> The Long 20th Century began around 1870, when the triple emergence of globalization, the industrial research lab, and the modern corporation in the context of the market economy
Especially for your 1870 start date, you're leaving out "metallic cartridge firearms".
The late 19th was the period of greatest relative advantage (and thus greatest expansion, and greatest economic consequence) of colonial powers; the early calendar 20th was the period of greatest social change in North Atlantic societies as the custom of empire collapsed under an inability to transition away from horse, guns, and foot to "anything you can see, the guns can grind up" and the linked needs of fielding as many rifle regiments as possible and achieving the greatest industrial mobilization possible. This requirement is politically powerful for roughly the hundred years from 1870 to 1970: If you wanted to exercise state power -- Great Power, hegemonic power, colonial power, it all came down to an inescapable need to get the population in on it.
To exercise state power, your politics had to address widely shared concerns. Maybe not share power, but a much wider distribution of economic benefit.
The Century of the Common Man arises from the sound of a breech block closing, and the Long Twentieth ends as oligarchical concerns again become completely politically dominant as the needs of war collapse back into being something that can be expended without the effort of mobilization. (To the great and consistent and expected detriment of the economy, as the wider concerns stop having political meaning.)
Was John Stuart Mill wrong? Perhaps not. Child licenses will eventually be required, if only to stop psychotic right-wing cultists from abusing children under the name of "raising" them. Birth control is the direct reason birth rates dropped, and birth control expanded due to the direct efforts of Margaret Sanger and her organizations funding birth control research.
I wonder how much of the jump revolved around the ruling classes need to deal with the political unrest of the 19th century. There were violent revolutionary actions in the 1830s, 1840s and beyond. They could be suppressed, but this had a cost when competing with other great powers. A modern war could not be fought by peasants nor could a modern factory operate with too low a grade of employee.
So, does the post-1870 revolution of economy and society represent a Singularity in the sense of Vernor Vinge? I'd already identified in a professional paper the emergence of steam powered transportation as sparking a Singularity. Abraham Lincoln's Cooper Union speech involved traveling hundreds of miles from the prairie of Illinois to Manhattan. That's a far cry from the subsistence agriculture which was his father's life.
That is a very interesting question. A lot of the fabric of our social life is recognizable to somebody in the past—as a lot of their social life is recognizable to us. It is much of worklife that seems post-singularity, or at least close to incomprehensibility, as in:
====
E. E. Smith: First Lensman: Chapter 10 : ‘“I am Virgil Samms, a Tellurian,” he sent out slowly, carefully, after he made contact with the outer fringes of the creature’s mind. “Is it possible for you, sir or madam, to give me a moment of your time?”…
“‘Madam’ might be approximately correct,” the native’s thought went smoothly on. “My name, in your symbology, is Twelfth Pilinipsi; by education, training, and occupation I am a Chief Dexitroboper. I perceive that you are indeed a native of that hellish Planet Three, upon which it was assumed for so long that no life could possibly exist….
”All I can understand of your occupation is the name you have given it. What does a Chief Dexitroboper do?”
“She—or he—or, perhaps, it … is a supervisor of the work of dexitroboping.” The thought, while perfectly clear, was completely meaningless to Samms, and the Palainian knew it. She tried again. “Dexitroboping has to do with… nourishment? No–with nutrients.”
“Ah. Farming–agriculture,” Samms thought; but this time it was the Palainian who could not grasp the concept. “Hunting? Fishing?” No better. “Show me, then, please.”
She tried; but demonstration, too, was useless; for to Samms the Palainian’s movements were pointless indeed. The peculiarly flowing subtly changing thing darted back and forth, rose and fell, appeared and disappeared; undergoing the while cyclic changes in shape and form and size, in aspect and texture. It was now spiny, now tentacular, now scaly, now covered with peculiarly repellent feather-like fronds, each oozing a crimson slime. But it apparently did not do anything whatever. The net result of all its activity was, apparently, zero.
