We Were Builders Once, and Strong
scholars-stage.blogspot.com
scholars-stage.blogspot.com
One of the problems that I think could help this a lot is income inequality. The economic gains are no longer that of the people working for them, but those of the ownership class. The only way to get ahead is to become an Owner, and such a thing is harder and harder as one has to compete against entire organizations of owners.
It's not like there was just empty land
I mean the game is janky but the concept was really interesting.
> Possibly
Definitely.
> at some point someone had to be the first humans in an area
Yes, and we know who they were. Hundreds of different tribes, spanning from coast to coast.
They came during the last Ice Age, crossing over the Bering Straight which was solid ground at that time.
The way American settlers treated the native peoples is not something that can just be "possibly"-d away.
Anyway the idea of land "ownership" is kind of stupid in the first place. You can't "own" land, you can just possess it under the rules of some kind of system of power.
"Most of [land speculation] was done on the company-system; a number of adventurers would unite, secure a grant of land, survey it, and then sell it off as speedily as they could. Their aim was a quick turnover; they did not, as a rule, contemplate holding the land, much less settling it - in short, their ventures were a pure gamble in rental-values. Among these pre-revolutionary enterprises was the Ohio Company, formed in 1748 with a grant of half a million acres; the Loyal Company, which like the Ohio Company, was composed of Virginians; the Transylvania, the Vandalia, Scioto, Indiana, Wabash, Illinois, Susquehannah, and others whose holdings were smaller.
It is interesting to observe the names of persons concerned in these undertakings; one can not escape the significance of this connexion in view of their attitude towards the revolution, and their subsequent career as statesmen and patriots. For example, aside from his individual ventures, General Washington was a member of the Ohio Company, and a prime mover in organizing the Mississippi Company. He also conceived the scheme of the Potomac Company...
Patrick Henry was an inveterate and voracious engrosser of land lying beyond the deadline set by the British State; later he was heavily involved in the affairs of one of the notorious Yazoo companies, operating in Georgia. ... His company's holdings in Georgia [amounted] to more than ten million acres...
Benjamin Franklin's thrifty mind turned cordially to the project of the Vandalia Company, and he acted successfully as promoter for it in England in 1766. Timothy Pickering, who was Secretary of State under Washington and John Adams, went on record in 1796 that "all I am now worth was gained by speculations in land." Silas Deane, emissary of the Continental Congress to France, was interested in the Illinois and Wabash Companies, as was Robert Morris, who managed the revolution's finances; as was also James Wilson, who became a justice of the Supreme Court and a mighty man in post-revolutionary land-grabbing. Wolcott of Connecticut, and Stiles, president of Yale College, held stock in the Susquehannah Company; so did Peletiah Webster, Ethan Allen, and Jonathan Trumbull, the "Brother Jonathan," whose name was long a sobriquet for the typical American, and is still sometimes so used. James Duane, the first mayor of New York City, carried on some quite considerable speculative undertakings; and however indisposed one may feel towards entertaining the fact, so did the "Father of the Revolution" himself - Samuel Adams."
He further says that the British forbade claiming land beyond a certain western border, and says that this was probably a strong motive for the revolution, stronger than some of the other things the British had done.
"In 1763 [the British] forbade the colonists to take up lands lying westward of the source of any river flowing through the Atlantic seaboard. The dead-line thus established ran so as to cut off from preemption about half of Pennsylvania and half of Virginia and everything to the west thereof. This was serious. With the mania for speculation running as high as it did, with the consciousness of opportunity, real or fancied, having become so acute and so general, this ruling affected everybody. One can get some idea of its effect by imagining the state of mind of our people at large if stock-gambling had suddenly been outlawed at the beginning of the last great boom in Wall Street a few years ago.
... A mere common-sense view of the situation would indicate that the British State's interference with [the land-granting process] was at least as great an incitement to revolution as its interference, through the Navigation Acts, and the Trade Acts ... In the nature of things it would be a greater incitement, both because it affected a more numerous class of persons, and because speculation in land-values represented much easier money."
