In 2017, I read an intriguing book concerned with the exponential advances in technology and the impact thereof on human society. The author believes that the displacement of human labor by technology is in its very early stages, and sees little limit to the process. He is concerned with how this will affect–indeed, has already affected–the relationship between the sexes and of parents and children, as well as the ability of ordinary people to earn a decent living. It’s a thoughtful analysis by someone who clearly cares a great deal about the well-being of his fellow citizens.
The book is Peter Gaskell’s Artisans and Machinery, and it was published in 1836. The technology with which he is concerned is steam power, which he sees in its then-present incarnation as merely “Hercules in the cradle…opening into view a long vista of rapid transitions, terminating in the subjection of human power, as an agent of labour, to the gigantic and untiring energies of automatic machinery.”
What Gaskell sees this infant Hercules as already having caused is this:
The declension of the most numerous class of artisans in Great Britain, from comfort, morality, independence, and loyalty, to misery, demoralization, dependence, and discontent, is the painful picture now presented by the domestic manufacturers. (he is referring particularly to the hand-loom weavers) ‘The domestic labourers were at one period a most loyal and devoted body of men,’ says an intelligent witness before the Select Committee of Hand-Loom Weavers in 1834. ‘Lancashire was a particularly loyal county.’ (These men had been prominent among those who had volunteered to defend Britain from Napoleon.) ‘Durst any government call upon the services of such a people, living upon three shillings a week?’
Gaskell notes that prior to the introduction of automatic machinery, the majority of artisans had worked at home. “It may be termed the period of Domestic Manufacture; and the various mechanical contrivances were expressly framed for that purpose…These were undoubtedly the golden times of manufactures, considered in reference to the character of the labourers.” The man retained his individual respectability and was often able to rent a few acres for farming, thus diversifying his employment and (with the addition of a garden) his family’s diet.
The new automated mills had relatively little requirement for adult male labor; most jobs could be done more cheaply by women and children, who indeed were often preferred because of their more nimble fingers. Those who continued as handweavers saw their incomes drop precipitously due to the competition from steam-or-water-powered machinery; it was John Henry versus the steam drill (although the birth of that legend was still in the future).
Before industrialization, the earnings of children were “entirely at the disposal of the head of the family”…thus home was “to the poor man, the very temple of fortune, in which he may contrive, if his earnings are not scanty indeed, to live with comfort and independence…the child of the domestic manufacturer was advantageously placed. It remained under its paternal roof during which the period in which puberty was developed; its passions and social instincts were properly cultivated, its bodily powers were not too early called into requisition; it had the benefit of green fields, a pure atmosphere, the cheering influences of nature, and its diet was plain and substantial.”
Gaskell contrasts this perhaps rather idealized picture with a dismal portrait of parents and children all going off to work as separate individuals, with little interaction beyond meals hurriedly snatched, if even that. “Parents have become the keepers of lodging-houses for their offspring, between whom little intercourse exists beyond that relating to pecuniary profit and loss. In a vast number of others, children have been entirely driven away from their homes, either by unnatural treatment…(or) for the sake of saving a small sum in the amount of payment required for food and house-room….The social relations which should distinguish the members of the same family are destroyed. The domestic virtues, man’s natural instincts, and the affections of the heart, are deadened and lost.” He argues that feelings of family mutual responsibility are destroyed to the degree that “When age and decrepitude cripple the energies of the parents, their adult children abandon them to the scanty maintenance derived from parochial relief.”
Gaskell does admit that the factory worker was in many cases more mentally-active than his domestic-manufacturing predecessor, that he often shows “a high order of intelligence, seeking his amusement in the club, the political union, or the lecture room,” but that “he is disbarred from all athletic sports, not having a moment’s time to seek, or bodily vigour capable of undertaking them; he has an active mind in a stunted and bloodless body.” The domestic craftsman, on the other hand, “possessed a very limited degree of information; his amusements were exclusively sought in bodily exercise, quoits, cricket, the dance, the chace, and numerous seasonal celebrations; he lived in utter ignorance of printed books, beyond the thumbed Bible and a few theological tracts…he had a sluggish mind in an active body.”