“There, it is done.” Pilinipsi’s thought again came clear. “You observed and understood? You did not. That is strange—baffling”…
"We are no longer in anything that we could call “the realm of necessity”. So one would think we humans ought to be in “the realm of freedom”: something that is and that we recognize as a Utopia. But we aren’t there."
My fuzzy thoughts...Perhaps we are stuck in our desires and our thoughts in an income-elasticity "realm of luxury goods" --in that people (and political parties) need not concern themselves with normal policy and companies need not concern themselves with normal goods because luxury goods (whether they be the latest mostly useless app or the latest mostly useless food or the latest mostly useless political shiny object) get sold to those with full bellies and fat wallets. Are there still poor people with real suffering and real needs? Unfortunately, yes, but there are even more not-poor people who seem to get a Jones buying now-affordable products that really don't make them materially better off and buying now-affordable ideas that give them reasons to be angry and own someone else with a crushing Twitter zing because at least then they feel something (Jim Kirk to the Platonians who got anything they wanted with a mere thought, "You're half dead, all of you!"). Does moving from 70% below extreme poverty to 9% change the economic and political landscape to the detriment of those who actually want to have sound laws that will help those 9%, not because of the wishes of the rich 1% but because of the rich-enough 50%? Whodathunkit?
And if I squint, I worry that I it's fuzzy what gets us from here to "the realm of freedom." Once I thought that might be technology. Pass. Education? I worry that people are saying, "Yeah, I'm full there, too."
Well, that's a downer. I'll try to get more optimistic. 70% to 9% should be something heralded. "We did something good here!" Ought to be something to throw back in the face of a cold universe.
"Let us suppose... transition to the new economic epoch is successfully accomplished.... What will the world be like when economic growth is triumphant, when this new epoch ofeconomic history is universal? Will "the economic problem" have been put to rest and humanity thus tum to more meaningful pursuits? Will humanity have made the great leap into freedom that Marx envisaged?
"Ever since Maslow's "hierarchy of wants," it has been widely assumed that the satisfaction of material wants is but one, lower, stage in human evolution and that economic growth brings with it a movement toward higher nonmaterialistic ends. As chapter 10 made clear, however, the evidence suggests otherwise. Despite a general level of affluence never before realized in the history of the world, material concerns in the wealthiest nations today are as pressing as ever and the pursuit of material needs as intense. The evidence suggests that there is no evolution toward higher order goals. Rather, each step upward on the ladder of economic development merely stimulates new economic desires that lead the chase ever onward.... Real income is being deflated by rising material aspirations.... While it would be pleasant to envisage a world free from the pressure of material want, a more realistic projection, based on the evidence, is of a world in which generation after generation thinks it needs only another ten or twenty percent more income to be perfectly happy. Thus, the epoch of modem economic growth is leading to a world stuck on a "hedonic treadmill" in which wants and real income grow commensurately, fed by the technological cornucopia of expanding knowledge. Is it possible for modem economic growth to yield a different outcome under institutional or cultural conditions different from those in today's developed capitalist countries? Although this was the expectation of thinkers like Karl Marx and Mohandas Gandhi (on quite different grounds), experience so far is to the contrary....
"The future, then, to which the epoch of modem economic growth is leading is one of never ending economic growth, a world in which ever growing abundance is matched by ever rising aspirations, a world in which cultural differences are leveled in the constant race to achieve the good life of material plenty. It is a world founded on belief in science and the power of rational inquiry and in the ultimate capacity of humanity to shape its own destiny. The irony is that in this last respect the lesson of history appears to be otherwise: that there is no choice. In the end, the triumph of economic growth is not a triumph of humanity over material wants; rather, it is the triumph of material wants over humanity."
> The Long 20th Century began around 1870, when the triple emergence of globalization, the industrial research lab, and the modern corporation in the context of the market economy
Especially for your 1870 start date, you're leaving out "metallic cartridge firearms".
