We decided to focus on relative gains instead of absolute.
The autumn sun was low in the sky, a vivid red disc, dusty and gaseous and the colour of blood, and rubbed into these well-fed Western faces in an image of a poison-price. I looked them in the eyes, but they looked away; I felt like taking them by the collar and shaking them, screaming at them, telling them what they were doing wrong, telling them what was happening; the plotting militaries, the commercial frauds, the smooth corporate and governmental lies, the holocaust taking place in Kampuchea... and telling them too what was possible, how close they were, what they could do if they just got their planetary act together...
I am not surprised by the fact that we have not yet built a utopia (even with levels of wealth that would have stunned previous generations). What I found really striking about Brad's argument (and which I tried to explain in the OP, but might not have done a good job), is the way in which it breaks the idea of a smooth arc of history.
The world of Jane Austin is recognizable in many ways but, practically speaking, in 1810 it wouldn't have been possible to distribute the products of technological progress in such a way that everyone could lead a comfortable life. The level of technology relative to the population was not enough to support that -- but now it is.
We haven't figured out how to do that yet (or lack the will), but it's both heartening and concerning to realize that we, as a species, haven't had that much time to work on the problem.
There's good posts at ACOUP that really drives home just how many people had to have their surplus extracted for the support of even a small number of elites or soldiers.
I'd be in for a book group. I love this type of stuff.
I liked DeLong's lecture notes that overlap with the book's topic a lot.
I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop on the asterisk after "optimistic" in the OP.
I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop on the asterisk after "optimistic" in the OP.
I think that was just going to be
* or not.
Is it encouraging to think that we have the possibility to build something that has never happened in human history (a society of broadly shared abundance).
There is, of course, also the possibility that the last 150 years have just been "living in the age of gasoline" but I'm optimistic about non-fossil fuel energy.
The world of ... 1810
This is an interesting statistic.
The earliest year for which I could get numbers to look at kind of the use of nails as a share of GDP was back in 1810. And the share, it was nearly half a percent of GDP then . . . comparable today to, household purchases of personal computers or household purchases of air travel.
There is, of course, also the possibility that the last 150 years have just been "living in the age of gasoline" but I'm optimistic about non-fossil fuel energy.
Yeah, my reaction to a lot of this sort of stuff is that people tend to underrate the importance of fossil fuels in the transition to "modern" conditions, which puts a big question mark on the idea of continued improvement. The optimistic case, which I basically agree with, is that fossil fuels were necessary to get us to this point but now that we're here we understand enough to transition again to non-fossil sources that will get us the same scale of benefits without the costs, though of course we're already paying those and will be for a long time. Vaclav Smil is the guy to read on energy history; he's written a bunch of books but Energy in World History is the one I've read.
8.last: this is the big thing I've wrestled with in my head. Largely inspired, I'm sure, by BdL himself, I've for quite awhile now viewed everything since ~1800 as a power-up provided by fossil fuel exploitation, and while Peak Oil seems not to be thing after all, the crow has certainly come home to roost with climate change.
If you were playing a game of Civilization, you could have used the first ~120 years of the FF era to focus, hard, on post-FF abundance* and basically avoided the whole issue of climate change. Hell, if you were Global Dictator, you'd allow every society X years of FF development, but then require transition to clean power--you could get everyplace up to decent living standards and still stay ahead of climate change.
But in practice, even with clean energy abundance at hand, we're going to burn every last BTU of Mesozoic ferns before we stop generating GHGs. Have we not had enough time experiencing this era to deal with it properly, or are we just jumped-up East African Plains Apes who never had a chance?
*although it's not really clear that you could have true FF-free abundance in the pre-transistor era. Hydroelectric and nuclear don't scale for transport, and the pre-transistor versions were massive and came with their own problems. Even 25 years ago, it was absolutely the case that you could not maintain a US middle class lifestyle on 100% renewables--there would be serious compromises/downgrades. Worth it, perhaps, but a hard sell to say the least.
10 is basically what I'm trying to say in the first part of 11.
Civ 5 doesn't even have global warming anymore.
"What nature doesn't do to us will be done by our fellow man."
But during National Brotherhood Week, National Brotherhood Week...
fossil fuels were necessary to get us to this point
Why?
I don't see a steam age without coal or an industrial revolution without a steam engine boost.
There's no other way to get that much concentrated energy with pre-modern technology. The difference in energy density between fossil fuels and the types of energy available in pre-industrial times (mostly animate and biomass, wind and water for some limited applications) is huge. The absolute world-record top speed of a horse is 55 mph, for one example. And concentrated energy was necessary for industrialization to reach the scale where it could deliver the breakthroughs necessary to create the modern world as we know it.