Becoming an owner is just opening a brokerage account away.
If land is your thing, you can buy shares in REITs, too. (Real Estate Investment Trusts)
Anyone can buy shares in Microsoft (for example) and become a part-owner and have votes. And it's never been easier to do so. Microsoft will even pay you a quarterly dividend as your cut of the company's profits.
He quotes a nice description of the American skilled working class of the 1800s, then somehow forgets about those people: you know -the people who actually built everything. The genius of our skilled working class machinist types is now wasted in coming up with new workman's comp schemes rather than building things, because you shipped most of his jobs and his future prosperity overseas. This is pretty much all of it in a nutshell. In Germany those people are building things. In America, it's difficult to make a living building things, so the brightest of them go into IT or whatever. Scumbag economists make up excuses for why improving some scam figure like the overall GDP is good for the 50 year old machinist whose job has been shipped to China, and who has to go to work as a Walmart greeter or janitor in a heroin clinic. It's not good for him, his family and community, or the country.
And it's not good for my blood pressure reading ding dongs like this talking about the South versus the North versus Karen. Talk about the human capital we've destroyed with our imbecile looter pyramid scheme economic theories. Everyone gabbles on about training for "STEM jobs" -the ones involving matter actually count if you want to become a society of builders.
I've always thought that upward mobility is what gives hope and hope is the fuel of persistence. Persistence coupled with patience and passion makes it possible to grow economically.
My recent experience living in Germany gave me a real sense of what that's like. There is a cultural affinity for "progress means innovation aimed at ever more closely and efficiently adhering to a standard". So this means, for example, the beer in Germany is very consistent over decades, sometimes centuries, is cheaper than soda, and there isn't much variety. (a similar story for Ireland's Guiness, BTW). Or take the German knife maker Wüsthof, which unusually for a large knife maker uses entirely one steel, one style of blade, across the line (okay there are exceptions but these are rare). They've fixed the larger values of a boundary condition, but still find room to innovate within that space. I can't help but think that this is a healthier way to think about progress and growth, rather than the very American approach that progress always means more, but never just better.
The major notions we have inherited of economy derive from the rentier merchants of early modernity. They took to the idea of seeing a nation as a balance sheet, a tabulation of assets: men, ships, iron. From this idea we get the idea of putting more assets on the balance sheet through trade and colonization, rather than tribute. This lasted a few centuries, but by the point of transition to an industrial economy it had already become clear in the writings of Enlightenment philosphers that it was not quite as simple as possession and accounting of the raw assets, but their organization too. The gross product and employment figures we started using to measure organization generalized things, but also suffer from limited scope - if it's not a money transaction, if the work is unpaid, it's outside "the economy".
In the long 19th century it was very straightforward to devise ways to purpose inventions towards economic benefit: take an existing trade, buy up more raw materials through the canals and rails, run it through the factory, sell more product. With the second industrial revolution, another "wave" of products appeared that substituted common uses of labor: canned food instead of fresh, telecommunication instead of express mail, and an increasing number of mechanized devices.
It got much harder in the 20th century as more of the inventions relied on developing consumer habits and did not reflect a traditional trade. The dilemma was averted through marketing techniques: Everyone uses toothpaste and shampoo, watches the new television show, and desires a new car, a bigger house and a higher-paying job. Creative financing ideas took up the rest of the slack, allowing consumers to get their hands on the stuff and set lifestyle expectations that are higher than reasonable.
So, by the early 21st century everyone simultaneously has too much "stuff", is unhappy because of the marketing, and is in debt because of the financing. But GDP is higher, so the system persists, up until now.