The late 19th was the period of greatest relative advantage (and thus greatest expansion, and greatest economic consequence) of colonial powers; the early calendar 20th was the period of greatest social change in North Atlantic societies as the custom of empire collapsed under an inability to transition away from horse, guns, and foot to "anything you can see, the guns can grind up" and the linked needs of fielding as many rifle regiments as possible and achieving the greatest industrial mobilization possible. This requirement is politically powerful for roughly the hundred years from 1870 to 1970: If you wanted to exercise state power -- Great Power, hegemonic power, colonial power, it all came down to an inescapable need to get the population in on it.
To exercise state power, your politics had to address widely shared concerns. Maybe not share power, but a much wider distribution of economic benefit.
The Century of the Common Man arises from the sound of a breech block closing, and the Long Twentieth ends as oligarchical concerns again become completely politically dominant as the needs of war collapse back into being something that can be expended without the effort of mobilization. (To the great and consistent and expected detriment of the economy, as the wider concerns stop having political meaning.)
Can't wait to read your book!
Was John Stuart Mill wrong? Perhaps not. Child licenses will eventually be required, if only to stop psychotic right-wing cultists from abusing children under the name of "raising" them. Birth control is the direct reason birth rates dropped, and birth control expanded due to the direct efforts of Margaret Sanger and her organizations funding birth control research.
I wonder how much of the jump revolved around the ruling classes need to deal with the political unrest of the 19th century. There were violent revolutionary actions in the 1830s, 1840s and beyond. They could be suppressed, but this had a cost when competing with other great powers. A modern war could not be fought by peasants nor could a modern factory operate with too low a grade of employee.
Just gonna go ahead and add this book to my xmas/birthday list. Thank you!
So, does the post-1870 revolution of economy and society represent a Singularity in the sense of Vernor Vinge? I'd already identified in a professional paper the emergence of steam powered transportation as sparking a Singularity. Abraham Lincoln's Cooper Union speech involved traveling hundreds of miles from the prairie of Illinois to Manhattan. That's a far cry from the subsistence agriculture which was his father's life.
That is a very interesting question. A lot of the fabric of our social life is recognizable to somebody in the past—as a lot of their social life is recognizable to us. It is much of worklife that seems post-singularity, or at least close to incomprehensibility, as in:
====
E. E. Smith: First Lensman: Chapter 10 : ‘“I am Virgil Samms, a Tellurian,” he sent out slowly, carefully, after he made contact with the outer fringes of the creature’s mind. “Is it possible for you, sir or madam, to give me a moment of your time?”…
“‘Madam’ might be approximately correct,” the native’s thought went smoothly on. “My name, in your symbology, is Twelfth Pilinipsi; by education, training, and occupation I am a Chief Dexitroboper. I perceive that you are indeed a native of that hellish Planet Three, upon which it was assumed for so long that no life could possibly exist….
”All I can understand of your occupation is the name you have given it. What does a Chief Dexitroboper do?”
“She—or he—or, perhaps, it … is a supervisor of the work of dexitroboping.” The thought, while perfectly clear, was completely meaningless to Samms, and the Palainian knew it. She tried again. “Dexitroboping has to do with… nourishment? No–with nutrients.”
“Ah. Farming–agriculture,” Samms thought; but this time it was the Palainian who could not grasp the concept. “Hunting? Fishing?” No better. “Show me, then, please.”
She tried; but demonstration, too, was useless; for to Samms the Palainian’s movements were pointless indeed. The peculiarly flowing subtly changing thing darted back and forth, rose and fell, appeared and disappeared; undergoing the while cyclic changes in shape and form and size, in aspect and texture. It was now spiny, now tentacular, now scaly, now covered with peculiarly repellent feather-like fronds, each oozing a crimson slime. But it apparently did not do anything whatever. The net result of all its activity was, apparently, zero.
