000, and now China setting its sights on $10,000.

Inflation explains part of this. In today's money, the threshold has always sat at around $10,000. By now, per capita GDP for the world as a whole has passed $10,000.

The first to cross the line was the United States, in 1913 — easy enough to understand. Except that at the time, almost no one cared about GDP or about $10,000 a head.

European countries came next, mostly after World War II. By the 1980s it was East Asia's turn, riding the transfer of manufacturing out of the US and Europe: local production generated GDP, and workers who drew wages spent more, generating still more GDP.

Sometimes this number tells you something. In some countries and regions, society changed — sometimes sharply, sometimes barely — around the time per capita GDP crossed $10,000.

But the number has limits. GDP is the sum of a region's economic output. These vast figures only represent the value of everything an economy finished making in a given stretch of time. They say nothing about how income is divided. Two countries can have similar per capita GDP and, because they distribute it differently, wildly different actual incomes.

QDaily picked 10 countries and regions, spread across the world, that crossed $10,000 per person at different points over the past century. Their ideologies differ, and so do the ways they raised their output.

GDP figures for each come from the World Bank and from the economic historian Angus Maddison, adjusted for inflation.

We looked at what happened in these places around the time they reached $10,000 — everything, big and small. For the people living through it, crossing a number changed nothing they could see. Work went on, life went on, and so did the problems.

United States, 1913

The United States first reached $10,000 per capita GDP in 1913. There's reason to think that had World War I not broken out the following year, pulling the US in by 1917, the curve would have kept climbing.

New York's influence was not yet what it is today, but nothing was holding it back. New York Times writer Holland Cotter called the city "boiling," "frenzied." Wall Street's challenge to London's stock market had begun to show, and the two cities would spend the next 100 years fighting over the world's capital. On Fifth Avenue, some 10,000 women marched for the vote. That was the other side of the noise.

1. Crossword puzzles reach the newspapers

Most of the time, people in this country lived steady lives and knew how to amuse themselves. That Christmas season, buying a copy of the New York World on a street corner turned up a fresh way to pass an hour: the crossword puzzle. This was roughly the first time a crossword had appeared in a newspaper.

It took a few more years for this brain exercise to catch on. At its peak, 50 million Americans played it every week, of every age and occupation. Later the crossword became standard newspaper equipment. The New York Times added one to its Sunday edition in 1942, and the puzzle editor set the difficulty by the day of the week.

On Monday, the hardest day to get through, the puzzle was the easiest of the week.

2. Macy's window

Or you could stop outside a department store; that was interesting too. More than a decade earlier, Macy's in New York had been the first to decorate its windows for the Christmas season. By 1911, Macy's had opened stores beyond New York and listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Going to look at the Macy's windows became a holiday ritual, especially for women and children.

1913 was no exception. Standing at the windows, people probably never thought about the fact that Macy's owner Isidor Straus and his wife, Ida Straus, had died the year before. That year the country had been ready to welcome more of the world's richest men, and migrant laborers hoping to start over here — and it left behind a shadow instead. The Titanic sailed for New York on April 10, 1912, struck an iceberg on the way, and 1,514 people died.

Consumerism ran deep. Historians point to one marker of it: a slogan coined years earlier by another retailer, Sears, Roebuck — "goods for the millionaire, at prices in reach of the millions." Through its mail-order catalog, Sears sold across the whole country, creating a standardized American way of buying that reached rural customers too.

Unlike the later flight to the suburbs, Americans in this period were moving toward the cities. Through the department stores' mail-order catalogs, the German scholar Lofgren wrote, "isolated villages and individuals were connected to emerging cities in a very tight way, and this process of modernization also made the whole country into one." In 1913, the year US per capita GDP passed $10,000, Sears's sales had already passed $10 million.

3. The Coca-Cola girl

Coca-Cola issued the world's first free redeemable coupon in 1888. Giving something away is, in the end, a way to get you to spend more. By 1913, Coca-Cola had redeemed 850 coupons in all. The company also hired the artist Hamilton King to paint illustrations for its calendars and serving trays.

King's work showed a "Coca-Cola Girl" who looked much like Audrey Hepburn would later look in My Fair Lady, arms full of new purchases, a small handbag dangling from her wrist. As it happens, My Fair Lady was adapted from George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion, written in 1912, first staged in Vienna in 1913, and brought to New York in March 1914. Though the British writer joked that "99 out of 100" Americans were fools, his plays found their earliest audiences in America.

4. Ah, Cubism — how terrifying!

European art was new and sophisticated, and Americans flocked to it. In 1913 they queued up with great enthusiasm for a show called the International Exhibition of Modern Art — and were struck dumb once they walked into the Cubist rooms.

On February 17, 1913, the 69th Regiment Armory in Manhattan took in tens of thousands of visitors. More than 1,000 works by over 300 artists from Europe and the Americas were on display, among them Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brâncuși, Paul Gauguin, Marcel Duchamp, and Henri Matisse.

One connoisseur told Chicago Tribune reporter Harriet Monroe: "It makes me afraid of the world. Something must be wrong with this age, that it would put such things into a museum and call it art. Psychiatrists really ought to study the brains of these people — these canvases, I can't even call them 'paintings' — they belong in the collection room of an insane asylum."

The "canvases" then traveled to Chicago and Boston, drawing an estimated 150,000 visitors.

