“Slouching Towards Utopia”, cont.
“Slouching Towards Utopia”, cont.
& BRIEFLY NOTED: FOR 2022-02-17 Th
“Slouching Towards Utopia”, cont.:
My principal aim with this ‘Stack over the next six months is to flog my book.
So here are Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the 20th Century, forthcoming from Basic Books on September 6, 2022 <https://bit.ly/3pP3Krk>; 97th-98th sentences, with commentary:
It is in hopes of transcending the nonsense to glimpse the world aright that I’ve written this grand narrative. It is in that spirit that I declare unhesitatingly that the most consequent thread through all this history [from 1870 to 2010] was the economic.
In short, if you are to understand anything at all about the history of the long 20th century—if your.thoughts are to be even somewhat coherent, and somewhere in the neighborhood of what a much vaster scrutinizing intelligence might call "the truth", you have to start from the premise that the axis around which history revolved from 1870-2010 was that of.the economic trends, events, patterns, and transformations that rocked the world, not once, but every single generation again and again and again. Moreover, you have to hold tight to the true knowledge that the long 20th century was the first century in which this was true. In all previous centuries—with the partial exception of 1770-1870—the economic side was the painted backdrop in front of which the play proceeded, with the economy becoming a protagonist in history only when we stepped back from any single-century perspective and took the millennial perspective of the longue durée.
The British Industrial Revolution century was a partial—a very partial—exception to this.
In the radius-300 miles "Dover Circle" and its offshoot economies, by 1870 humanity's discovered, developed, deployed, and diffused technological prowess stood at 2.5 times its level of 1770. By 1870, in the "Dover Circle" plus offshoots, roughly and approximately, on average what it had taken 250 workers to do in 1770 it took only 100 workers to do in 1870. That economic change had upended society, culture, and politics within the "Dover Circle" (plus offshoots). But it had only done so once. And it had taken 100 years. After 1870, that much economic creative-destruction upending everything else would take place every generation.
And if we step outside the 300-mile radius Dover Circle, and look at the world as a whole? For the world as a whole, humanity's deployed technological prowess was only some 3/5 higher than it had been in 1770:
That was certainly enough to shake thrones and altars and shift patterns of authority, hierarchy, coordination, and gift- and market-exchange. But outside the Dover Circle, the meat and fish of history over 1770-1870 remained the dance of culture, society war, conquest, and politics, with the economic being the scene-backdrop, and arranging the furniture on stage, before and as the actors entered and the play of history began.
CONDITION: Eeuuww…
The New York Times has a new motto: “all sweetener, no beat”:
Steve M.: The Great Man Theory of National Decline: ‘Many people say that American political journalism is bad because it… overemphasizes the political horserace…. Here’s a New York Times story [by Ryan Mac and Lisa Lerer] about right-wing megadonor and supervillain Peter Thiel that downplays… key races because it doesn’t fit the article’s thesis… that Thiel is one of the Great Men who drive politics…. It’s good that the Times is informing its readers that the Trump movement isn’t just… random malcontents… [but] also deep-pocketed resentniks…. But this is journalism for the post-Reagan Second Gilded Age, so every detail has to suggest that Thiel is awesomely powerful…. We’re not told—because it would be embarrassing for both [J.D.] Vance and [Peter] Thiel—is that Josh Mandel…humiliated Vance (“Want to have dinner with me and Peter Thiel? Donate $10,800 by tomorrow and I’ll send you the details”
🚨Want to have dinner with me and Peter Thiel? Donate $10,800 by tomorrow and I’ll send you the details.🚨 This will be a small group, with good food and better company. Link to donate: secure.winred.com/ohioans-for-jd… If that's too much, see the next tweet...with this response to the dinner-with-Thiel offer: “For $10.80 anyone can join me eating fries off the hood of the car from a gas station Denny’s at midnight”
BERKSHIRE, OH — For $10.80 anyone can join me eating fries off the hood of the car from a gas station Denny’s at midnight.It’s only in paragraph 50—in a 54-paragraph story—that we’re informed,
[Thiel’s] backing may not be enough. In Ohio, Mr. Vance trails in polling…”. Vance doesn’t just trail—he trails badly [Gibbons 20%, Mandel 185, Dolan 7%, Timken 6%, Vance 5%]…
That information would make Thiel seem like less of a demigod. This is Great Man journalism…. Hints of anything less than undisputed-alpha dominance must be carefully avoided.
