The Glass Famine
edconway.substack.com
edconway.substack.com
Eighteenth century Britain levied a great many consumption taxes on things that were disproportionately bought by the wealthy. These were the taxes that the Boston Tea Party rebelled against.
> Here’s a chart I dug out of the UK National Archives while researching Material World. It shows you optical glass supplies to the UK. And look: the standout thing is how quickly UK domestic production rose.
> The UK didn’t need German glass by the time that deal was done because it was producing plenty by then, and output was rising fast. UK factories had swung into action. They turned around the deficit so quickly that by the end of the war they were producing more than they needed - enough to supply their allies.
> The glass famine, in other words, was followed by the glass feast.
> (the other thing to note is what happened AFTER this chart: having rebuilt its glass industry, the UK allowed it to waste away again. By the post-WWII period it was back in the doldrums. Most of the optical producers shut down. It was a short-lived feast).
There's a strange pattern of Britain performing best when it's least prepared. I think this ties in well with the observation that the British establishment is unconcerned with 'theory' and wholly concerned with practical matters, which I first read in The Sloane Ranger's Handbook. Compare also the discourse surrounding the US Bill of Rights to that surrounding the English Bill of Rights, which includes pretty much the same rights (including the right to bear arms).
I had only read the WWII and post WWII coverage so it was interesting to read the linked article about the original WWI glass famine.
In a strange way, overtaxing window glass in the UK in the 1800s indirectly resulted in me implementing a Mandelbrot calculator on an 80s home computer based upon some interesting columns.
I feel this is highly context dependant, too. Hanging out with a rural group of people born in the 80s? yards. Anyone in a city and/or born after 1990 is probably more comfortable with meters
Maybe posh horsey types are different, but even they're mostly concerned with furlongs and hands and suchlike.
(Not wanting to disparage Conway or his work - it's likely that, as gp suggests, his choice of measurements is simply due to the historic source material)
I'm too old to be a zoomer and too young to be a millennial, but I'm more or less bilingual with unit systems. Useful for a European who deals with the US often!
Most measurements in one measuring system have very similar equivalents in other measuring systems or useful approximations, like a pound being 1/2 a kilo, a liter being about a quart, or a meter being about a yard. Even various ancient chinese measurements can be similar like this.
Except the metric system seems to have eschewn the common measurement of "About the length of a human foot". It confuses me.
What do you call a footlong submarine sandwich in the metric system? A third-meter-long? A decimeter-long? It wouldn't fit into the power-of-ten based system.
That's what confuses me. It's a dumb confusion admittedly. It's basically an argument to "Beauty" or aesthetics or similar.
The smaller sandwich is a "15cm sub", or "a fifteen".
Define 1 metric hand = 1 decimeter, and you can cleanly convert between hands and meters (it's just a factor of 10 instead of the weird jump from centimeters to meters) and at the same time be able to approximate three metric hands to a foot.
This is great for estimation, but these separate measurements had to be massaged to get them all on the same base (there were three different definitions of the fathom in use well into the 1700s) so the result is somewhat arbitrary (4 inches to a hand, 3 hands to a foot, 6 feet to a fathom, 880 fathoms to a mile). Metric's clearly the more consistent, simpler system for anything beyond estimates.
The closest to what you're looking for is probably the decimetre (dm) at 100mm (roughly one hand). But in everyday speech, "30 centimetres" sounds less clunky than "3 decimetres", and in technical speech everything human-scale is done in mm.
Generally, it's considered useful to post prior links with significant discussion. I usually consider that to be about 20 comments or so.
Both side's agreeing to enable each other's massacre of their own country's downtrodden young masses, while all sorts of profiteering going on at the back no doubt.
My recollection is that Krupp was paid a premium based on the effectiveness of their artillery shells - which, again, were being sold to both sides. Said effectiveness was calculated based on casualty numbers... so the more soldiers died (on both sides) the more Krupp was paid.
The "economist" faction in the British government (that is, those who wanted to fight a limited war, sparing men and materiel) semi-deliberately failed to ramp up domestic production as part of their campaign to constrain the extent of any conflict. Their opponents did the opposite, exaggerating the lack of production as part of their campaign to move the economy much more completely onto a war footing.
It came to the head with the "shell crisis" in 1915 when Lloyd George (previously chief amongst the economists) switched sides and, with the aid of a coordinated series of attacks in the press, caused the fall of the government and its replacement by a coalition.
The coalition massively increased war production by borrowing heavily and taking over huge swathes of the economy. Conscription was introduced, and millions were shipped off to the trenches. Lloyd George soon became prime minister, the military expanded massively, the economy grew, and the war was won.
On the other hand, hundreds of thousands more lives were lost, the increased industrial capacity was largely destroyed in the economic retrenchment of the 1920s, and the unsustainable levels of borrowing almost bankrupted the country (and the Empire in general - with Egypt and India bearing much of the burden).
Of course, Germany also followed the "total war" model and suffered terribly for it too. In both cases, it's hard to say who was driving who - the politicians, the industrialists, or the military. The first stirrings of the Military Industrial Complex, half a century before Eisenhower talked about it.
China managed to go from peasantry in the grip of communism to arguably the biggest economy in history over a remarkably short period. And it is hard to get a read on exactly what is going on in that country but that seems to be despite heavy state intervention in the economy and without the benefits of political free speech. I'd also rate their rule of law as a bit rubbery. It is clear that industrialisation can happen like lightening if best-of-breed policies are adopted.
Which is to say, policies in the West since the end of the cold war have been an absolute disaster and we are well due some political remove-the-spec-from-your-own-eye reflection on our industrial strategy. And, frankly, the endless reign of military terror that the middle east is subjected to doesn't seem to help. Keeping the military at home has been a massive win for China, all of that money went into investments instead of pointless murder.