The absolute world-record top speed of a horse is 55 mph, for one example.
The animal rights people keep me from trying to give horses better drugs.
Also, the horses will only hold the pipe for as long as the sugar coating is there.
I mean, fossil fuels were convenient once we found them, but who's to say we wouldn't have just figured out biodiesel and so forth? I don't quite know what other advances high-density fuel was critical for - we were figuring out chemistry before we had trains.
A fossil fuel transition could have easily happened starting in the 1970s if only they hadn't outlawed hemp.
If you will commit to a 50% chance of preordering, email me for a galley...
Interesting forum thread on wood versus coal for trains. Coal has 3-4 times the energy density and accounting for both weight and volume can increase range 6-10 fold. (Fuel oil is even denser and railroads eventually switched to it for that and other reasons.)
I can't really imagine someone coming up with the idea of biodiesel without first being familiar with regular diesel, which is a refined petroleum product designed for application in a specific type of internal-combustion engine.
The return of GnoLed Darb (hedgehog impersonator)!
Anyway, transportation is a particularly clear example because it's so straightforward (mostly just optimizing for speed), but there are similar dynamics in lots of areas where the energy density of fossil fuel led to massive increases in efficiency and scale. Manufacturing was revolutionized by the steam engine, which only really took off once Watt invented an efficient coal-burning version.
The biggest single innovation in creating the modern world was surely electricity, which of course can be generated any number of ways with or without fossil fuels, but in practice figuring out that it was possible to do in a usable way required access to lots of concentrated energy in another form, and that meant fossil fuel.
(I realize that this is a depressing conclusion given what we now know about climate change, but I think if you look closely it really is inescapable.)
How do I know my probably of ordering? I can make inferences about the probability based on my behavior, but the confidence intervals will be very wide until we have lots of cases.
Man, this thread is really being spammed by some sort of book selling character...
I can't even spell "probability" consistently and I'm supposed to be a master at inductive inference.
Anyway, teo gets it right here. Any time people discuss whether the Industrial Revolution could have happened elsewhere in Europe, one of the caveats is which countries had sufficient coal reserves to make machinery worth the investment (not only literal capital but also the tremendous innovation that went into turning clunky, demonstrator-level devices into efficient machines).
It's useful to think about the computing revolution: what could be effectively done with vacuum tubes, what with transistors, and then what with integrated circuits. You don't get the iPhone with vacuum tubes, and not just because of size per se: you needed Moore's Law in order to get the vast resources that were poured into computing in the post-1970 world that in turn led to all the things that make the iPhone possible. The original Mac was incredibly constrained, but it had enough potential to get some of the smartest people in the world spend all their time trying to figure out how to squeeze a little more out of it--which laid the groundwork for the next round, etc. Punch card machines were simply never going to get there.
Manufacturing was revolutionized by the steam engine, which only really took off once Watt invented an efficient coal-burning version.
Flag: the steam engine only really took off after Watt invented a version that was efficient enough to work anywhere else than at the top of a coal mine, pumping out water by burning low grade coal that wasn't saleable. It's not a story of greater profligacy. Trevithick's machine was only useful if you had an endless supply of coal you couldn't sell.
It's not a story of greater profligacy.
Did I say it was? I think we're in agreement that Watt's engine was a massive improvement that led to its widespread adoption.
I suggest that at least some of Cicero's slaves lived better than Jefferson's. And domestic slaves had a real prospect of manumission and citizenship in Rome.
"The absolute world-record top speed of a horse is 55 mph"
I learned about the concentrated energy problem from Back to the Future 3.
23 et seq.: What about charcoal as a non-fossil fuel coal substitute? I don't know if it's as good as high-grade coal, but in the same ballpark, wouldn't you think?
Generally, on whether society could have bootstrapped itself to renewables without fossil fuels, I think it's very hard to come up with a solid answer on that kind of counterfactual, but there's an awful lot of low-tech accessible hydropower and wind power in the world. You couldn't power an industrial society that looked anything at all like ours with it, but it's plausible to me that you could keep on developing technologies until you got to modern renewables.
40.1: I don't think the world has enough trees.
Enough for what? Enough to seamlessly replace coal and rerun the Industrial Revolution as it actually played out, probably not. Enough to make a lot of the technologies that relied on coal somewhat useful, plausibly.
Enough that burning charcoal caused less global warming than coal?
