this encyclopedia britannica films about 20 minutes. ♪ >> gas lighted streets, colorful screen paintingsltimore, like most american cities is also block after block of incredibly bad housing. i'm a worker for the baltimore housing bureau. i had a job that hot summer day to find somewhere where the housing bureau could work, there were great plans to rebuid the area. without our neighborhood leader, someone known and liked, our plans would get as far as a painted bird on a window screen. i had the name of someone who sounded perfect for the job, but i wasn't sure of the address. this was more than just a routine day's work for me. i believe in the plan we working on. somehow, i must've felt that all the people in the neighborhood were just waiting for me. it seemed like another world deserted, un-peopled, but not without a life of its own. it is another world, but though it may seem a jungle, it's real life to the people who live here. people with the same kindliness and neighborliness of elsewhere. i wasn't doing too well in my search. it was though i'd stepped into a strange city, from

wikipedia, it is contributing zero dollars to gdp whereas when you used to buy the world book or encyclopedia britannicat used to show up in gdp. so the fact that those services, listening to music, finding videos, the price deflator doesn't capture the quality of these services. particularly ones where the price goes down so quickly that it essentially doesn't get seen by that measurement. so you wouldn't trade places -- if you made, you know, inflation adjusted the same amount 50 years ago, your life would be way worse than it is at the current level. >> but let's take that and just be very specific because a lot of people say middle-class wages have stagnated for the last 15 or 20 years depending on how you measure it. but you're saying, well, a middle-class person shouldn't trade places with somebody 20 years ago because his life or her life has immeasurably improved. >> that's right. we don't capture in the numbers that the -- you'd much rather choose, say, $40,000 a year now than the equivalent 20 years ago or 30 years ago or 40 years ago. your ability to read books, to find information, to stay i