The American historian Jacques Barzun mentions the show in From Dawn to Decadence. Former president Theodore Roosevelt, he notes, wrote a review of it: the first few paragraphs were extremely polite, before he concluded that this newest school of painters was the "lunatic fringe." Barzun also argues that Cubism's sweep through Europe and its later vogue in America "bore a subtle relationship to the wave of populism" — wiping out recognizable things, and above all wiping the human face out of Cubist portraits, meant that the new mass had swallowed the individual.

"Of course the individual still existed, but anonymously, as one of thousands of similar atoms. Now millions of people each mattered enormously, but were indistinguishable from one another in status and habit."

5. Hollywood is born

To satisfy millions of people who each mattered, and keep them all content, safe and conservative standardized consumption and entertainment took shape. Hollywood deserves much of the credit.

Before 1913, silent film was still made mainly in New York, but in those couple of years production companies and investors ran off to Los Angeles to escape Thomas Edison's patent fees on filmmaking technology. Universal, the big studio, was founded in 1912, Paramount in 1914, and 20th Century Fox in 1915.

6. Higher, and higher still

A businessman named Frank Woolworth changed New York's skyline. In 1913, a 241-meter, 60-story building rose at 233 Broadway. Woolworth, who had made his money on cheap "Five-and-Dime" stores, planned to move his company's headquarters there.

The architect he hired, Cass Gilbert, would later become a devoted skyscraper man, but at first he meant to design the Woolworth Company a standard 12-to-16-story office block. Woolworth found that insufficient: he wanted to beat the nearby New York World Building, 20 stories and 110 meters tall. Draft followed draft and the building kept growing — from 170 meters and 40 stories to 45 stories, level with the Singer Building, then to 190 meters, 2.4 meters above the Singer Building. When the final design went public, the drawings showed 45 stories and 191 meters.

In April the Woolworth Building was completed, reaching nearly 210 meters — the tallest building in New York City, and the tallest in the world at the time.

7. Raising efficiency, a businessman's calling

Carl Fisher, an early automobile manufacturer, planned to build a concrete highway from Times Square in New York to Lincoln Park in San Francisco. The railroads already covered the country — by 1916 the network ran 254,251 miles. But the whole United States still had not one long-distance highway. Carmakers were the first to see how much roads mattered: cars did far better on smooth concrete than on dirt. Fisher wanted to find a few peers to help fund the road. It would be good for car sales, too.

Henry Ford, the most influential carmaker of the day, wasn't buying. Road-building, he thought, was the government's job.

Ford understood the difference between the government's responsibility and a businessman's calling. In 1908 he produced the Model T and positioned it as a consumer good "everyone should own."

In 1909 he wrote in the New York Times explaining the system Ford had adopted and how it was possible to build "high-priced quality into a low-priced car," giving seven answers, among them buying in bulk, producing in volume, cutting the number of parts, and selling more efficiently to lower costs. Ford also spent $250,000 on new production machinery, shortening the distance from raw casting to assembly by a tenth and cutting the labor needed by a third.

But Ford did not reach genuinely modern production until 1913. Ford said he had once watched, at a Chicago slaughterhouse, a cow stunned by electricity, then bled, gutted, and cut apart — each step done in turn by a different worker. That gave him the idea, and in 1913 he built the world's first assembly line.

United Kingdom, 1933

In 1933 Britain was still an empire; one king ruled more than 500 million subjects and roughly 25% of the world's inhabited land.

But for the 46 million people on the British Isles, $10,000 per capita GDP arrived at anything but an easy moment — the country still had not climbed out of the global Depression. Britain's unemployment rate hit 22.8% in 1933, and hardly anyone was paying attention to Churchill's warnings about Nazi Germany.

8. A new London Underground map, later copied by every other city

The event that changed Londoners' lives most in 1933 was the unification of the city's public transport. Every Underground line, light railway, and bus was brought under one body, the London Passenger Transport Board (LPTB). At the same time, the Underground map drawn by the surveyor Harry Beck came into use.

The network, under construction since the 1860s, had grown too tangled, with stations anywhere from 200 meters to 60 kilometers apart. The maps of the day, drawn to scale, were too complicated to work out where to change trains.

Beck turned the map into a topological diagram. The lines no longer sat where they sat in the real world, but the order of the stations along each line and the crossings between lines survived, and where to change became obvious at a glance.

The new map was a hit — 750,000 copies gone in under a month — and cities around the world later copied its design.

But as often happened in Britain then, the map was credited to Beck's superior. His name was not added until the 1997 edition.

9. The lights come on

The British engineer Hector MacLean recalled that when his family first had electric lighting put in during the 1930s, his parents' first reaction was: "Look how much soot there is — we'll have to repaint."

By the 1920s the electric vacuum cleaner, the washing machine, and the electric stove had all arrived. But only in the United States could ordinary people afford electricity: by 1925, half of American households had it.

In Britain, 6% did. There was no electric utility of any real size, five light bulbs running for a day would burn through an ordinary person's monthly wages, and in 1933 nearly a quarter of Britons had no work at all. The Conservative prime minister Stanley Baldwin pushed through the Electricity (Supply) Act in 1926, creating a national grid and connecting 122 power stations.

After five years of work, the grid was finished in September 1933, ahead of schedule and under budget. Six thousand four hundred kilometers of cable went up, linking 122 power stations across the country. By 1938, 9 million British households had electricity.

Denmark, 1946

10. Lego switches to plastic toys

For Godtfred Christiansen and his family in Denmark, life in the early 1940s was genuinely wretched. Germany occupied his country, the studies he had planned in Germany were shelved, and he stayed home helping with the family business as manager of a wooden toy factory.