Well, sure, of course. The carbon in charcoal is part of the current carbon cycle, while the carbon in coal is fossil carbon, additional to the current carbon cycle. Deforestation would lead to some warming, but not on the same scale as burning coal, and making charcoal from sustainably grown trees/bamboo/whatever wouldn't have any net effect on warming.
This map from saiselgy but not from saiselgy (he posts it here in the context of a fair use discussion) was pretty surprising. Aside from the main point about cows and housing, about the same amount of land is used for bullshit ethanol fuel as actual food? Flowers use twice the land of tobacco? More land is used for golf courses than crops to prepare beer? Now I feel bad about recently learning to play.
I haven't run the numbers, but I was assuming there's not enough land to grow enough trees sustainably for an industrial revolution. They clear cut huge areas of the world just for steel production and a subset of the steam engines. Local forests still haven't recovered. Replacing any significant proportion of the coal used would come on top of that.
Sure. As I've been saying, you couldn't rerun something indistinguishable from our Industrial Revolution without fossil fuel. A sustainable 19th and 20th century without fossil fuel would have been much, much poorer (with everything that means in terms of famine and drudgery and death) than the one we had. But if the question is "could you have used sustainable energy to support the development of technology that could have bootstrapped all the way to modern renewables", that seems hard to answer for certain, but very plausibly possible.
29: Is it more or less depressing if it turned out that we could have avoided global warming by choosing another easily available energy source?
I'm not convinced that's plausible, but can we refine the question by thinking about an example or two of key, "index technologies "? Cast iron?
According to Wikipedia, machine tools (I can't see the specific anchor for the link): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution
47: Then the question is how many people you need to free from famine, drudgery, and death to support a technology revolution that doesn't just replace men with spears with men with machine guns in terms of who gets to eat three times every day.
49: That sounds interesting, but I'm not following you.
As sort of a general thing I'm thinking about plausibility, there's a big space between saying that an Industrial Revolution powered by sustainable energy (wind, hydro, biofuels) would have been completely unable to compete economically with industry powered by fossil fuels, which I think is incontrovertibly true, and saying that an Industrial Revolution powered by sustainable energy wouldn't have been economically worth doing in the absence of the availability of fossil fuel.
50: I will say -- _The Fabric of Civilization_ was convincing that simply automating textile production frees up a _lot_ of time and energy. But I still have a hard time picturing anything like the industrial revolution without coal.
51 -- I'm just suggesting that focusing on a couple technologies allows us to ask, "could you replace this technology (on a broad scale) without coal?" And, "how different would the transition have been without affordable X"?
51: Well, not just how many people, but also for how long.
That is, if I were right that the technological bootstrapping is possible without fossil fuels, at some point you get to a present-day technological level, where it seems clear that a sustainably-powered society is achievable, even if the transition is going to be a bitch, at something comparable to our current level of energy abundance. But I have no idea how long it would take to get from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to present-day technology if you were powering it all with wind, hydro, and biomass.
The longer it takes, the better the odds that the people producing the technology get murdered before they can make a plausible vacuum tube or whatever.
55: No, in Earth 2, there is no violence, and while economic growth is slow, it is shared equally.
53: I think that's going to be hard to do with any kind of rigor, because the actual development of technology is all about path dependence. Like, not that I know anything about organic chemistry, but my vague impression about it is that a whole lot of interesting early work was on fossil fuel byproducts, and that was all vital to everything that happened later. No fossil fuel, and all that chemistry is developed differently, in a different order. Doesn't mean equivalent work wouldn't have been done, but specifics are going to be impossible to work out.
Or power storage technology. In a world where your easiest way to run a generator is with a windmill, it gets much more important to develop ways to store intermittently available power than it is in our world, where the easiest way to store energy is in an oil barrel. Different things would have been developed in a different order, again.
I mean, 'rigor'. This is blog comments.
57: Taking DeLong's numbers, from 1500 to 2010 is ~40 fold improvement in technology. If we saw that growth happen at .15% per year (rather than increasing to 2% per year) it would take about 2500 years -- 5 times as long.
I certainly could believe in an advanced, non fossil fuel civilization in the year 4000, but I assumed you were thinking of something faster than that.
55: Yeah, the question is whether a society at the wealth and energy-abundance level of, say, Elizabethan England could hold it together through a slower, sustainably powered Industrial Revolution. That seems plausible to me, but obviously I don't really know what I'm talking about.
I get the impression I'm sounding unrealistically cheery about the possibility of industrial civilization without fossil fuels. I don't mean to be. For one thing, this is completely useless -- given that it didn't happen, it's all spilt milk at this point. And in the world we live in it couldn't economically have happened without a magically powerful world dictator forbidding the use of fossil fuels. And it would have involved a lot more starvation and drudgery than our actual history. I'm just noodling about whether it would have been possible, and I'm not seeing strong arguments for saying it wouldn't have been.