Gaskell writes positively about the “distinctions of rank” and especially about the role of the Squire as it once had been in rural areas. “The Squire …obtained and deserved his importance from his large possessions, low rents, and a simplicity and homeliness of bearing which, when joined to acknowledged family respectability, made him loved and reverenced by his tenants and neighbours. He mingled freely in their sports–was the general and undisputed arbiter in all questions of law and equity–was a considerate and generate landlord–a kind and indulgent master…tinged, it is true with some vices, but all so coated over with wide-spreading charity, that the historian willingly draws the veil of forgetfulness over them.”
Concerning the mill-owners, who have to some extent replaced the Squires as masters of men, Gaskell says that few of those who started in the business as rich men have succeeded, while “the men who prospered were raised by their own efforts–commencing in a very humble way, generally from exercising some handicraft, as clock-making, hatting, etc….having a very limited capital to begin with, or even none at all save their own labour.” He defends the mill owners against charges of wanton cruelty to employees, saying that many of the stories are exaggerated. But while being men of high energy and quick thinking, the owners are in Gaskell’s view “men of limited information–men who saw and knew little of any thing beyond the demand for their twist or cloth, and the speediest and best modes for their production.” Acquisition of wealth, though was not always attended by a “corresponding improvement in their moral and social character…The animal enjoyments–the sensual indulgences which were witnessed at the orgies of these parties, totally unchecked by any intercourse with polished society, should have had the veil of oblivion drawn over them, were it not that, to some degree, they tend to explain the depravity which in a few years spread, like a moral plague, over the factory artisans.”
Gaskell in the previous passage appears to be talking at least partly about sex, a subject to which he returns several times in the book. He comments on, but is not particularly condemnatory about, the fact that in rural areas, marriages had long often followed rather than proceeded the bride’s pregnancy. What he *is* concerned about is what he viewed as extreme promiscuity and “the almost entire extinction” of sexual decency he sees among millworkers…he blames this partly on the bad example of the mill owners, partly on the greatly reduced connection between parents and children, partly on the elevated temperatures which were maintained (for technical reasons) in the mills.
Interestingly, the author does not appear to share the (purported) Victorian view that women do not experience sexual desire. (Of course, the Victorian era had not yet begun.) On the contrary, “Man cannot be taught to forget that he is a man, or that the breathing and blushing being before him is a woman; that she is endowed like himself with an argent temperament–a desire for gratification…and that she has passions which, if roused into activity, would overwhelm all sense of shame or propriety. Neither can he be taught to forget that he has a fire within his own breast, which, if freed from the asbestos coating of moral decency, would overthrow all obstacles standing between him and the object of his desire; nor, that he has the capability of stirring into vigorous life his own and woman’s propensities.” Gaskell’s fear is that an industrialized and urbanized England would become–had largely already become–a sexual free-for-all in which family responsibilities and affections have ceased to exist.