Then a fire in 1942 burned the factory to the ground. The scene was not unfamiliar to him. In 1924, he and his younger brother had set fire to some glue while their parents napped, and within minutes the family house and toy workshop were flat.

Luckily, years of running the factory had left healthy reserves, and it was quickly rebuilt and back in production. Four years later, in 1946, Christiansen took 6% of the company's revenue and bought a Danish plastic injection-molding machine for toys, putting plastic into the family's product line for the first time.

Three years after that, he made a plastic brick that locked into other bricks, with round studs on top — what the world now knows as the Lego brick.

Germany, 1959

Ludwig Erhard, the father of the social market economy, became West Germany's minister for economic affairs and labor in 1949. Price caps, rationing, and heavy taxes that had run from the Nazi era through the postwar years were scrapped. People again had a reason to work harder for more.

Over the next decade the German economy grew at furious speed, in what came to be called the economic miracle, the Wirtschaftswunder. By 1959, Germany's per capita GDP passed $10,000 for the first time (in 2018 money), and its exports overtook Britain's, reaching twice those of France.

11. The Formula One Grand Prix comes to West Berlin

On August 2, 1959, the German Grand Prix was held in West Berlin.

West Berlin was cut off from German motorsport. Ringed entirely by East Germany, the city could only be reached by air, and local teams had no money to fly west often to race; more often they staged their own events and invited drivers from other countries.

Less than two months remained before the deadline of Khrushchev's ultimatum demanding that Britain, America, and France pull their troops out of West Berlin. The American government was preparing to evacuate women and children from West Berlin and from West Germany as a whole, to show the Soviets it meant to defend the city. West Germans did not look worried.

"There is no sign of any German canceling vacation plans because of it," a New York Times reporter observed from Bonn.

The star of the race was Ferrari. The top three finishers all drove for Ferrari: the British driver Tony Brooks, and the Americans Dan Gurney and Phil Hill, all in the Ferrari Dino 246. Brooks's fastest lap reached 150 miles per hour; it was the last F1 win of his career.

Crashes were unavoidable, especially on the AVUS circuit. Just before the race, the famous French driver Jean Behra died on that same track in a different event. Of the 15 cars that started the Grand Prix, only 6 finished all 60 laps. No F1 race was ever held there again; the track later became part of Germany's Federal Highway 115.

Germans loved racing, and turned the country's whole highway network into a kind of racetrack.

With half a million cars going onto West German roads in a single year, crashes grew common to match. In September 1959, West Germany had 80,000 traffic accidents in one month, leaving 50,000 people injured and 1,380 dead. That year in West Germany, an average of 40 people died on the roads every day. Over the same period 99 people a day died on American roads — but the US population was more than three times West Germany's.

The Cologne safety association urged drivers with less than six months' experience to hang a special plate with a large "L" on it, reading "You never stop learning." The West German defense ministry stepped in too, capping speeds on the Autobahns at 50 miles per hour (80 kilometers per hour).

Still, Germans spent most of their time working. The official West German week was 48 hours; the real one ran longer. Asked why Germans worked so hard, one German banker complained that people these days dawdled until nearly 8am before starting. A local union organizer joked at his own expense: "It's a kind of national disease. Other people work in order to live; we Germans live in order to work."

Two other big things happened to German cars that year. One was the "Think Small" advertisement, which made the Volkswagen Beetle a hit in America, helped define the Mad Men era of advertising, and 38 years later inspired another famous slogan. The other was the Quandt family taking control of Bayerische Motoren Werke and preparing to build cars — which became the BMW 3.

12. The Tin Drum is published, waking memories many Germans wanted to lose

Günter Grass's The Tin Drum is now counted among the most important works of 20th-century literature. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999, honored for having, in "frolicsome black fables," drawn "the forgotten face of history."

In the world Grass built, the dwarf Oskar watches the adult world in secret. He is born alongside the Nazis, starts school as Hitler takes power, gets to France in time for the Normandy landings, and comes home to Danzig in time for the Red Army's occupation. What Grass wrote was not an invented character; it was the 20th century.

But when The Tin Drum first appeared on October 6, 1959, Germans were not eager to talk about that war and what it had done.

That year a German television station visited secondary schools and found that among students aged 15 to 17, nine in ten knew little about what had happened during the war. Popular opinions included "Hitler saved Germany, solved unemployment, and built the highways" and "people are gradually realizing the Nazis' actions weren't so bad after all." Students put the number of Holocaust victims at under 30,000, about one two-hundredth of the real figure.

The Dutch writer Ian Buruma put it this way: "While most Germans suffered from collective amnesia, Grass became a serious writer. Those Germans, having just forgotten what had barely become the past, could devote themselves single-mindedly to expanding the economic miracle. Grass's 'Danzig Trilogy' blew a hole in the amnesia of the early postwar period. Some critics were stung by his wild, coarse, sharp prose and called his novels obscene. In reality, what was truly obscene was the suffocating atmosphere created by cautious evasion, euphemism, and deliberate forgetting."

13. Dieter Rams designs two products

In 1959 the 27-year-old German designer Dieter Rams designed two products for two different companies.

One was for Braun, where he had worked for four years and would soon become chief designer: the TP1 portable radio. Natural, with nothing extra on it — the shadow of Rams's later classics is already there.

The other was for a new company, Vitsœ. That year Rams met the Danish furniture dealer Niels Vitsœ and the German designer Otto Zapf. With Braun's blessing, he designed the 606 Universal Shelving System.

