A decade to forget? No, remember Viagra, the iPod and the death of good manners

Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business

It’s tempting to label the Noughties ‘the decade to forget’, except that we only get about eight decades each, so it doesn’t really seem wise to forget any of them. It was certainly a decade of nasty shocks — 9/11, the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 — and of nasty wars and bad politics, beginning with George W. Bush’s disputed election and ending with Gordon Brown’s disintegration before our very eyes. It was a decade of financial madness that began with the bursting of the dotcom bubble and ended with half our high-street banks under state control and our public finances in ruins. And yet it was also a decade of remarkable progress in so many aspects of our daily lives.

What would you pick as the greatest scientific or technological advance of the past decade? For some, the answer might be the text message, developed in the early 1990s but not adopted as a national habit until the turn of the millennium.