So where does Gaskell see things going in the future? Mechanization, he is certain, will expand vastly beyond its beachhead in the textile trades. He quotes an eminent engineer: “The cottager looks upon the neat paling which fences his dwelling; it was sawed by steam. The spade with which he digs his garden, the rake, the hoe, the pickaxe…every implement of rural toil which ministers to his necessities, are produced by steam…Applied to architecture, we find the Briarean arms of the steam engine every where at work. Stone is cut by it, marble polished, cement ground…gratings and bolts forged…all owe to steam their most essential requisites.” And this widespread application of steam has driven prices down, permitting ordinary people to buy things–especially items of apparel–once restricted to the richest few. But Gaskell questions what benefit the masses of people are actually getting out of this. “The advantage to the poor man, according to (another contemporary commentator) is, that his wife can purchase a printed calico gown for 2s, 6d. This is a fact that he repeatedly insists upon. It seems to us a very poor compensation for poverty, expatriation, or the workhouse.” (Quite similar to the point sometimes made about cheap imported goods at Wal-Mart in our own time.) So, in Gaskell’s view, the reduced prices of so many items will not equal in their impact the reduction in employments and wages driven by the new technologies. There is no refuge from the process; commenting on a then-new improvement in spinning machinery, he says, “Spinning machines, when first introduced…at once destroyed domestic spinning: the Iron Man of Roberts will as surely destroy the factory spinner. It is utterly ridiculous to say that the extension of the trade will aborb the discharged hands–it is impossible.” And machines can even make machines (mirroring, again, some of the present-day concerns about artificial intelligence.) Automation will focus on the elimination of the highest-cost workers, so adult men, in particular, are in danger of becoming largely obsolete.
What is to be done to prevent a bleak future of impoverishment, family disintegration, and widespread misery relieved only by the temporary pleasures of the gin shop?
Gaskell disclaims any intention of stopping and rolling back the progress of technology. He mentions the possibility of taxing steam power (mirroring today’s proposals for the taxation of robots) and concludes that it is not feasible…it would “derange the entire commerce of the kingdom.” Similarly, restricting the hours of labor would have only a temporary benefit to employment in that it would “stimulate mechanical ingenuity” to recover the increased costs, and hence, “the crisis between human and automatic industry would be accelerated.” Nor does he see emigration to Canada and other countries…of which there was then a considerable amount happening among unemployed workers (some of it subsidized) as a fair or sustainable solution to the problem of technological unemployment.
His primary proposed solution to the problem of technological unemployment is the reclamation of the waste lands, of which he asserts that there are 31 million acres in Great Britain and Ireland, of which 15 million are capable of agricultural development. The money currently being expended for welfare and for subsidies of emigration could be better applied to investment in such a project: it could offer productive work to a large number of unemployed or underemployed. Gaskell also proposes that wherever possible (obviously, not in dense urban areas) workers should be provided with a small plot of land (about half an acre) and that these should be held directly from the landowner rather than indirectly from a tenant farmer.
Concerning factory operations, Gaskell seems some improvement in the current set of owners, some of whom are more concerned with the well-being of their workers than had been the pioneering developers of the industry. He also sees labor-management conflict as very detrimental, and opposes ‘combinations’ on the part of both workers and owners. He seems to want the mill owners to play a role more analogous to that which the Squire played in an earlier day; yet at the same time, he is very opposed to what Americans would call the Company Store…individual ownership of retail establishments in manufacturing areas would, he believes, not only drive down prices through competition but would promote the establishment of a Middle Class, which he sees as highly beneficial to both workers and owners. His proposed solutions don’t seem very convincing, and I suspect they were not that convincing to he himself, either.
Tyler Cowen, in his review of this book, says Gaskell is “optimistic about the long run, but not about the transition.” From my reading, I’m not really seeing that optimism even about the long run.
But things did work out considerably better than one might have thought from Gaskell’s analysis. Where Gaskell went wrong, I think, is in several areas. First, he underestimated the potential for economic growth and new industries–he never probably considered, for example, the possibility that people not in the upper classes might own their own carriages, with all the new demands for labor that would create. (And indeed, such widespread carriage-ownership would not probably have been feasible as long as the only motive power available was the horse!) Second, his argument that reduced working hours would do no good because such reductions would merely spur additional labor-reducing technological improvements misses the beneficent feedback loops that at least sometimes exists in practice between these factors. Third, he did not foresee the Victorian era and the social and religious trends that would have at least some impact on curbing the drunkenness and other types of social dysfunction that he saw among the urban working classes.
Gaskell explicitly states that he does not mean to portray the pre-industrial times as any kind of Arcadian paradise, but to a considerable extent he does just that. His almost entirely positive portrayal of the Squire would, I suspect, have been roundly mocked by those living within the domains of a fair number of real-life squires.