Rams kept working for both companies until he retired. The ten principles of good design he later set out shaped generations of designers, in hardware and software alike:

• Good design is innovative
• Good design makes a product useful
• Good design is aesthetic
• Good design makes a product understandable
• Good design is unobtrusive
• Good design is honest
• Good design is long-lasting
• Good design is thorough down to the last detail
• Good design is environmentally friendly
• Good design is as little design as possible

Saudi Arabia, 1961

14. The first civilian air terminal is finished

In September 1961 the civilian terminal at Dhahran Air Field, on Saudi Arabia's Tarut Bay, opened, turning the field into Dhahran International Airport.

Saudi Arabia's first airport had started life as a US Air Force base, but because the Saudis were wary of imperialism, it was called an "Air Field" rather than an "Air Force Base" from its completion in 1946 onward.

With the technology of the day, flying in Saudi Arabia was no easy business — summer heat cut engine efficiency, and sandstorms forced pilots to hold their planes at 14,000 feet to see clear sky. Even so, from the 1950s on, demand for civil aviation grew slowly and steadily, with routes reaching Istanbul, Karachi, Amman, Kuwait, Port Sudan, and elsewhere. Besides the flag carrier, Saudi Arabian Airlines, the state oil company Saudi Aramco also ran an airline at the time.

Without air transport, getting around the country meant going overland: 12 to 14 hours by car from where Saudis lived to the Gulf oil fields, and longer when sandstorms closed the roads. As routes multiplied, Saudi Arabia began planning and upgrading its civil aviation facilities, paid for by the United States, which leased Dhahran Air Field.

Minoru Yamasaki, the Japanese-American architect who would later design New York's original World Trade Center twin towers, ran the Dhahran terminal project. Yamasaki blended traditional Islamic and modern design in a way so far ahead of its time that the American engineering director, Major General Emerson Hess, said it was "too imaginative even for Disneyland." But the Saudi king liked it, the project went forward, and the terminal opened in 1961. Saudi aviation ordered two Boeing 720 jets from the US, becoming the first airline in the Middle East to fly jet airliners.

The year before the terminal was finished, Saudi Arabia joined the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC, as a founding member, reached several fiscal agreements with the International Monetary Fund, and launched a five-year plan to improve the economy. That made a terminal with its own immigration office all the more necessary to handle the growing traffic.

15. Under fiscal pressure, Saudi Arabia reforms

Under the country's first king, Abdulaziz, Saudi Arabia had not in fact built a privileged royal class: his first palace was made of the same sun-dried mud brick as farmers' houses, and he and the herders called each other by their first names.

When his son Saud took the throne in 1953, lavish spending drained the treasury. With annual oil revenue of $300 million, the riyal lost more than 80% of its value in 1958. To stop the tide of criticism, members of the Saudi royal family and elite studying abroad were forbidden to major in law, political science, or related fields.

Saudi Arabia's foreign relations grew tense too. Because France and Britain had sent troops against Egypt, a Saudi ally, Saudi Arabia broke off relations with France. Olof Höstbeck, Ericsson's Middle East sales manager, remembered visiting Saudi Arabia in 1961: "It was very difficult to work in this country. At the time, they hardly allowed Westerners in."

But because Saudi finances had to lean on the International Monetary Fund, reforms began, gradually, after 1961. Saudi women were allowed to be educated starting that year, and the government carried out plans for girls' schools and colleges. Under the new king, Faisal, infrastructure projects such as road-building and telephone networks were also being assessed — Ericsson's delegation had come to the Middle East for an automatic telephone network. Faisal, a graduate of Princeton's economics department, also tried to loosen religion's hold on Saudi thinking by spreading public education. It was in this period that Saudi Arabia first legislated basic support for people over 60, those unable to work, orphans, and women.

Japan, 1962

After one failed bid, Tokyo in 1959 finally beat Brussels, Vienna, Buenos Aires, and Detroit to win the 1964 Olympics — the first Games to be held in an Asian country.

In 1961 the stock market set a record with 13 straight days of gains, a record that stood until October 20, 2017. From 1954 to 1961 the market climbed from 314 points to 1,829, then began to slide.

Still, the warmth of the Iwato boom lingered. Mass production of cars, televisions, microwave ovens, and dishwashers really had changed daily life.

16. A 333-meter Tokyo Tower isn't enough

1962 was a year of preparation for hosting world-class events. Four years earlier the 333-meter Tokyo Tower had been finished — 8.6 meters taller than the Eiffel Tower — and people said this tower, built to broadcast radio waves, showed off Japan's postwar revival.

That wasn't enough. In 1958 the Japanese government decided to build the Tōkaidō Shinkansen, connecting Tokyo and Osaka; the 1970 World Expo would be held in Osaka. Nine days before the 1964 Tokyo Olympics opened, the Tōkaidō Shinkansen entered service — the world's first commercially operated high-speed railway. Its top speed of 210 km/h was the fastest in the world in 1963, and people called it the dream super express. (In September 2017 the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed line ran at 350 km/h.)

It was not only for the tourists who came for the Games. Once the Olympics ended, it would be ordinary Japanese people's everyday transport.

Kenzo Tange's Olympic venue, the Yoyogi National Gymnasium, had been under construction for a year by then; when it was done, the district would gain a strange building shaped like a shellfish. Architects were arguing about the relationship between Western modernism and Japanese national character. Tange thought the conflict had vanished — "the opposition between the elite class and the common people no longer exists either."