“There, it is done.” Pilinipsi’s thought again came clear. “You observed and understood? You did not. That is strange—baffling”…
LINK: <https://scifistories.com/s/76:1009/chapter-10-first-lensman>
====
Perhaps more apposite: <https://web.archive.org/web/20130312071500/http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/699.html>
"We are no longer in anything that we could call “the realm of necessity”. So one would think we humans ought to be in “the realm of freedom”: something that is and that we recognize as a Utopia. But we aren’t there."
My fuzzy thoughts...Perhaps we are stuck in our desires and our thoughts in an income-elasticity "realm of luxury goods" --in that people (and political parties) need not concern themselves with normal policy and companies need not concern themselves with normal goods because luxury goods (whether they be the latest mostly useless app or the latest mostly useless food or the latest mostly useless political shiny object) get sold to those with full bellies and fat wallets. Are there still poor people with real suffering and real needs? Unfortunately, yes, but there are even more not-poor people who seem to get a Jones buying now-affordable products that really don't make them materially better off and buying now-affordable ideas that give them reasons to be angry and own someone else with a crushing Twitter zing because at least then they feel something (Jim Kirk to the Platonians who got anything they wanted with a mere thought, "You're half dead, all of you!"). Does moving from 70% below extreme poverty to 9% change the economic and political landscape to the detriment of those who actually want to have sound laws that will help those 9%, not because of the wishes of the rich 1% but because of the rich-enough 50%? Whodathunkit?
And if I squint, I worry that I it's fuzzy what gets us from here to "the realm of freedom." Once I thought that might be technology. Pass. Education? I worry that people are saying, "Yeah, I'm full there, too."
Well, that's a downer. I'll try to get more optimistic. 70% to 9% should be something heralded. "We did something good here!" Ought to be something to throw back in the face of a cold universe.
Indeed. There is Richard Easterlin:
"Let us suppose... transition to the new economic epoch is successfully accomplished.... What will the world be like when economic growth is triumphant, when this new epoch ofeconomic history is universal? Will "the economic problem" have been put to rest and humanity thus tum to more meaningful pursuits? Will humanity have made the great leap into freedom that Marx envisaged?
"Ever since Maslow's "hierarchy of wants," it has been widely assumed that the satisfaction of material wants is but one, lower, stage in human evolution and that economic growth brings with it a movement toward higher nonmaterialistic ends. As chapter 10 made clear, however, the evidence suggests otherwise. Despite a general level of affluence never before realized in the history of the world, material concerns in the wealthiest nations today are as pressing as ever and the pursuit of material needs as intense. The evidence suggests that there is no evolution toward higher order goals. Rather, each step upward on the ladder of economic development merely stimulates new economic desires that lead the chase ever onward.... Real income is being deflated by rising material aspirations.... While it would be pleasant to envisage a world free from the pressure of material want, a more realistic projection, based on the evidence, is of a world in which generation after generation thinks it needs only another ten or twenty percent more income to be perfectly happy. Thus, the epoch of modem economic growth is leading to a world stuck on a "hedonic treadmill" in which wants and real income grow commensurately, fed by the technological cornucopia of expanding knowledge. Is it possible for modem economic growth to yield a different outcome under institutional or cultural conditions different from those in today's developed capitalist countries? Although this was the expectation of thinkers like Karl Marx and Mohandas Gandhi (on quite different grounds), experience so far is to the contrary....
"The future, then, to which the epoch of modem economic growth is leading is one of never ending economic growth, a world in which ever growing abundance is matched by ever rising aspirations, a world in which cultural differences are leveled in the constant race to achieve the good life of material plenty. It is a world founded on belief in science and the power of rational inquiry and in the ultimate capacity of humanity to shape its own destiny. The irony is that in this last respect the lesson of history appears to be otherwise: that there is no choice. In the end, the triumph of economic growth is not a triumph of humanity over material wants; rather, it is the triumph of material wants over humanity."