John Stuart Mill asserted that “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.” To some extent, Gaskell’s positive portrait of the worker of pre-industrial times…”a sluggish mind in an active body”…argues the opposite case.
I’m reminded of something C P Snow wrote:
I remember talking to my grandfather when I was a child. He was a good specimen of a nineteenth- century artisan. He was highly intelligent, and he had a great deal of character. He had left school at the age of ten, and had educated himself intensely until he was an old man. He had all his class’s passionate faith in education. Yet,he had never had the luck-or, as I now suspect, the worldly force and dexterity-to go very far. In fact, he never went further than maintenance foreman in a tramway depot. His life would seem to his grandchildren laborious and unrewarding almost beyond belief. But it didn’t seem to him quite like that. He was much too sensible a man not to know that he hadn’t been adequately used: he had too much pride not to feel a proper rancour: he was disappointed that he had not done more-and yet, compared with his grandfather, he felt he had done a lot.
His grandfather must have been an agricultural labourer. I don’t so much as know his Christian name. He was one of the ‘dark people’, as the old Russian liberals used to call them, completely lost in the great anonymous sludge of history. So far as my grandfather knew, he could not read or write. He was a man of ability, my grandfather thought; my grandfather was pretty unforgiving about what society had done, or not done, to his ancestors, and did not romanticise their state. It was no fun being an agricultural labourer in the mid to late eighteenth century, in the time that we, snobs that we are, think of only as the time of the Enlightenment and Jane Austen.
The industrial revolution looked very different according to whether one saw it from above or below. It looks very different today according to whether one sees it from Chelsea or from a village in Asia. To people like my grandfather, there was no question that the industrial revolution was less bad than what had gone before. The only question was, how to make it better.
(from The Two Cultures, 1959)
It’s a long book, but very well worth reading. The author was a physician, and there is a lot of data about the prevalence of various diseases among different segments of the population; possibly especially interesting to Michael Kennedy. There are a lot of historical details that I didn’t know; for example, I was certainly aware of the riots, machine-breaking, and other violence, but had never before heard that acid-throwing was a thing back then.
Tyler Cowen, in his review, notes that “So much of (Gaskell’s) discussion of handloom weavers could come out of an Atlantic Monthly article from 2015, albeit with different historical references.” As I’ve argued before, much of today’s discussion about the economic and social effects of robotics and AI seems quite lacking in historical perspective. Gaskell’s book is very helpful in developing such a perspective.
Previously posted at Chicago Boyz, where there is a good discussion thread.
The process of industrialization caused a lot of social dislocation and not just because it replaced existing industries. Rip people from places where their families had lived for generations and send them to factory towns, replace the paternalistic system of neo-feudalism with wage labor and you are going to have all sort of social problems. Marx wrote extensively on the subject seeing industrialization with its offspring capitalism, and modernity in general as the great solvent of traditional society. Ask the Russians late 19th and early 20th Century how that worked out.
While Britain had its fair share of radicalism and social issues it had the one advantage of being the first mover. Gaskell wrote his book in 1836, which was before the other hammer blow of modernity (Darwinism) hit. Therefore Britain still had the cultural institutions and confidence to adapt. Contrast and compare with the Britain of post-WW I era which CS Lewis wrote about
As far as the US, break down robotics to its essential which is changing labor to a cheaper input. We have already (and still are) experienced for the past 50 year that phenomena which is called globalization which shifted the American manufacturing base out of the hands of the American workforce and moved it overseas to where labor was cheaper. Long before China there was Japan and the American auto and steel industry, Instead of robots the primary enabling technologies and institutions were bulk/container shipping and free trade backed by policy, WTO, and the US Navy.