17. The ten traits of a consumer civilization

Shuji Hayashi, a professor of economics at the University of Tokyo, distilled ten traits of a consumer civilization in the early 1960s:

• Disposability — 100-yen lighters, 100-yen clocks.
• Exaggerated use — larger sugar cubes, spray cans that release a lot at a light press.
• Encouraging gift-giving — Valentine's Day sales, Father's Day sales.
• Encouraging collecting — foreign liquor bottles, complete sets of illustrated volumes.
• Accessory products — a camera case for shooting outdoors.
• Manufacturing entry points — Reading Week, Cavity Prevention Day.
• Single-purpose specialization — dedicated vitamins, a different pair of underwear for each day of the week.
• Second copies — a second home or a second car.
• Spares — spare tires or light bulbs as consumables, or photo film you can stockpile.
• Planned obsolescence — making consumers feel a thing is too old even when it still works.

18. Toyota builds its own "people's car"

Around 1960, Toyota set up a US sales company, opened its first overseas plant in Brazil, and expanded its factories at home.

When it announced in 1961 that it hoped to give everyone a car of their own, the way Volkswagen had, it really did launch its own people's car, the Toyota Publica. The first one came off the line at the Motomachi plant in March 1961.

Less than a year after launch, the Publica was selling more than 2,000 units a month. The 1960s became a decade of exploding sales for Toyota, which passed two milestones: 1 million vehicles built at home and 1 million exported in total. In 1961 Toyota listed on the Nagoya Stock Exchange.

19. The television replaces the household altar

The household Shinto altar's old spot was taken over by the television. The Japanese photographer Shinya Fujiwara, born in 1944, described the Japanese home of the period in Tokyo Drift: "In the past, the center of every household was ruled by a near-deathly silence. One day, that silence suddenly reversed itself, turning into a clamor that came from nowhere and rang out like drums and gongs."

He wasn't wrong. In some archival footage you can still see people curled up on the tatami watching television, the altar apparently just moved down and propped crookedly on the mats. Television ownership in Japanese homes grew fast, from about 1.98 million sets in 1958 to more than 10.22 million by 1962.

The manga artist Osamu Tezuka was feeling worn out around this time. A year earlier he had founded Mushi Production's animation division, and he was still drawing Astro Boy. Astro Boy had run in the manga magazine Shōnen since 1952, Tezuka's first long serialized work; its hero was a bionic boy born on April 7, 2003. "For the first two or three years I really did enjoy drawing it," he said, but by now it was "purely a product of inertia," "a work drawn for money and fame."

Whatever Tezuka later said about it, the series stayed enormously popular. On January 1, 1963, Astro Boy was brought to the screen by Fuji Television, itself only four years old — Japan's first television anime, which drew a 30% average national audience share and was later sold abroad. Only a few years earlier, several of Japan's public television stations had still been filling airtime with imported American programs.

Astro Boy was black and white, because most Japanese households still had black-and-white sets. Color television had debuted in the US back in 1953, but Panasonic did not release its first color set until 1960 — thanks partly to a technical cooperation agreement between Panasonic's founder, Konosuke Matsushita, and Philips. The 21-inch color set still carried National, the brand name Panasonic used inside Japan at the time (retired in 2009).

Not long after the color set went on sale, several stations began transmitting color signals. But real trial broadcasts of color programming had to wait until a few months before the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

20. An Autumn Afternoon

Yasujirō Ozu directed his last film, An Autumn Afternoon (also known as The Taste of Sanma), in 1962 — his 54th. Critics' admiration had made Ozu a much-respected director; Yasunari Kawabata and Masao Maruyama were among his fans.

But the film did not appear anywhere on Japan's national box-office chart that year. Apart from genre pictures, the year's biggest hit was Akira Kurosawa's action film Sanjuro, a sequel to 1961's Yojimbo. Kurosawa, already a favorite of the international festival circuit, had finally (and reluctantly) proved he could sell tickets.

Nearly all of Ozu's films are about the family lives of ordinary people. The opening title card of his first talkie, The Only Son, reads: "The first act of life's tragedy begins with the relationship between parent and child." Of all such relationships, the one between father and daughter is the one he handled most often. An Autumn Afternoon is about a father, Hirayama, who lives with his daughter and younger son after his wife's death. The daughter looks after the family as her mother did, but she has reached marrying age.

While writing the screenplay, Ozu wrote in his diary:

Spring blooms beneath clear skies, the cherry blossoms bright and brilliant, alone here, I feel only lost. I think of the taste of sanma, the fallen cherry blossoms like scraps of cloth, the sake carrying a bitterness of goldthread.

21. The gift of curry

Thanks to instant curry cubes, canned curry, and the ready-to-eat pouch curries that appeared in the 1960s, a housewife could make curry rice at home. It was a rare dish that spared her the work without making her look careless or lazy.

Curry ads showed up on television. Glico launched one for curry cubes in 1963: the housewife only has to slice a bit of onion and drop the cube into water to simmer up a pot of curry, easily. The curry is good enough to make a few rowdy children sit properly at the table, holding out their bowls of white rice with both hands, waiting to receive their spoonful.

Curry first appeared in the Japanese navy's recipes. By 1932 the price had dropped sharply, and Osaka's Hankyu Department Store was selling more than 13,000 servings of curry rice a day. After World War II some Tokyo schools began putting curry in school lunches, and it spread across the country.

Soviet Union, 1970

22. The space race isn't over yet

The Soviet Union launched two lunar probes that year, Luna 16 and Luna 17.