If I were going for pie-in-the-sky fantasy, it'd be about a history where the Industrial Revolution was powered by fossil fuel through the 19th and early 20th century, so as to get the humanitarian benefits of a richer world that we actually did get, but somehow everyone got convinced of the pressing need to flip over to sustainability by 1930 or so, and we were relying on renewables by the end of the 20th C. A history like that would have been awfully nice.
59: Sure, if .15% is the number you pick out of the air, that's the timespan you get. If you picked a different number, you'd get a different answer. Not sure how you'd defend any particular number.
I pick .528% and will defend it against all comers.
I guess I'll accept from .489% to .556%. Because science has error bars.
Just occurred to me that Professor DeLong feels the same way about Hayek as Judge Sweat feels about liquor.
59: Sure, if .15% is the number you pick out of the air, that's the timespan you get. If you picked a different number, you'd get a different answer. Not sure how you'd defend any particular number.
From the OP (quoting Brad Delong who has the obvious caveats about this being a very rough approximation):
Thereafter come the really big changes. Thereafter comes the breakout:
a growth rate of useful ideas of 0.15% per year during the 1500-1770 Imperial-Commercial Revolution Age.
a growth rate of useful ideas of 0.44% per year during the 1770-1870 Industrial Revolution Age.
a growth rate of useful ideas of 2.06% per year during the post-1870 Modern Economic Growth Era.
Few in 1870 would have doubted that humanity more than ten times richer in material terms would build ourselves a utopia.
Was there that much less cynicism about human nature in 1870? I'm pretty sure Dostoyevsky would not have had any difficulty imagining a society 10 times richer in material terms that was far from utopia.
The implicit question I'm asking is, "would you see that acceleration without fossil fuels?"
I'm not committed to the 2500-year timeline, just saying that, to some extent, you could start with that as a baseline and then try to imagine other breakthroughs that could lead to accelerating progress.
Russians have shitheads in a way we can't understand.
Okay, so you're assuming that a renewable energy-powered industrial revolution would have slowed the rate of growth of technology to no faster than it was in the pre-industrial era. Yes, if that's your assumption then getting to modern levels of technology would take a very long time. How you'd defend that assumption (or any other assumption --I'm not offering an alternative) I can't imagine.
68: Yes, Dostoyevsky is a ridiculous example. He would probably be most horrified by a society that Professor DeLong would consider close to utopia.
I'm not committed to a specific assumption; I'm trying to think about how we could define criteria to assess whether this is true:
A sustainable 19th and 20th century without fossil fuel would have been much, much poorer (with everything that means in terms of famine and drudgery and death) than the one we had. But if the question is "could you have used sustainable energy to support the development of technology that could have bootstrapped all the way to modern renewables", that seems hard to answer for certain, but very plausibly possible.
What counts as "plausibly possible?" It is plausible if you think that could be accomplished by the year 4000, or is it only "plausibly possible" if you think it could be accomplished by (say) the year 2200?
69 to 65.
One obvious reason to think that the acceleration in useful technology during the industrial revolution would have happened to some degree in the absence of fossil fuels is that a significant part of the early portion of the industrial revolution was based on water power, wasn't it? All those New England textile mills. Likewise, wood burning locomotives existed -- even if they couldn't compete with coal, the answer "is it even worth developing a train if it's not coal powered" is yes. While I said I wasn't making a guess about how fast a sustainable industrial revolution would have developed, guessing that it would have stayed at a pre-industrial baseline seems hard to defend.
70: But, still by 1870 there was significant material progress and it was clear that it wasn't being shared equally. Also, a significant portion of the elite believed in inequality as a positive good.
I'm assuming that the rate of technological progress is going to vary inversely with the proportion of the population that needs to be in agriculture and that without fossil fuels, that proportion drops much more slowly than with fossil fuels. You need a mass of specialists/technologists/dilettantes with caliper fetishes/etc.to accelerate technology and basically none of those people are farmers.
71: This seems like a weird track to go down, trying to quantify how a very very different alternative history would have developed and how fast -- I don't think there's likely to be anything to say along these lines that isn't pretty empty. Particularly, I think "rate of growth of useful ideas" isn't going to be a way of thinking about things that is going to lead to saying anything meaningful.
That said, "plausibly possible" was meant to mean "plausibly possible" without any commitment to a particular timeline.
Growing trees for charcoal (and cutting them before fossil fuels) is labor for peasants. Probably peasants with a nicer life than the miners back in the day, but the miners were learning to work with (or at least around) technology and every so many miners required an engineer.