The problem is that we lack the social institutions and confidence to adapt, what Britain had in the 19th Century. In fact the very people who profit from globalization seem to be the very ones who hate the country and its various lower classes (the deplorables) Remember “Learn to Code”? The deal was free trade was supposed to move the American work force up the value-added ladder, but that was predicated on developing a more educated workforce which means education and well…. just look at our educational system today. The ones who profit the most are the ones who are the most educated and hate the country the most. That’s how you get Trump, he’s response. That’s the dividing line.
Your citing of Gaskell and then robots fits into the technological progression of device becoming, powered, then networked, and then autonomous. The problem becomes not so much taxing robots but what sort of meaningful existence, let alone work, will be there for the lower-end of the workforce when the future really doesn’t need them anymore. A better funded welfare state isn’t going to cut it
Maybe that’s why we have legalized pot and gambling as well as even less respectable online pursuits
No mention of the Luddites? It was a bit earlier – 1799 – when Ned Ludd supposedly broke a weaving machine. Accounts vary if it was out of spite, incompetence or a desire to set back the advance of machinery in manufacturing. I’m not sure exactly when French mill workers started pitching their Sabots (wooden shoes) into the works but it would have been not long after.
I’d guess the modern version would be resisting AI for mundane tasks. Writing for instance.
Tacitus–just tried searching the full text (which is online at archive.org) for ‘Ludd’, “Luddite,” and “Sabotage”…no hits. Interesting.
My perception is that Luddism was 90% about economic self-interest…fear of job loss and lower wages…rather than any pastoral objections to machinery per se. Weavers were certainly happy to have low-cost machine-produced yarn as an input, not so happy to have machine-produced fabric as a final product competitive with their own.
Virginia Postrel, who writes interestingly about technology and society (see her history of fabrics) basically accused JD Vance of being a Luddite yesterday, though she didn’t use the word:
“If JD Vance had been around in late 1700s Britain he’d have been opposed to spinning machine and, a generation later, to power looms. Aka the Industrial Revolution, which threw a lot of people out of work even as it created new jobs and unprecedented increases in living standards”
I don’t think this is correct. JDV has worked as a venture capitalist, seems unlikely he is anti-technology. He has explicitly said that he see the threat to American workers as foreign and low-cost-immigrant competition, *not* productivity-improving technology.
And as they say, the worst was yet to come. John Deere was just starting production of his steel plow, which was probably a 2-3x improvement of the existing iron and wood plows and maybe 10-20x better than spading which was still common in England for far too long. McCormick was a few years from his reaper but the mechanization of agriculture would eventually displace many times more workers. The labor that had been bound to the land by law and then by custom became an unsupportable burden to the land owning class.
Thinking about it, I’m amazed it took as long as it did for someone to hit on the idea of shipping the looms and such to India with a couple of mechanics. That would have surely cut labor costs. The British tried mightily to keep all of the technology at home and the political situation in India was probably too unsettled through the 19th century as well.
Why should I pay some UAW guy $50 and hour to put my car together when there are plenty of people in China perfectly willing to do the same slap-dash job for $5?
MCS…”Thinking about it, I’m amazed it took as long as it did for someone to hit on the idea of shipping the looms and such to India with a couple of mechanics.”
Logistics of shipping, plus communications delays, would have been an issue. Suez Canal not open until 1869. When did the first undersea cable reach India? (searches) Looks like 1870. I guess there could have been an overland telegraph in principle, but don’t think there was.
To follow-up on the Suez Canal point.
The reason that off-shoring works is that there is a transportation infrastructure that can efficiently ship the products the extra distance to market.
Not only would any labor savings by transferring textile manufacturing to India have to offset any additional transportation costs in shipping the final product to market (assuming back to North America or Europe), it would also have to offset the additional inventory and other financial costs en route.