That trend makes me think that "building" is at an end, and something more like the German system has to take hold. America's consumer economy is now developing a multitude of niches, marketed through various online storefronts, Kickstarters and viral video. Appreciation of the best stuff of past years has risen as more of that material surfaces online and rubs shoulders with "new" stuff. Where this emerging system struggles the most, it can usually be traced back to the old power structures and their large footprint on the economy. And to a great degree the measure of the economy is tied to those structures: growth and employment figures feed into the taxation and spending model. Change the measure and you have to realign what it means to tax or to spend, who is in debt to whom. It's not done so easily.
About this, 86% of today’s billionaires didn’t have billionaire parents. The elites were surprisingly well renewed for our generation.
Some people would want the social elevator to work from -1 to +100 in one generation, this is unrealistic and wouldn’t even be wise because it takes a lot of knowledge to manage large groups of people. But if the top 40% can threaten the top 1% at each generation, and the bottom 60% threaten the top 40% in a single generation, then we’ve made it, we’ve given power to people who will need to keep working if they want to stay atop, and they’ll be accountable, and this is the important part.
Money is not 0-sum, but power is, and power is really the point of economic inequality.
So yes, right now some people have too little power in our society, and for them to rise, others have to fall (relatively speaking).
Assuming the population remains mortal, there will be a steady stream of vacant positions at the top and plenty of room for individual growth, even without overall economic growth.
This is what makes "hope" so dangerous, since the risky things people are willing to do can be quite destructive to themselves and others.
If people are already content, fear tends to be stronger than hope. This comes with its own downsides, of course. People become passive, and society becomes stagnant and eventually corrupted due to lack of rejuvinating forces.
As you say, a balance is needed. Some needs must require some positive effort in order to be fulfilled. But if only the most anti social and ruthless get their needs fulfilled, society breaks down even faster.
Look, other than building Amazon, Netflix, Google, Facebook, the Iphone, Tesla, SpaceX, Uber, Lyft, Stripe, AirBnB, Epic Games, Steam, Instacart and others what have Americans built lately?
To put it in a different way - America is falling down in almost every metric that measures quality of life globally. But yeah, they built Facebook and Apple, and Apple is one of it not the wealthiest companies in the world, so that counts for something, yeah?
Here's a series that goes through actual history:
https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
* It was a common idea about the Roman empire. Gibbon found it plausible though he invoked other mechanisms.
* John Stuart Mill, who was hardly a pompous conservative: https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/12/11/luxury-and-societa...
* Toynbee too.
* More recently Francis Fukuyama wrote Political Order and Political Decay.
I think the wonder of software, at least at one point (80's to early 2000's), was that you were using a thing that you could also improve - it was a short path from consuming web sites to creating them, for instance. The clever youngster described in the article could easily look at something and think "I can make this better" and learn how in a practical time frame.
I'm not sure that's still possible now. It's still easy to make a 90's website, but building production-quality work is increasingly specialized.
It hasn't really materialized, but this was part of the early excitement behind 3d printing - finally, when you saw a plastic widget that could be made better, you could try it out on your own, cheaply and quickly!
It probably doesn't help, either, that our most valuable assets are controlled by cartels and monopolies.
If you want to build a home near decent jobs, you will find doing so defaults to being illegal, and you need to beg for an exemption to be allowed to do so. We allow owners of homes to vote whether to allow building more homes (making them effectively a cartel).
If you want to produce software for phones, you need to give a cut to the two big manufacturers, or risk irrelevance. The existing players have such big network effects there's very little room for new entrants to the market.
If you have a clever idea for an invention, and want to use it, you risk inviting extremely expensive lawsuits from huge companies who have coopted the patent system to show they have prior art for nearly anything you can imagine, and have worked to capture the courts deciding these cases. It's not completely unlike a cobbler's guild shutting down a clever new shoe design that threatens incumbents.
What does the clever young person with a good idea do now, aside from try to win VC in an incredibly crowded and competitive market?
1) Estate tax - reduce dynastic wealth and recirculate it to even the playing field with good education opportunities in all regions and similar social programs to separate birth to income. Its always going to be there but reducing this should be a goal.
