Politics & Power Quote by Simon Newcomb

Newcomb is doing a sly kind of time travel, and he’s not talking about nostalgia. By claiming he “lived in the time of the American Revolution” in terms of economics and everyday thought, he’s exposing how uneven modernity actually arrives. The line reads like an engineer’s complaint disguised as autobiography: the calendar says the late 19th century, but the infrastructure of daily life - wages, work rhythms, information flow, expectations about what’s possible - can still feel pre-industrial, even quasi-colonial.

The intent is double-edged. On one level, it’s a testimonial about acceleration: Newcomb lived through railroads, telegraphs, mass production, professional science. On another, it’s a rebuke to the triumphalist story that “progress” moves as one smooth wave. A mathematician’s voice makes the irony sharper; you expect precision and steady advancement, yet he’s insisting the baseline conditions of society lag so far behind the era’s inventions that it might as well be 1776.

Subtext: intellectual life can modernize faster than civic life. Newcomb belonged to a class gaining new authority - credentialed experts, statisticians, scientific administrators - while large parts of the population still inhabited older patterns of scarcity and localism. His phrasing (“might claim”) signals a careful, almost prosecutorial posture, as if he’s inviting the reader to test the evidence. It’s also an understated warning: if a society modernizes its tools without modernizing its economic arrangements and public thinking, it risks living in two centuries at once.