It is enough to make you wonder if it is the politicians or the voters who are more evil and incompetent.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2014/apr/15/china...
And the occupied place isn't very important to the state, but rather only to a couple of residents.
All others just show that demolitions have started, and there are houses not yet demolished.
0/1.4 billions of people is actually convincing the other way you intended.
The point is that China doesn't "just crush" dissenters. This is ignorant Western fantasy which is used by people to justify the dismantling of their own rights. China needs a Bill of Rights like the US's, and most of the US populace needs to stop being such a sucker for nearly century-old propaganda that it doesn't burn its own treasure in service of elite-propagated paranoia.
Nail houses always lose. They have their services and access cut-off by private developers without any recourse to the courts. The nail houses exist only for the duration of arbitration proceedings over compensation for the property. FMV value is usually determined by prices before the area was considered for development, which in poor areas is a pittance. But in arbitration the villagers are merely postponing the inevitable.
Also, IIRC, nail houses are rare as outside cities private ownership of property was not common, at least into the early 2000s. (Not sure how common it is now.) And they only became a thing circa 2004 when China amended their constitution to require legal process for expropriation, but that process provides much fewer protections than it does in, e.g., the US.
Most of them are much less strategic about what they drive for. But a "more free" state could certainly be more strategic as well about aims, goals, and definition of success; the US has done it before to various extents, for instance.
The claim has often been that it'll eventually collapse like in the Soviet Union—because "not caring about what individuals want—has been believed to be a major limiting factor, not an advantage. But it hasn't yet.
Unfortunately it seems that often Western governments serve narrow interest groups (sometimes overseas) over their own people. In other words, open systems that have been usurped by these interest groups, including the military-industrial complex, to your point.
It is a pity, because values of the Enlightenment can be truly beautiful, and are often in fact embodied by the people themselves - just not their economic and governmental systems.
> [to the article more broadly]
If one presumes certain material wealth is in support of the people, then hopefully fixing the underlying resource allocation system away from interest groups can, as evidenced, lead to these industries being reborn.
But the core issue to fix is the underlying systems I think. How? Well, it's tough, but perhaps some garbage collection on structures that don't actually serve the nation(s).
Perhaps Great Depression II will be the spark as Great Depression I was the spark for the limited socialism in the U.S.
Both the US and China engage in copious amounts of "state intervention". They have different characteristics but it's fundamentally the same tool even if they're optimized differently. The US has no problem steamrolling people and interests, it just takes more time and money. At the behest of various interests I will not piss everyone off by naming and shaming because who they are is somewhat beside the point, the US has spend the past 50yr wielding state intervention in pursuit of policies that will kick out industrial activity at the margin. China has intentionally done essentially the opposite in the same time. Both have essentially accomplished what they set out to do.
Cheerleading for "more/cheaper/faster state intervention" is stupid when the goals being pursued are what's responsible for the lion's share of difference in outcome. Giving a glawk fawty to a biathlon athlete isn't gonna make him want to indiscriminately pepper the crowd any more than giving US policy more teeth to tear shit up is going to change the fact that the policy is pursuing de-industrialization.
Arguably because of state intervention in the economy. They give generous cash subsidies across various industrial sectors -- and as "investors" they have a remarkably light touch! Their standard modus operandi is to subsidize a number of competing ventures per sector (which number could be somewhere in the dozens or hundreds) and have competition take care of the rest. This is always good for the consumer, good where the perception of fairness is (internally) concerned, and good for the government's position of power. They don't build monopolies, nor are most firms left to scramble for multiple successive rounds of VC funding.
America prefers protectionism and tax credits; a markedly inferior overall strategy. We know this from the past five decades of economic history. Subsidies to high-value and growing technological industry are the best way to go from poor to rich, and the best way to go from "not producing much" to "producing everything we want."
More than that. It's the closest thing we have to a successful economic experiment replicated multiple times in real life.
It's the Japanese model. Meiji Japan, post-WW2 Japan. South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, China more or less followed the same pattern.
The 5 Dragons (Taiwan, South Korea, HK, Singapore, Japan) followed pretty much the same recipes that made Britain, France, Germany, Switzerland industrial powerhouses in their days.
My main point though is that the government-industry relationship in China in many ways mimics the one in Nazi germany more than a continuity of the Maoist industry-government relationship where 5-year plans were part of the plan and it was much more unidirectional.
It's because the free market is not perfect (as is often claimed). "Central planning" has been debunked (at least with 20th century technology), but it's become pretty clear that state control + markets > markets alone.
> Which is to say, policies in the West since the end of the cold war have been an absolute disaster and we are well due some political remove-the-spec-from-your-own-eye reflection on our industrial strategy. And, frankly, the endless reign of military terror that the middle east is subjected to doesn't seem to help. Keeping the military at home has been a massive win for China, all of that money went into investments instead of pointless murder.
I think the "keeping the military at home" has been a marginal reason. The real reason is Chinese government can redirect resources to where they're needed, and they've got a long-term vision for what they want to do.
Communism is what brought China out of peasantry. They were literally peasants for a couple thousand years, then they became Communists at which their standard of living started to improve and never stopped. Admittedly the Communism became a lot less Communist, but to paint Communism something that existed at the same time or even as a contributor to peasantry was weird.
> policies in the West since the end of the cold war have been an absolute disaster
The US adopted socialist policies after shattering the organized left, pouring money into the safety net, elevating unions, and subsidizing housing, health care, education and technological innovation. In the late-70s to the early-80s it gradually stopped, and that's why we have what we have now.
> It is enough to make you wonder if it is the politicians or the voters who are more evil and incompetent.
What?
instead of creating a very large internal jobs program to build/repair fundamental infrastructure?
Such a waste. The ROI from 'better roads' is massive.