74: I think that can be overstated. Not that I have these numbers at my fingertips, but googling says 90% of the population was working in agriculture through the 19th century, and yet there was an great deal of technological progress over that period.
76: I'm not arguing that my imaginary renewables-powered industrial revolution would have been nicer than the history we had -- almost certainly poorer and less nice -- just that there's no good reason to think it would have been impossible or that we can make good estimates of how slowly things would have developed.
This seems like a weird track to go down, trying to quantify how a very very different alternative history would have developed and how fast -- I don't think there's likely to be anything to say along these lines that isn't pretty empty.
Yes; I'm not sure that I've succeeded in adding any rigor, even by the standards of blog comments. But, from my perspective, I was just trying to figure out how to get purchase on your claim -- you thought it was plausible, I was skeptical, and I wasn't sure if I could add any precision to my skepticism. My first question was to think about keystone technologies, but I realized that I didn't have enough information to really assess that. So my second thought was, "what would be a plausible length of time?"
And, that's helpful for me, because I can say that my skepticism was about the idea of an alternative industrial revolution in a similar period of time. If we're talking about, "could the same technology be developed given an extra millennium or two"? I no longer have reason to be skeptical. At that point I'd say, "sure, why not."
77: I don't know those numbers either, but a technological revolution requires specialists interacting with and using the prior work of other specialists and economies of scale. In a society with 14,765,898 people, the difference between 90% and 92% is 295,318 people. If you figure that most of the 10% not in agriculture at the start were already off being religion/politics/art/etc., that 295,318 (or a portion of it) is your technological revolution.
I mean, most of the 295,318 people aren't going to do shit for technology either. Let's say 2.5% are, so that's 7,383 people doing the technology that will move the needle of those working in agriculture down from 88% to 86%.
77. But roughly none of it in China or backward parts of Europe, say southern Italy. Looking at the geography of useful ideas provides a pretty straightforward way to assess how an existing base of technology affects specialization and further development. Nick S and Teo are basically right about this, Smil's book that Teo mentioned makes lots of broad connections about energy use and growth. There's not a great way to go into detail, but putting limits on the rate of hypothetical restoration-era hippie technology growth (it would be low) seems manageable-- DeLong explicitly considers Roman technology growth.
Where is the Watt of the Zulus, basically.
You lost me completely with the numbers. But in general, talking about what kind of population you need to keep technology moving forward, think about the phenomenon where the same thing gets invented multiple times in multiple places simultaneously, because the state of knowledge has made the next step either obvious, or at least achievable. Poisoning Newton wouldn't have significantly slowed the development of calculus, because Leibniz was right there.
This seems to me to imply that that the rate of technologically progress isn't a simple function of the number of educated people working on technological problems. There's a point below which you just don't have enough people to support an intellectual community capable of making progress, but once you have a community like that, I don't think doubling its size doubles the rate of progress. (Not that you exactly said it did, but something like that seemed to be the implication of the math you were doing.)
DeLong isn't the only person to have considered why the industrial revolution happened in the UK and not elsewhere-- there's a lefty analysis in Robert Allen's Very Short Introduction to Global Economic History, the claim there is that a combination of coal availability and high local labor costs led to innovations getting shared rather than being tried and forgotten was the necessary combination.
I fucked up the numbers by doing it backward. Anyway, once you get past a minimum size, I think it's an exponential curve (the relationship between the size of the community and the amount of progress) and not linear at all. That is, if you have a 1700-era population of people in technology, you get one math. If you have ten times that population, you get a steam railroad system connecting all of your major cities.
A steam railroad system requires like 100 maths where a "math" is an innovation.
I'm late to the thread and can't engage in too much detail, but the problem isn't the first 50 years of fossil-fuel-based technology, maybe not even the first 100 years, the problem is what's come after that. Climatologists are saying we only hit the tipping point to irreversible catastrophe in the past 5 years or so, right? Or we haven't even hit it quite yet, it's just that we're on track to do so?
You want to imagine a world without global warming, imagine replacing the space race with a sustainability race.
89: Yep, see my pie-in-the-sky fantasy at 60 last.
You want to imagine a world without global warming, imagine replacing the space race with a sustainability race.
Imagine a world in which every deposit of fossil fuel was only 2/3 as large as it is in our world . . . we would have hit "peak oil" in the 20th century, and it would have created a different pressure for sustainability (I think).
86: ISTR that another push towards coal was that the UK was running low on trees.