Luna 16 could collect samples on the Moon by itself and send them back to Earth, which no probe had managed before. The rocks it brought home later ended up in private hands, and three of them sold at Sotheby's in New York in November 2018 for nearly 6 million yuan.

Luna 17 was unusual too: the Lunokhod 1 it carried was the first remote-controlled lunar rover humans ever operated successfully, driving across the surface and taking measurements.

Soviet probes also landed on the surface of Venus.

That year, the country as keen on exploring space as the Soviet Union was the United States. Their space race had begun in 1955 and had peaked the year before, when the American astronaut Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon. But the Soviet Union had no intention of conceding.

Hong Kong, 1976

Hong Kong in 1976 was run by youth culture. Statistics from 1975 showed that people aged 10 to 19 were the largest group in the population.

No wonder fashionable clothes, fast food, entertainment, and anxiety about identity were all so prevalent in Hong Kong in those years. It had to do with more than the city getting richer.

23. "What's fated to come will come; don't force what isn't"

A 22-year-old changed his name to Jackie Chan. Originally named Chan Yuen-lung, he was in Australia when he met his future manager, Willie Chan. In 1976 he returned to Hong Kong and appeared in New Fist of Fury, the start of his career.

Three years earlier the kung fu star Bruce Lee, adored around the world, had died, leaving behind an unfinished last film, Game of Death, the highest box-office record since Hong Kong opened as a port, an all-Asia box-office record, and a long wave of enthusiasm for action films.

Hong Kong's cinemas at the time were held by "sensory films"; violence and eroticism sold the most tickets. The rest were wuxia pictures about honor and integrity.

By 1976 change had quietly begun. That year The Private Eyes took HK$8.53 million, beating Star Wars, The Godfather, and Jaws to become the highest-grossing film in Hong Kong for the whole of the 1970s. The Private Eyes was a slapstick comedy starring the Hui brothers — Michael Hui, Sam Hui, and Ricky Hui. Michael Hui's 1974 film Games Gamblers Play had already set that year's box-office record, and its advertising carried the line "Films by devoted young people with you in mind."

The Private Eyes follows the head of a private detective agency, an underpaid employee, and a soda factory worker as they investigate a run of odd cases; every face of Hong Kong society turns up in the story.

Even when a society's wealth reaches a certain level, for any one person the figures may mean nothing at all. The film's two theme songs, "The Private Eyes" and "Voice of the Wanderer," are taken as a portrait of Hong Kong then — and perhaps of ordinary Hong Kong people for years afterward.

The first goes: "For us working stiffs, the grind we go through is frightening to say out loud / And don't tell me it doesn't matter / Even if there's good fortune going, you'll get no share of it / Pig intestines in boiling water shrink to almost nothing the moment they hit it / Your wages shrink the same way, and you only ever earn a little."

The second's most famous line: "What's fated to come will come; don't force what isn't fated."

After The Private Eyes, more and more hits telling homegrown Hong Kong stories appeared, and in the 1980s they swept Asia.

Like Bruce Lee, who joined Golden Harvest in 1970, the Hui brothers signed with Golden Harvest too, and in the late 1970s so did Jackie Chan. Golden Harvest's founder, Raymond Chow, had earlier been the head of Shaw Brothers.

24. Miss Hong Kong

The Miss Hong Kong pageant was relaunched in 1973 by Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB) and has been a closely watched annual event ever since. The 1976 pageant's promotional line differed from previous years:

"The purpose of the Miss Hong Kong Pageant is to select a young woman of both beauty and talent, one who can truly represent Hong Kong's beauty and culture, and raise overseas impressions of Hong Kong."

That year's winner, Lam Leung-wai, was less demure than her predecessors. After the judges and the host announced the result, the 18-year-old danced her way to the front of the stage, sat herself down on the winner's throne, threw her arms wide, and blew kisses at the audience.

25. City Magazine isn't popular yet

Chan Koon-chung founded City Magazine with a few friends in 1976. It started as a thin tabloid and later grew into a visually striking large-format publication.

The reason for publishing it: "When I was in America, I saw some countercultural newspapers and magazines. They targeted a group of people, not a single subject, so the content was very varied — covering fashion as well as politics, consumption as well as culture. I found these publications really compelling." The Village Voice, for instance. Chan had recently graduated from Boston University in journalism and sociology.

He misjudged the market. The first issue printed 10,000 copies, and more than 9,000 went to scrap dealers. At first no distributor would carry it. Chan liked it; that didn't mean other young people in Hong Kong did. "If all you read is City Magazine, you'd get the mistaken impression that Hong Kong takes culture very seriously," he said in one interview. City Magazine, which dug into the city's undercurrents, spent a long time living only on the praise of cultural figures and intellectuals.

What did a mainstream Hong Kong young person look like in the 1970s? Chan wrote years later, in My Generation of Hong Kongers: "Beyond becoming a lawyer, architect, engineer, or accountant, the mainstream elite could also go work for a foreign company." "We managers weren't like the rigid white-collar organization men of the mid-20th-century West and Japan — we were quite flexible."

City Magazine did not win the mass public, or advertisers, for another seven years. In 1983 a wave of fashionable brands came into Hong Kong, and advertisers positioned the magazine as "Hong Kong's only yuppie media." The young people of the 1970s now had more respectable incomes and more avant-garde tastes. Some of them, back from studying abroad, joined City Magazine and completely remade its visual style.