2) Focusing on small business vs large corporate. Literally making policy that favours smaller companies be it lower regulation, taxes etc. But you have to actively help the up and comers to disrupt the market vs protect large interests.
3) Break monopolistic behaviour. We really need to reduce the acquisition takeover culture. And not just mega corp but so often to see things like all the Dentists in a small city are owned by one family type thing. Im not sure the way to deal with this but possibly proportional asset taxes?
Generally I think governments role is to run the nation for the benefit of the people and economic efficiency is the the be all and end all of achieving this.
Most of the billionaires are first generation and waiting for the rich to die to spread wealth is not going to help anything economically (estate tax is a drop in the bucket compared to the GDP itself just growing a couple of percent).
> 2) Focusing on small business vs large corporate. Literally making policy that favours smaller companies be it lower regulation, taxes etc. But you have to actively help the up and comers to disrupt the market vs protect large interests.
This will make it very difficult to compete globally in the capital intensive industries. Would this be coupled with nationalistic trade policies as well?
This is a quirk of the tech boom and we are in a blip in history. Also when you say 'most' its a slim majority, about 55% which is fair to recognise. And I agree on its own it wont help economically, but this is one tool to help this balance, these things are done in part, not one variable solves all which also needs to be recognised as will it have some positive effect, rather than does it fix the entire issue, if you believe dynastic wealth and intergenerational inequality is in fact an issue as many wouldn't.
> This will make it very difficult to compete globally in the capital intensive industries.
While there is likely some edge cases, helping small business and putting focus there doesn't have to be against big business. There is good and bad options within this statements. Monopolistic behaviours aside when I say focus on small business I dont mean restrict larger business. But you can look at rules that level the playing field. For example you could ensure distributors have open order systems so Walmart cant get goods at half the price anyone else can. Or make tax forms efficient so that 10 man business doesn't need a full time accountant priced into their small operation type changes.
This wont effect the capital intensive industries + will also benefit big business, however the benefit will be felt more for smaller operations.
But that in itself is already restrictive. As a manufacturer I would rather give one giant customer 100,000 units than 10,000 customers 100 units in a huge range of products. The overhead of dealing with different customers, different shipping, different receiving is a big pain in the ass. This is why there is a such a thing as volume discounts.
So you’ve forced the local manufacturer to have an artificially high price for high volume customers and Walmart just goes to a Chinese manufacturer. See the problem here?
Squelching big business will doom the economy to mediocrity.
And 'within reason' if government focuses on making an environment for small business to thrive, this will often help big business too. But the same is not true if the focus is reversed.
Right now it would only mean that really reach people would invest elsewhere (they have means to do this) and estate tax would be paid by the middle class and poor people (especially the latter, since they have to rent flats very often, and this tax would be just added to their rent by the estate owner).
Yes, sure ultimately if they want to transfer special voting shares that might seem like a problem, but with some foresight I bet that that can be worked around easily too, especially if the family has decades to prepare an do it.
The recipients of those jobs would pay income tax though. And in most jurisdictions earned income is taxed way higher than dividends or capital gains.
I do not see that relationship. To not invest in people's well being and education is what has doomed America economically and politically.
Increase taxation, invest in your infrastructure, education and health care. That way, the USA would create jobs, and wealth.
Giving the benefits of all the increases on productivity to a selected few, it is not a way of improving your country.
If Germany's labor position is so great, why are their workers so relatively poor? People constantly applaud Germany for their supposedly great labor protections and unions. So where's the wealth?
Germany's median wealth per adult is below that of Greece. Let that sink in for a moment. It's 1/2 that of South Korea. It's nearly 1/3 that of France.
For 2019 Germany's GDP was $3.84 trillion. In 2008 it was $3.73 trillion. Inflation adjusted, Germany's economy contracted by at least 1/4 in a mere 11 years. That's a vanishing economy, and that's all pre-Covid.