If I were going for pie-in-the-sky fantasy, it'd be about a history where the Industrial Revolution was powered by fossil fuel through the 19th and early 20th century, so as to get the humanitarian benefits of a richer world that we actually did get, but somehow everyone got convinced of the pressing need to flip over to sustainability by 1930 or so, and we were relying on renewables by the end of the 20th C. A history like that would have been awfully nice.
Now I'm curious what that would look like. Neither nuclear power or solar would have been remotely plausible in 1930. I would expect more dams, and . . . . what? An interesting question.
Maybe I'm wrong and nuclear power would have been the key development.
72: yes. I was literally walking around the site of Richard Arkwright's original textile mill a few weeks ago. They kept building more until they'd substantially changed the whole valley's hydrology. Interesting detail: a big contributor to the head of water was diverting the drainage from a lead mine on the hills above.
94: oddly enough, the theoretical work on how much power you can in principle capture from the wind is from the 1930s.
94: Photovoltaic solar was out of reach, but heat-based solar wasn't. Wind and hydro were available, as were biofuels. And nukes were in the very near future. Geothermal, too.
But mostly I was trying to fantasize 'realistically', so starting to try for sustainability in 1930, and getting there by 2000.
94: oddly enough, the theoretical work on how much power you can in principle capture from the wind is from the 1930s.
That reminds me of a song.
In days gone by, when the world was much younger
Men harnessed the wind to work for mankind
Seamen built tall ships to sail on the ocean
While landsmen built wheels the corn for to grind
But mostly I was trying to fantasize 'realistically', so starting to try for sustainability in 1930, and getting there by 2000.
Yes, I wasn't trying to be too literal, just mulling over what an alternate future that diverged in 1930 would have looked like.
Smaller windmills run most of the pumps that provide drinking water for cattle on the range, but those do require a certain level of material abundance.
87: This is the sort of thing that's hard to know, but my guess is that once you get over a certain minimum size for a functional intellectual community, making it bigger gets you a less than linear, rather than a more than linear, increase in the rate of technological progress.
Think about technological progress from 1920-1970: fabric biplanes and punchcard machines to space travel and computers -- as opposed to the progress from 1970-2020: computers to much better computers (this is not a fair summary, but do your own). The population was a lot bigger in the second period, and the educated population was maybe twice as big again. Progress didn't necessarily slow down, but I think it'd be hard to argue that it sped up by more than the factor by which the size of the educated population increased.
Good point. It's logistic, not exponential. In other words, it starts slow and then accelerates rapidly and then at the top of the scale it slows down again.
Right, so the whole question on speed of progress is where on the curve you are. My guess, that I can't defend, is that you get to the sweet part of the curve at a fairly low educated population, and that my imaginary renewables industrial revolution is slower than the real one we had, but not colossally slower. But I don't have anything concrete to base that on.
Think about technological progress from 1920-1970: fabric biplanes and punchcard machines to space travel and computers -- as opposed to the progress from 1970-2020: computers to much better computers (this is not a fair summary, but do your own). The population was a lot bigger in the second period, and the educated population was maybe twice as big again. Progress didn't necessarily slow down, but I think it'd be hard to argue that it sped up by more than the factor by which the size of the educated population increased.
Noah Smith had a couple of posts on that topic.
Science is progressive like that; each discovery is supported by the discoveries that came before it (in Newton's words, it "stands on the shoulders of giants"). Thus, each new discovery makes the older discoveries that support it that much more important. So we'd expect to see more important discoveries in the distant past than the recent past; this is not, by itself, a sign of stagnation.
While looking that up, I saw this tweet, which I appreciate (though I disagree with the 70% figure).
Leftists only 70% as nuts as rightists, but there are very few rightists in my social groupings or in my city, which means leftists end up annoying me much more frequently.
The solution is follow some rightists on Twitter, so I can remember to be even more annoyed by them.
...
I think I'm going to call this tendency "MNITP". "My neighbor is the problem".
My point about the map, golf courses aside, is that a need for energy might push colonialism in a different direction. What were the main products of North America- a few high intensity crops like sugar and tobacco and cotton? What if they need thousands of square miles of space for growing biomass? I think colony patterns look a lot different and maybe could sustain the energy demands of Northern Europe, although I don't know how dense you can make the products for efficient shipping across the Atlantic.
Concrete was invented by the Romans, forgotten, and the reinvented in someplace like Oregon.
105, 106: I learned a lot so I could understand this joke. It wasn't worth it.
It's strange to me that the Pantheon is still the largest unreinforced concrete dome. You'd think someone would build a slightly bigger one, sell the naming rights, and profit hugely because now that dome's name is in about 2 million footnotes.
