The Bureau of Nutrition and Home Economics

This has me all kinds of nostalgic. For NOEMA, John Last describes a government agency whose sole function was to find new ways to live a better life.

They shared what they found with private companies, which incorporated those findings to build better products:

The ideal kitchen sink, for a working kitchen of any reasonable size, has two basins. On the right, it’s a shallow five inches, a comfortable depth for washing dishes. On the left, it’s deeper — eight inches, perfect for rinsing down fresh fruits and vegetables. A wire drying rack is sized to fit the deeper basin; a cupboard behind the faucets secrets away soaps and sponges.

You’re unlikely to find this sink design in most modern houses. But it is the fruit of decades of diligent government research conducted primarily by a little-known agency known as the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics. From 1923 to 1962, the bureau deployed mass public surveys, built experimental houses and conducted research into hundreds of consumer products from textiles to meats to kitchen sinks, all to deduce scientifically the best possible way to live a middle-class life in midcentury America.

This gets at a very deep-rooted problem in contemporary America: distrust of government. This type of government entity isn’t possible today because the government is seen as inherently wasteful, and who is the government to tell private companies how to build better products?

It wasn’t perfect, but this level of cooperation between the public and private sectors feels like a dream. Sometimes we forget what we’ve been deprived of.