Do you remember when there were no cell phones?

Back then, people went about their daily business without any thought of the phone calls they might be missing or the people they could be talking to if they had the technology to reach out and touch while walking the dog.

Back then, people rode buses and trains, went out to dinner with friends, did all manner of things without needing or wanting access to a telephone.

Remember when folks on a Greyhound bus didn't worry about being bored during the ride, because they'd brought a book?

Now, of course, cell phones are ubiquitous. People walk down the street with phones pressed to the sides of their faces, carrying on conversations with folks nobody on the street can see — which would have been considered very odd behavior just fifteen years ago.

Now, it simply is not okay to have missed that call. Even if all you end up telling the person in question is that you'll call them back later, you must always be accessible.

Now, when people are bored on a bus, they don't open a book. They open their phone.

The cell phone is an example of a bit of technology that has changed us, changed the way we are, just because it's there.

That's the trigger effect that British journalist and historian James Burke talked about way back in 1978 in his television series, Connections.

"An invention acts as a kind of trigger," Burke told his audience. "It changes the way things are and that change stimulates the production of another invention, which in turn causes more change ... and so on."

There have been a lot of changes like that over the last twenty years.

Which is why I find it rather peculiar that so many of our nation's leaders and policy makers behave as if our economy is the same one they were dealing with thirty or forty years ago.

Well ... don't you?