Pretty surprised it's not the Hagia Sophia.
According to Wikipedia, that's masonry construction and also uses iron reinforcements.
I'm saving peep the effort so he doesn't get mad at me again.
Maybe you can't get insurance for a concrete dome without reinforcement.
Nobody needs to go inside it after it's done.
104 Fur was a pretty big deal for a pretty long time.
Some of my ancestors lived in New Bedford in the mid 19th century, and they'd have told you that whale oil was the past, present and future.
Re: "is Brad stacking the deck for that interpretation?"
Say, rather, that if you wanted to live a comfortable life before 1870, humanity was so poor that the only way to do this was to figure out some way to take a substantial share of stuff other people were making and grab it for yourself--and then find some way to make that grabbing stable, and also to convince yourself that you deserved to grab so that you could then be happy with yourself about doing so. And that requirement for how to live a comfortable life--it, to say the least, profoundly marked humanity and its history.
Now and in the future--since 2010--however, we are rich enough--technology is advanced enough, growth is fast enough, and women have other ways of gaining social power than being the mothers of sons enough that Malthusian pressures no longer keep us so poor--that we can all lead comfortable lives, in the sense that it is straightforward to produce _**enough**_, so our collective economic problems are ones of distributing the _**enough**_ and of using it appropriately to make us happy rather than miserable.
In between 1870 and 2010--during the long 20th century--things were both marvelous and terrible, but in the context of previous human history more marvelous than terrible. The coming of the industrial research lab; of the modern corporation; and of the globalization triple of the iron-hulled ocean-going screw-propellered steamship and of the railroad, of the submarine and land telegraph cable, and of the open world economy--those removed the final barriers to the rapid discovery, development, deployment, and then diffusion of new technologies: new and better ways of manipulating nature and organizing humans to make stuff and do things. After 1870, the deployed-and-diffused technological prowess of humanity doubled every generation, a pace previously unimaginable and unimagined. That meant that the global market economy revolutionized the economy and then re-revolutionized it again, once every generation, in a process of profound and repeated creative destruction in which all established patterns and hierarchies were steamed away.
Technological progress and creative destruction under the aegis of the market economy solved the problem of not being able to make _**enough**_ stuff for all. But it left the problems of distribution and of utilization untouched. Moreover, 140 years of repeated creative destruction of economic patterns upended all of the patterns and bargains that did guide distribution and utilization, and then upended them again. This led to great fear among the powerful: their relative status and power depended on those patterns. And this led to great anxiety among the powerless: they could dream of utopian changes, but they did fear that the market economy would take away what little they had. People think they have rights--to a stable community that validates and nurtures them, to an income commensurate with what they deserve, and to a stable life. But the market economy does not recognize those rights. The market economy recognizes only property rights. Your social power is your wealth and is only your wealth. And you only have wealth if the property rights you possess are to things useful in producing commodities for which the rich have a serious jones.
Friedrich August von Hayek, that genius-idiot Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde figure of the long 20th century, saw the power and productivity of the market economy unleashed and preached subservience to the market: "the market giveth, the market taketh away: blessed be the name of the market". To seek for anything other than the expansion of production, to seek for "social justice" and resolving the problems of distribution and use would, he claimed, destroy the ability of the market economy to solve the problem of production and create _**enough**_.
Karl Polanyi said: that simply will not work. Market-worship to create a stark utopia in which the only rights are property rights is inhuman, and humans will not stand for it. Attempting to enforce a system that destroys all rights other than property rights, all of "society" and all dreams of social justice, will call forth an unstoppable counterreaction of some kind. Humanity must try to resolve the problems of distribution and use, for: "the market is made for man, not man for the market". But how is the market made for man? And in what way?
John Maynard Keynes said: All we need are a few technical and technocratic adjustments to the way the market economy works, and we can all but guarantee that everyone will have a job and see themselves as useful. Moreover, these proper technocratic adjustments to the system will produce the _**euthanasia of the rentier**_: interest rates will be so low that the only way the unproductive rich can exert their social power will be by spending down their capital and so joining us non-rich. Plutocracy will not be a permanent problem. With the problems of production and distribution solved, there will remain the problem of utilization: how to use our resources to enable all of us to live happy and fulfilled lives rather than have us hag-ridden by necessity, greed, and fear of poverty. But a world in which that is the problem is a much better world.
But it did not work out, did it? We did not run or march forward, but only slouched, didn't we? And what did we, over 1870 to 2010, slouch towards? Was it utopia? Or was it something else?
And what did we, over 1870 to 2010, slouch towards? Was it utopia? Or was it something else?