Thus the magic of our 21st Century sea transportation infrastructure – container ports and shipping, canals, IT, and the US Navy. Note the system is so tight with integrated supply chain that Toyota was able to off-shore many of its components for its just-in-time assembly lines. That’s impressive
Marc Levinson in his book “The Book” actually had a calculation using a sample cargo that was delayed offloading in port by a day and the additional inventory costs incurred there within. Thus the freak-out a few years ago when those container ships were backed up off Long Beach
I am curious though about the India/textile off-shoring case. I’m sure somebody crunched the numbers, if only for a PhD dissertation
The declension of the most numerous class of artisans in Great Britain, from comfort, morality, independence, and loyalty, to misery, demoralization, dependence, and discontent, is the painful picture now presented by the domestic manufacturers.
I would encourage anyone interested in the history of this period to read Andrew Wareham’s novels, “Poor man at the gate” series. The first book is the best as the story begins.
MCS…if we’re not making consumer products in the US because of much lower labor costs elsewhere, that also reduces demand for capital equipment such as machine tools and stamping presses…and those that do still need to manufacture in the US for whatever reason will also be likely to take advantage of lower-cost capital equipment sources from elsewhere.
Which contributes to the kind of dependency I discuss in Turks and Chinese, Help Us Make the Ammunition
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/71147.html
Also, the success of the US has been materially dependent, I think, on our position as a high-wage society. Whether this can be maintained…and combined with growth…given the transportation & communications improvements and the large # of people willing to work for much lower wages, is a vitally important question.
At the time, a successful voyage to China could pay back at a rate of several times the initial outlay, including the cost of the ship. That’s assuming the ship returned and a good many didn’t. The cargoes of tea, porcelain and silks answers my own question; cheap cloth could not have supported the risks associated with a long sea voyage before steam propulsion. Also, at the time Englishmen worked very cheap, the wages paid to children were the difference between a family getting by and literal starvation, Dickensian is the word.
By 1834 the divergence between America and England was well advanced. Not least by the emigration of many Englishmen that saw no future on that side of the Atlantic. The potato famine accelerated the trend while our Civil War barely registered.
Martin Hutchinson has a recent book: “Forging Modernity: Why and How Britain Developed the Industrial Revolution“. Definitely worth reading.
Hutchinson is strongly in favor of a high-wage economy. Not just for the social benefits for citizens, but also because the relatively high wages in the UK during the Industrial Revolution were a major incentive for introducing labor-saving mechanization, which in turn raised worker productivity and thereby justified the higher wages.
(Relatively) high wage workers in England were able with mechanization and steam power to make cotton cloth so cheaply that they destroyed India’s domestic cotton manufacturing. Then UK politicians fell under the spell of (unilateral) free trade — and the rest is history.
David, I agree with you, but how do you do that? Trump is talking about erecting tariff barriers. The history is that industries stagnate behind them. Anything that’s supposed to “level the playing field” amounts to the same thing in the end with the added fun of endless legal maneuvering and controversy that enriches lawyers at everyone else’s expense, normally while the inequities they were intended to address continue unabated pending endless appeals.
I predict that the ongoing effort to subsidize the reshoring of semiconductor fabs will end with maximum expenditure of money and minimal or even negative increase in actual domestic semiconductor production. Beyond the Biden administration’s complete inability to do anything constructive, can anyone remember even one of these programs that actually worked. In the end, there’s no substitute for being truly competitive.
MCS: “In the end, there’s no substitute for being truly competitive.”
Agreed. But how should we define “competitive”? If being competitive means workers having to live in shanty towns with inadequate water, power, sewage and factories dumping waste product into the river … do we really want to be “competitive” with that? How do we avoid a race to the bottom, in a world with 9 Billion potential workers and a Political Class that does not care about its citizens? Tariffs are a very blunt instrument, but there are not many other tools in the toolbox.
Much of the problem with the way tariffs have been implemented lies in our Fascist political system, where bought politicians do favors for their contributors at the expense of the citizen body. But then the Political Class is the root of most of our problems — and the main obstacle to improvements. Yeah! Democracy!!