26. McDonald's sells its millionth burger

After KFC opened Hong Kong's first outlet in Wan Chai in 1973, McDonald's opened in 1975 on Paterson Street, the busiest street in Causeway Bay, from 7:30am to 9:00pm. Fries cost HK$1.80, a Big Mac HK$3.40.

By 1976 Hong Kong had 4 McDonald's, and the first one opened in Kowloon, across the harbor from Hong Kong Island. In an old photograph the Hong Kong trend magazine Milk published in 2010, a giant inflatable Big Mac is being ferried by small boat from the island to Kowloon.

By 1977 McDonald's had sold more than a million burgers in Hong Kong. In Peter Chan's 1996 film Comrades: Almost a Love Story, Maggie Cheung's character, Li Qiao, works at a McDonald's.

27. Hong Kong's Mass Transit Railway breaks ground

Sedan chairs used to be common in Hong Kong; after the war this carried-by-hand transport all but disappeared, replaced by buses and the "ding ding" trams that ran on rails and cables.

In the 1970s a tram left the center of Hong Kong Island every 25 seconds. Four bus routes on the island, put together, made a loop around the whole of it. Across Hong Kong Island, Kowloon, and the New Territories there were roughly 4,000 public light buses; before 1969 these minibuses had been "white-plate" vehicles allowed to run only in the New Territories. To get from the island to Kowloon you took the cross-harbor ferry or a steam launch, and the piers were always packed with connecting vehicles. The Cross-Harbour Tunnel opened in 1972 and eased the traffic a little.

Real change had to wait for the subway. Hong Kong's Mass Transit Railway broke ground in November 1975, and its first line opened four years later.

The main thing that pushed the Hong Kong government to build it was the population explosion. A 1967 study by London's Transport Committee and the Road Research Laboratory, the "Hong Kong Mass Transport Study," projected that Hong Kong's population would reach 6.868 million by 1986; the figure was later revised down to 5.647 million.

28. Taikoo Shing built for the middle class, public housing built for 1.8 million people

Hong Kong's birth rate began to fall in 1976, because the government had spent the preceding years promoting the slogan "Two is enough," hoping to slow population growth.

Even so, the population rose from 4 million in 1971 to 4.5 million in 1977, and 5 million by 1979. Housing ran short first. In those years Chinese property developers, Li Ka-shing among them, bought up large amounts of land, and by the 1980s it was scarce and precious. In 1975 small and medium-size flats in Hong Kong cost about HK$230 per square foot; by 1981 the average was HK$1,000.

Besides moving out to Tuen Mun, Sha Tin, and Kwai Chung beyond the city center, there were two other new housing trends around 1976.

The government showed it meant to solve the housing problem systematically. In 1972, Governor Murray MacLehose proposed a public housing programme to provide units for 1.8 million Hong Kong residents by 1982. The flats were about 30 square meters, with no private bathroom, and rented for around HK$100.

Taikoo Shing was going up too — a large complex meant to hold 45,000 people in 10,000 units, "built for the middle class."

Taiwan, 1987

The New Taiwan dollar rose sharply in 1987, from NT$39.4 to the US dollar in 1985 to NT$28.5. That made it far easier for Taiwan's per capita GDP to pass $10,000; at the exchange rate of two years earlier, the same output came to only $7,233.5.

The currency rose because foreign exchange controls were loosened, which piled up reserves. The more important backdrop: on July 15 that year, Taiwan formally lifted martial law, after 38 years and 56 days.

29. New newspapers can be founded

The ban on new newspapers was formally lifted on January 1, 1988. Before that, the government, citing "paper conservation," had stopped registering new papers, limited each one to three large sheets, and required printing plants to operate only in their place of publication. Anyone who wanted to start a paper had to buy a registration license from a struggling existing publisher before he could print.

One newspaperman recalled: "Because there were so few sheets and so many ads, we shrank the type down really, really small — a single newspaper could fit as many as 27 columns."

He added: "Even before the ban was lifted, applying for a magazine license in Taiwan was actually quite easy — approval was basically automatic. It's just that if you broke the rules afterward, you could easily get shut down." But "newspapers carried a lot of influence, so they weren't something you could just apply for."

30. Terry Gou goes to Shenzhen and starts Foxconn

Hon Hai Precision Industry, which had got its start assembling IBM computers as a contract manufacturer for Acer and United Microelectronics, was preparing to add production lines. In 1987 its founder, Terry Gou, bought land in Tucheng, Taipei; construction began the next year, with the first phase of the Hu Yue plant covering 7,260 square meters. With new equipment, the investment came to NT$25 million.

At the end of 1987 Taiwan lifted its "Three Nos" ban on the mainland and its foreign exchange controls, letting companies invest abroad. The following year, returning from his family's hometown of Jincheng, Shanxi, Gou passed through Shenzhen. Always good at handling local officials, he decided to build a factory in Xixiang, in Shenzhen's Bao'an District.

Labor costs in Taiwan had risen steeply, and manufacturing was bound to move. Before the factories went to the mainland, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia had already become important sources of labor.

Xixiang was still all dirt roads then, which meant "big rain boots" whenever it rained; the company had to "build its own infrastructure: buy water pipes, buy electrical conduit, basically everything," and "work out of shipping-container offices in nearly 40°C heat." But the average worker there earned only 223 yuan. In Taiwan, the average monthly pay for a worker in electronic component manufacturing in 1987 was NT$14,094.

