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Comment by dmazin | Hacker News Reader

"What problems, challenges and hardships in life and work were faced by people in earlier generations and centuries? And how did we solve those problems through science, technology, and invention?"

I respect Patrick Collison, but this curriculum worries me. Our understanding of progress already de-emphasizes the nasty parts (eg slavery) by hyper-focusing on innovation. I think this curriculum, which seemingly leaves out critical analysis of labor practices, etc., will worsen our understanding of technological progress.

For example, the improvement of infant mortality is one of the major accomplishments of the last couple centuries. We could focus on the role innovation in the improvement of women's health. But I believe that expressly leaving out the exploitation along the way (eg experimentation on enslaved women[1]), leads to understanding history worse, not better.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/17/603163394...

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A lot of labor practices improved because exponential productivity growth made that a practical decision. You can't have an eight-hour day and a two-day weekend when it takes hundreds of hours of labor to make a single shirt. Factories became safer when people were rich enough that they could afford to pay for safety equipment to prevent even rare accidents. A lot of dangerous and exhausting jobs are now done by machine - no one picks cotton anymore because the process has been automated. And so on.

I don't know why people are so opposed to this explanation. You didn't say all labor practices improved because of productivity gains. And no doubt collective action played some role in the current state of things, but so did a lot of other factors. To claim otherwise without a very good argument smacks of ideological possession. The vehemence with which such an explanation is insisted upon is revealing.

> A lot of labor practices improved because exponential productivity growth made that a practical decision.

No, they didn't. In some cases productivity gains may have been a necessary prerequisite, but it was never the proximate cause—labor action to wrest better conditions from capital was always the proximate factor.

First you had to have the productivity gains before you could have the labor movement. Look, there's no easy way to farm with a mule. Most people were subsistence farmers for most of human civilization's history. They grew just enough to get by with not much more. That is back- breaking, life-shortening labor. Technology changed that. Industrialization let modern society soar past the relatively high living standards of ancient Rome, which were lost in the dark ages.

> First you had to have the productivity gains before you could have the labor movement

So, like I said previously “...productivity gains may have been a necessary prerequisite, but it was never the proximate cause—labor action to wrest better conditions from capital was always the proximate factor.”

> First you had to have the productivity gains before you could have the labor movement.

That's, just, like, your opinion, man.

If the labor movement is considered one way of fighting for human rights, then, it's been around a long time, my friend.

Think: serfdom, indentured service, slavery.

It's interesting to argue the opposite, that the power past empires had over people and their labour devalued productivity improvements, that Industrialisation required a social context in which the expense of labour justified the capital investment and risk of mechanisation.

I'm not sure I understand. And tbh I'm not sure I originally expressed myself well.

But I think we all agree that laws against child labor are good, that laws requiring a weekend are good, and that basic safety laws in dangerous environments like meatpacking plants are good.

And we'd all agree that those things fall somewhere on the spectrum of "human rights".

And, if someone doesn't agree then that's an entirely conversation that needs to be had.

But for those of us that do, well, all those things came from organized labor. So --- organized labor, imperfect as it is, like all human institutions, has been and is one of the ways in which people have fought for their rights over time.

Period.

Sorry for the confusion, clearly from the way I express myself, I am a software developer and not an economist, and I use this forum to experiment with how to communicate and think about topics on which I am not expert, but care about.

I was meaning to respond to the idea in the conversation that I read as "the gains in human rights and labor standards, had only been possible because of productivity improvements" I think it's worth considering instead whether investment in 'productivity' has been undermined by poor human rights. Could the roman empire have mechanised, industrialised, but that the cruelty and oppression that was fundamental made it uneconomical, when the capital cost was compared to the cheap labor cost of buying slaves. I have a friend who debates with me about the problems that flow from the high cost of labor and environmental standards, and I argue back that the greater problem is the low cost of labor, the low enforcement of human rights and environmental standards, because these de-incentivise the upfront 'activation energy ' investment in any efforts that would make our civilisation more sustainable and equitable.

Thanks for explaining. I think I understand better. Interesting.