Branson, Missouri.
**euthanasia of the rentier**
I admit that the last 15 years or so have left me much more enthused about that idea than is probably seemly for a guy with a 401k and minor real estate investments.
Can't wait for the book and enjoyed the Long DeLong Thread.
However, this seems a bit of an overstatement to me. But it left the problems of distribution and of utilization untouched. I assume "distribution And utilization" here does not mean the logistical aspects of distribution and utilization (for which I believe the statement would be very wrong), but rather who gets or deserves the to use and enjoy the stuff. But even in that sense I believe technological progress and creative destruction have had some effect (although mostly inadvertently).
I may be being a bit wooly-headed in my thinking and confusing categories, but something like the social consensus on who gets to shit in a secure indoor place seems to involve more than just abundance and logistics. But then again maybe not; it all may just be a moving threshold based on the relative ability to cheaply provide secure indoor shitting places.
117. Being a retiree adds to that sense.
Friedrich August von Hayek, that genius-idiot Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde figure of the long 20th century
Darb demonstrating that peep was correct in 64.
Re: "is Brad stacking the deck for that interpretation?"
Just to be clearer about the question. I don't doubt the economic history, what I'm mulling over is how that affects my reading of the intellectual history of political economy. Take the question of, "what is needed to accomplish equitable growth -- the policies needed to produce sustainable growth, so share the output (mostly) equitably, and to build a sustainable political coalition in favor of those policies?" How long have humans had to attempt to develop a good answer to that question? Before reading the economic history I would have said that was a question of interest to 18th century philosophers. From my vaguely remembered intellectual history classes that question would have made sense to the French Encyclopédiests*. But, knowing that they were a century away from the beginning of material abundance, I would see them intellectual antecedents, with limited ability to contruct either the question (as formulated above) or an answer.
I guess,in Darb's comment above, I see this as really creating a new political problem.
140 years of repeated creative destruction of economic patterns upended all of the patterns and bargains that did guide distribution and utilization, and then upended them again. This led to great fear among the powerful: their relative status and power depended on those patterns. And this led to great anxiety among the powerless: they could dream of utopian changes, but they did fear that the market economy would take away what little they had. People think they have rights--to a stable community that validates and nurtures them, to an income commensurate with what they deserve, and to a stable life. But the market economy does not recognize those rights. The market economy recognizes only property rights. Your social power is your wealth and is only your wealth. And you only have wealth if the property rights you possess are to things useful in producing commodities for which the rich have a serious jones.
Of course, it isn't entirely new, but it gives me a different sense of why it's so difficult to resolve -- because there is much that is new and different.
* I haven't read Adam Smith, but recently re-read Brad's quite moving account of coming to understand Smith.
This led to great fear among the powerful: their relative status and power depended on those patterns.
We've gone through the tragedy/farce cycle on that, from the Okhrana and Pinkertons and the like to pissed off restaurant owners trying to hire at $2.13/hour and putting up signs complaining that no one wants to work when they fail.
How the good-hearted and intelligent posters on this blog can continue to see someone like Delong as worthy of attention still puzzles me. Delong himself admits that as an adviser to the Clinton administration he made recommendation after recommendation that ended up stiffing workers at the expense of capitalists. The right thing for him to do is to fade from public life and let left-wing economists who are not marred by such incredible failures take center stage. Fortunately, the people close to power in the Democratic Party do seem to have completely stopped listening to him, Larry Summers, and Jason Furman.
I'm probably not Larry Summers, but on the internet, who can tell?
It's a problem involving induction and induction is hard.
Said the bishop to the actress.
If you're really that puzzled you could read the excerpt.
I still can't prove I'm not Larry Summers.
Maybe a little too on the nose to suggest Prof Delong be sent to work the fields.
Unfortunately, I believe that there are now fewer farmers and farm laborers in America than there are gardeners, groundskeepers, and growers of ornamental plants. And there are supposed to be four times as many WoW players. As a result of the technological revolutions of the 20th century, tankies no longer enserf people to work in the fields on the collective farm. They send people to clip the hedges, or to forge virtual magical items in prison workshops in South Azeroth...
Unfortunately, I believe that there are now fewer farmers and farm laborers in America than there are gardeners, groundskeepers, and growers of ornamental plants. And there are supposed to be four times as many WoW players. As a result of the technological revolutions of the 20th century, tankies no longer enserf people to work in the fields on the collective farm. They send people to clip the hedges, or to forge virtual magical items in prison workshops in South Azeroth...
My cousin does my farming, but I might help this year.
Taylordle in one!!
I took three tries, but I've still never missed one.