A decade plus with zero net growth is one of the best economies in the world? No it's not, it's a contracting economy with no wealth creation occurring and an impending assault by China on their high value manufacturing.
Germany is standing in a very bad spot. Whether they realize that yet or not is another matter.
Here's the next 20 years for the German economy: China will take a giant chunk out of their high value manufacturing export machine. The average German will have to work a lot more hours just to stand still, while they attempt to retire with very little savings at the median ($35k isn't going to cut it). The industrial hollowing out that Germany will suffer, is one that the US has already gone through, and it's a brutal thing for a society to endure, especially starting from a position of a terrible median wealth figure and an economy that is contracting persistently.
Those super low hours per week that they've been enjoying? They've been trading on their future and haven't been generating enough wealth to sustain against what's coming for them.
That describes a society where only a very small fraction of the work is what we would call white collar administration. Consider all the jobs who's net effect on the world is to slightly change the paperwork in 1 or 2 files in an office somewhere, and all the secondary, tertiary jobs that exist to support that goal! That is white collar work too, but I'd not call it an improvement to productivity, but rather an unfortunate side-effect of moribund information systems that people dare not streamline.
> "This is what a healthy building culture looks like. The Southrons did not have it, and partially lost their war because of it. America grew strong in their loss: the Yankee culture of building came out of the war triumphant, and those who won the war would go on to build the country we live in today."
(This reads like Yankee propaganda, but it's not historically inaccurate)
However, the Southrons never went away. Somehow they built statues to their defeated leaders. And it seems - again, as an outsider - that so many of the US's current problems stem from the south rising again and replacing "builder" culture with supremacist, anti-science culture.
>New England led the WORLD in educational facilities and literacy at midcentury.
I think we've already started to see the beginning of diminishing returns on our software investments. I agree that we haven't in any way reached peak deployment of productive, intelligent software in the world, but even once we get there the robots still need to actuate in the physical world. Jointly, I think the sheer amount of investment thrown at pure software ventures in the past 20 years has certainly colored our perception of their potential agency, since financial output is only a fuzzy indicator of economic good.
If general AI was on the horizon, I might be able to give this attitude the benefit of the doubt, but we cant even rigorously prove that it's possible at this juncture. The largest deployments of the latest generation of software acumen are probably social media, and I hope we've learned that that's anything but a panacea.
From these beginnings we have seen a rise in mass groups of people organising behaviours in cohesion even despite the rudimentary interface of keyboard, camera and screen, and going out on a bit of a limb viewed from above it operates like a group brain or gestalt entity.
In that view we've seen the birth in recent decades a form of aggregate intelligence that hasn't existed before in history except perhaps crude and 1-way through newspapers and television propaganda.
One can imagine a platform using real time analytics, more deeply integrated into people's thinking and behaviours, that can be set to more productive goals than targeted content, advertising, and disinformation, and that may be driven less by central authority and more by the will of the collective, as weird as that sounds I can't see how it's not a possible future.
Again for better or worse I don't think we've seen the end of what we call "social media" and its ilk, and I think despite efforts to control it, there is a good chance for some upset to the status quo as further iterations of the technologies become more ingrained and capable and exert greater influence on the various forces and tensions in the world.
Or not, who knows, weird times we're living in.
> robots still need to actuate in the physical world
I suspect they might need a little bit of software written. More people work on apps for the iPhone than worked building the iPhone.
(NB: I have no desire to sidetrack a potentially interesting discussion into a dull one about race, whiteness etc., so please don’t be offended if I don’t reply to replies.)
There are countless other examples in English and other languages. Amazon coopted Alexa. Apple, siri. I've met more than one person named Isis.
Unfortunately language is still a rough tool. We name things from mathematical proofs, to sea slugs, or even groups of people with certain identifiable characteristics, arbitrarily and sometimes capriciously.
Ultimately those effected find a way to adapt to an environment that's coopted one of their identifiers under a new definition in the collective lexicon. Trying to fight it usually just makes things worse.