From then on, "Foxconn" was the collective name for all of Hon Hai's mainland factories, later famous for assembling iPhones and for being a "sweatshop." In 2017, Hon Hai Precision's revenue passed 1 trillion yuan, with profit of about 29.1 billion yuan.

31. Please pretend you don't want to leave me

Edward Yang's The Terrorizers won the Silver Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival in 1987, his first international festival prize. The film is about a middle-class couple's difficulties in life.

Yang was seen as a director good at urban life, unlike Hou Hsiao-hsien. Two years earlier, his Taipei Story had taken as its starting point the frictions of Taiwan's urban-rural development. Some believed The Terrorizers voiced Yang's worries about the Taipei of the day, and about the estrangement of city living.

But after finishing his last film, Yi Yi, in 2000, Yang said in an interview: "A lot of people come out of The Terrorizers thinking the film is very pessimistic, because although there are two endings, they're equally hopeless — Li Li-chun's character seems to have only the choice of killing someone or killing himself. But what I actually meant was for the audience to understand how fortunate they are, compared with a life like that."

He also talked about his view of city life:

"A city can be a place where better, more intimate human relationships develop. A city just needs space and time to develop — of course that has to do with government policy, and often the government doesn't provide such spaces or facilities. Actually, places like this café or this small bar are exactly where more intimate relationships between people can develop. This touches on the question of a city's maturity — for instance, a city like New York may have developed more maturely, so for someone living in that city, they have more opportunities to develop relationships, because there's just so much fun stuff going on! Cities really are fascinating — even an immature one is still rich enough to be worth exploring. That's why I've made a few films about urban life — because that's already become a shared way of life in civilized society."

But these may not have been his views in 1987.

32. Lo Ta-yu goes to Hong Kong

Taiwan's pop music seemed to come alive all at once. Dave Wang, Chao Chuan, Bobby Chen, Chang Yu-sheng, Sky Wu, Huang Shu-jun, and Kay Huang all debuted. Several labels also rolled out girl groups. Jonathan Lee saw that professional working women had emerged, that their lives and their attitudes toward love had changed, and that this was a big market for music; in 1987 he wrote his first song with Sarah Chen, "A Single Woman Like Me," and in 1988 produced the album A Woman's Heart.

But that year Lo Ta-yu went to Hong Kong. For years he had "wrangled with Taiwan's censorship system, long and painfully." The music critic Ma Shih-fang wrote in one essay that "from 1973 to the end of 1987, Taiwan's Government Information Office held 320 'song review meetings' in all, reviewing more than 20,000 songs, of which over 3,000 — about one-sixth — failed, meaning that on average two songs per album were rejected."

On April 21, 1982, Lo Ta-yu released his first album of original songs in Taiwan, Of Words and Manner (《之乎者也》). On the cover he wore all black, sunglasses, and permed medium-length hair; people said he looked a great deal like Bob Dylan. The album's tagline read: "There are no bland, inoffensive songs here. If you don't like it, please go back to their songs, because there's no compromise in this one."

It sold 150,000 copies. But the lyrics of the title track had to be changed after failing review. "The songs are reviewed, do they pass or not; the songs that do pass — are they pirated?" became "Of wind and flowers and snow and moon, ha-la-la-la; so-called folk songs — is this really what they are?"

Brazil, 2004

33. The country gets richer, individuals pay more tax

Seen from the level of the country and from the level of the individual, Brazil's economy is two entirely different things.

By 2004, when Brazil's per capita GDP crossed $10,000 (again, in 2018 money), the economy was growing 5.7% a year and federal tax revenue had set a record for the seventh year running.

But Brazilians were handing 42% of their annual wages to the government — 72% on cigarettes, 56% on beer, 44% on a car. Rates were so high that, in the consulting firm McKinsey's phrase, tax evasion had become a way of life in Brazil.

By some organizations' rough estimates, Brazilians and local businesses dodged more than $50 billion in taxes between 1997 and 2004. Asked about the tax rates, Sergio Garcia Ozorio, who owns a Brazilian construction company, said it was nothing but plunder, and that it fed the growth of an "informal economy" built on evasion.

Vendors selling $8 pirated discs of Shrek 2 were everywhere on the streets of São Paulo. "In 1997, the piracy rate for Brazilian music and software CDs was just 5%; now it's reached 53%," the Washington Post wrote in 2004.

Brazil's inefficiency didn't stop there. A study by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' Institute of Latin American Studies found that in 2004 starting a business in Brazil took 15 procedures and, on average, 152 days. Over the same period the US needed 5 procedures and 4 days; South Korea, 12 procedures and 33 days; and Chile, in the same region, 10 procedures and 28 days.

Augusto Ceolin, who lives in a city in southern Brazil, told QDaily that in 2004 you almost never saw luxury car brands like Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Audi in Brazil. Under strict trade protection, imported cars were taxed heavily. "Back then we only had brands like Chevrolet, Volkswagen, Fiat, and Ford," Ceolin said. "Buying a car or a mobile phone were both extremely extravagant things to do."

The lopsided division of income showed up directly in how Brazilians experienced their days. In 2004, roughly 33% of Brazilians lived on less than $2 a day, and about 45% were malnourished. Smaller cities were safer then. Ceolin's father ran an eyeglass shop and used to stay open until 10pm without worrying about a thing. After nearly ten robberies over the following years, he now dares to stay open only until 7pm.

But in big cities like Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, violent crime was actually worse around the time the $10,000 mark arrived. In 2004, São Paulo's murder rate reached 31.24 per 100,000 people, about four times the 2017 rate.