At the same time I don't think we should instrumentalize human rights -- human rights are important because their human rights, not because of their potential to increase productivity.

And I'm not saying you're saying anything like that at all -- moreso, I'm responding to the logical implications of the discussion : ).

The importance and value is of human rights is unrelated to their positive or negative impact on productivity.

Some people might like to throw in a "what if" at this point about limited resources, etc. And sometimes in life (like in medical triage situations) people have to make difficult or terrible decisions, but if we believe in human life having an inherent value then that shouldn't be the basis or starting point of our moral reasoning.

Absolutely not. Fair and safe labour practices were possible from the get-go, and were simply ignored for profit. Just like a lot of things today.

What pushed this social progress was collective labour action in the form of unions and socialist parties engaging in direct action.

So we would expect to see much more ‘fair and safe Labour practices’ in socialist countries where the profit motive did not exist, such as the Soviet Union, the other countries of the Warsaw Pact, North Korea, Cuba etc. Do we have any evidence that that was the case? Strangely, all those countries appear to have been poorer than their peers (North vs South Korea and East vs West Germany probably being the best to compare to minimize confounders).

>So we would expect to see much more ‘fair and safe Labour practices’ in socialist countries where the profit motive did not exist

No, and that's not GP's claim either. It's entirely reasonable (and historically accurate) to say that socialists have consistently pushed for improved labour rights in capitalist countries. That doesn't make any comment as to their achievements (or lack of) in "socialist" countries.

It's a summer program, not a comprehensive lifetime education. It would make no more sense for you to object to a history class that doesn't talk about slavery than it would for me to object to your comment because you didn't mention the relationship between resource extraction and colonialism.

For sure. Let me clarify a bit -- I used this specific course as an example, but I am talking about the novel field of Progress Studies in general. The entire _field of study_ that this course introduces suffers from the problem I described above.

I think a totally whole human being should know something about art, literature and mathematics. Does that mean that any field of study that doesn't include mathematics is deficient? No, it means that any person who doesn't cover more than one field of study, even cursorily, is deficient. Any piece of human knowledge can only be understood in the context of every other piece of human knowledge... but it's fine for a field of study to have a limited context, if for no other purpose than to make it easier for librarians to organize books associated with it.

I mean, this is like a CS program that doesn't teach you about algorithms. Studying progress and not taking into account social movements such as the labour movement that were the necessary driving force is really underwhelming.

But this is not a program, this is a single course. Not all CS classes are about algorithms either.

Yes, and the criticism was about the field in general.

Also, an introduction course to CS should mention algorithms.

Yes, an introduction to CS course should include algorithms too.

But this isn't an introduction to history course. It's a course about the "story of unprecedented human progress in the modern age".

Those things are not mutually exclusive. That's like saying farming should not be studied because slaves historically have been used in agriculture.

> I respect Patrick Collison, but this curriculum worries me. Our understanding of progress already de-emphasizes the nasty parts (eg slavery) by hyper-focusing on innovation. I think this curriculum, which seemingly leaves out critical analysis of labor practices, etc., will worsen our understanding of technological progress

I don’t see what you think connects these threads together.

Before industrialization nearly everyone was doomed to serfdom.

For a brief period of time.

For substantially longer we just hung out with our buddies, banged, and picked up food right from the ground when we were hungry.

And had 20 children to have 3 survive?

> we see that on average 57 percent, 64 percent, and 67 percent of children born survive to age 15 years among hunter-gatherers, forager-horticulturalists, and acculturated hunter-gatherers.

https://condensedscience.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/life-expec...

Still bad, but much better than 3 in 20.

This is very much a “yes and”. I think I can speak for all of us working on the course when I sat that we don’t think that industrial innovation is the only or even the most important part of history. Why does developing a course on one aspect somehow reduce the importance of another?

Also realistically the majority of the trend for the last 200 years was all backed by fossil fuels. Which has some serious ramifications whether we're gonna make it through this global warming or not.

> I respect Patrick Collison

What connects pc to this, other than that he's a speaker?

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