Tariffs were significant over much of US history…I think there are many people who don’t know this, and think they were personally invented by Donald Trump in 1916.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff_in_United_States_history
Warren Buffett once suggested an interesting variant on tariffs: an automatic system involving ‘export certificates’, tradable certificates issued based on the mix of imports to exports conducted by particular companies with particular countries. The benefit was making the system automatic (once it was set up) and taking it out of the political favor-buying realm that Gavin mentioned. Don’t know whether or not Buffett still supports that idea.
Also, domestic production tax deductions/credits could be an alternative to tariffs. There was indeed a ‘domestic production tax credit’ in place, but is was eliminated in 2017 in favor of other tax changes. It seemed excessively complex, anyhow, but the overall idea, better-designed, might be a good idea.
As it stands, if a company pays an employee a salary, say, $60K/year, then the federal government collects taxes from the employee on that salary. If the company pays a foreign company the same amount, or pays a foreign employee directly, then employee taxes go to the foreign government, not the US goverment.
Speaking of China, here’s an interesting story. For those benighted souls that aren’t yet on X, here’s the first part:
***
MORE PROFIT, LESS PRODUCTION??
I’ll start with a story. Once upon a time Siemens made a kind of machine in China that sold on the world market for 80,000RMB. Their Chinese supply chains feasted on this work. Executives were taking first-class flights. Everybody was fat and happy until…
A Chinese company cracked how to produce the whole thing. The boss promptly slashed the price to just 3000RMB. When asked why he didn’t just price it at something like 80000RMB, which still undercuts Siemens, he simply stated “my costs are 2000RMB.”
Everybody suffered (except customers) from the maniacal drive to pare margin down to the bone. Not just Siemens, but the Chinese themselves in the aggregate. Overproduction is the result.
***
From Angelica, ‘The Original Manic Nuclear Scheme Girl’
https://x.com/AngelicaOung/status/1814833685944000604
David, any scheme that increases the cost of imports is functionally a tariff. This includes all trading schemes. Notice how all the carbon trading serves to increase the cost of energy generally instead of rewarding some while penalizing others, all while burying all in paperwork and compliance costs.
The situation in China vis-a-vis electric cars, new energy vehicles, is even crazier than what she lets on. There are more than 400 manufacturers supposedly in the business. There have been numerous pictures of thousands of subsidized, never used vehicles sitting in out of the way fields and other hiding places. Those that have received subsidies for cars never sold or even built joining those government officials that paid them all swimming in a sea of corruption. Then there are all the videos showing new energy vehicles immolating anything near them as they conflagrate. The money wasted defies words but is only a fraction of what is “invested” in the ghost cities and the bursting real estate bubble. The crash when it comes, and it will come, will be epic.
Why should I pay some UAW guy $50 and hour to put my car together when there are plenty of people in China perfectly willing to do the same slap-dash job for $5?
Why should I care if somebody burns your house to the ground? Or kills you family? After all, it’s not my house and it’s not my family.
And why should I care when China steals any IP you have in your car factory and uses the knowledge gained in the production of automobiles by their local workforce to bankrupt you?
Of course I am expected to care, just like I’m expected to care about those ships the Houthis are sinking in the Red Sea. I’m told they’re American ships, somehow, even though they weren’t built in the US, aren’t crewed by Americans, and aren’t even flying under an American flag.
Hmmm. I don’t care. My guess is that the swarms of Americans who are just too expensive for the global economy don’t care either- and they aren’t interested in signing up to defend a regime that looks upon them as nothing more than an expense to avoided.
That’s one significant reason why the US military is having recruiting troubles, among many.
Xennady…”My guess is that the swarms of Americans who are just too expensive for the global economy don’t care either- and they aren’t interested in signing up to defend a regime that looks upon them as nothing more than an expense to avoided.
That’s one significant reason why the US military is having recruiting troubles, among many.”
Very similar to Peter Gaskell’s remark about the handweavers.
In our present case, though, I doubt that this the major factor: more important, I think, is the negative attitude projected toward America by so many influential people and institutions, and the obvious mismanagement of the military that has been going on.
…if we’re not making consumer products in the US because of much lower labor costs elsewhere, that also reduces demand for capital equipment such as machine tools and stamping presses…and those that do still need to manufacture in the US for whatever reason will also be likely to take advantage of lower-cost capital equipment sources from elsewhere.
I think the technical term for this is “death spiral.”
Also, the success of the US has been materially dependent, I think, on our position as a high-wage society.
Let’s put a pin in this.
Whether this can be maintained…and combined with growth…given the transportation & communications improvements and the large # of people willing to work for much lower wages, is a vitally important question.
Hmmm. How could it be arranged that the US maintains high enough wages to succeed even when there are lots of foreigners in other countries who will work for less and can also use the internet.
What to do, what to do…Wait! I know! Let’s use the armed might of the state- that is, the US government- to prevent the impoverishment and destruction of the United States.
Note above it was stated that the success of the United States was dependent upon remaining a high wage society- refer to pinned comment above- hence it follows that the United States government should be working towards that goal.
Is it?
I would say, f*** no it isn’t. That should be obvious. You can’t imagine that the regime wants a high wage domestic economy when it has open borders, thin or irrelevant restrictions on most imports, and heavy taxes upon earned income.
It seems to me that the regime ruling the United States doesn’t actually care about the country at all.
In our present case, though, I doubt that this the major factor: more important, I think, is the negative attitude projected toward America by so many influential people and institutions, and the obvious mismanagement of the military that has been going on.
I can’t disagree with this, except to opine that it’s part of the same Gordion Knot of failure that is strangling the country.
The negative attitude projected against America by our so-called elite leads them to be nastily indifferent when Americans are rendered unemployed by foreigners, both outside the country and inside. They simply don’t care much about the American people and it shows. Hence the astonishing political resilience of Donald Trump, who does seem to care.
Peter Turchin writes about “asabiya,” which is roughly the inclination of a group to coalesce against outsiders and retain internal cohesiveness. Plainly the present American regime lacks this inclination, which is a fact of enormous import.
Either the present regime gets replaced by one which does have a sense of asabiya re the United States, or the country will cease to exist.
The history is that industries stagnate behind them.
No, the actual history is that the United States went from a howling wilderness to a great industrial nation with tariffs. More recently, China went from a rural peasant society to- well, a great industrial nation.
I detect flaws in your theory of tariffs.
My theory of tariffs is that they are a policy tool to achieve certain desired outcomes. My present goal would be to use tariffs to retain enough industrial activity and knowledge such the United States can remain wealthy enough to continue to exist under the political structure of a republic.
That isn’t the only tool to achieve that goal, but that’s where tariffs come in.
Not just for the social benefits for citizens, but also because the relatively high wages in the UK during the Industrial Revolution were a major incentive for introducing labor-saving mechanization, which in turn raised worker productivity and thereby justified the higher wages.
Bingo. This is the way.
I will note that the open borders policy of the present regime does the exact opposite.
Death spiral, etc.
As to the reasons for the de-industrialization of the Once-United States — look at capital-intensive industries. Industries like steel-making, or those videos that litter the internet showing highly-automated manufacturing in China (not the US), or pharmaceuticals, or computer chip manufacturing. Labor costs are not that significant a component of total costs in those kinds of capital-intensive industries — yet those are the very industries which the US has lost (or thrown away, to be more precise).
So did those industries go overseas because of high wages in the US? Or did they leave the US because of excessive regulations, out-of-control litigation, Congressional & bureaucratic animus against productive industry, a convoluted and continually changing tax code beyond human comprehension? The fact that the US threw away those capital-intensive industries where the then-rich US theoretically should have had an advantage over then-poor China & India is strong evidence that high wages were merely a Political Class excuse for the consequences of their own destructive behavior.