LINK: <https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2022/02/the-great-man-theory-of-national-decline.html>
Very Briefly Noted:
The Catalan Atlas: ‘Travelers Along the Silk Roads, 10th Century to the Present @ Pitt: The Catalan Atlas… <https://pitt.libguides.com/silkroads/catalanatlas>
Andrew Gelman & Eric Loken: The Garden of Forking Paths: Why Multiple Comparisons Can Be A Problem <http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/unpublished/p_hacking.pdf>
Doctorow: Pluralistic: 11 Feb 2022: Daily links from Cory Doctorow<https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/11/bezzlers-gonna-bezzle/#gryft>
Friedrich Engels (1884): The Relative Autonomy of the State <https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/03/friedrich-engels-1884-_the-origin-of-the-family-private-property-and-the-state_-the-state-is-normally-the-stat.html>
David R. MacIver: How to Understand Groups of People: ‘A model I use for understanding complex systems involving people, and realised that I’d never written it up anywhere. So, here is me writing it up somewhere!… First let’s talk about user personas…
Paragraphs:
Ben Thompson: Mr. CISC vs. Mr. RISC, ARM & AMD Threats, Gelsinger’s Three Tenets: ‘Gelsinger’s tenets also explain the strategy that I laid out on Tuesday: Intel is not abandoning x86; it remains the biggest differentiator the company has. Intel appears to be shifting some amount of fabrication for its fastest chips to TSMC’s most cutting edge 3nm process. This puts the company back on the bleeding edge of Moore’s Law (and ahead of AMD). Intel is making its x86 IP available to chip designers who use Intel Foundry Services so that they can design custom chips that retain full software compatibility with their current infrastructure. Here is the key thing to understand: Gelsinger may have made his name designing chips, but from the very beginning his view of the world has been rooted in a belief in the importance and power of software to create and differentiate the ecosystems built on top of those chips; that means that when it comes to making the hard decisions, I fully expect him to prioritize software over hardware. In the case of Intel, that means prioritizing x86 and Intel’s designs over his company’s manufacturing, even if it is the latter that have culturally dominated Intel’s decision-making for many years…
LINK: <https://stratechery.com/2022/mr-cisc-vs-mr-risc-arm-and-amd-threats-gelsingers-three-tenets/>
Steven Falk: New Lakewood, 1967: ‘Lakewood followed Levittown as one of the first production-line communities in the United States. Developers Louis Boyar, Mark Taper, and Ben Weingart introduced efficient just-in-time assembly-line processes to the labor-intensive construction business, and the result was rock bottom prices. A two-bedroom house was just $7,575. Three bedrooms cost barely fifteen hundred dollars more, at $9,075. Veterans weren’t required to make a down payment, and the non-veteran deposit was only $695. In the 1950s, the payment on a 30-year loan for any and every Lakewood house was about $50 a month. Adjusting for inflation, these brand-new California homes – each with oak floors, stainless steel kitchen counters, garbage disposal, a reasonably-sized back yard, and a sapling tree plugged into a small grass lawn facing a brand-new street – sold for less than $100,000 in today’s dollars. It’s no wonder that 200,000 people visited the sales office in the first few weeks it was open…
LINK:
Sahil Bloom: How to Retain What You Learn: ‘It’s not enough to simply learn more—you have to retain more of what you learn. So to recap, my framework for better retention: Inspired Consumption: Inspired consumption is when you feel genuinely pulled to consume—when you enjoy the consumption process. Put ego aside and "quit” more books (or content) when that genuine inspiration fades. Unstructured Note-Taking: Take unstructured notes of novel insights, key ideas, or things that caused a reaction. Consolidation: Zoom out and consolidate your unstructured notes across key themes, insights, or ideas. Analogize: Take your newly-learned information and place it within your broader mental maps. Make clear comparisons and connections between newly-learned and existing information. Idea Exercise: Use Spaced Repetition and other methods to exercise your new learnings and prevent atrophy. Give this framework a shot and let me know how it works for you!…
LINK:
Charlie Sykes: Why The RNC Is Obsessed With Liz Cheney: ‘Why does Liz Cheney matter so much? Perhaps the answer is obvious: Trump demanded revenge, and the feckless GOP simply acquiesced…. [Still,] why was it so important that the Republican Party denounce and discredit the woman who, just months ago, was the third most powerful member of the House GOP leadership?… LINK: <
Economic trends rocking the world over and over again 1870-2010: when Boomers or Boomers’ parents talk about “the way things used to be” in reference to the period you are describing, the implicit span of time forming their concept of the good old days is surprisingly limited, barely more than a generation.
I’m a middle Boomer. I grew up in a medium-sized Ohio industrial town where, as with many others, “everyone” had “always” worked in “the factory,” in this case Big Three automaker plants (we had one of each).
As it turned out, for my hometown “always” really only described the three decades from the 40s to the 70s. The factories I mentioned started as wartime defense plants that transitioned to civilian manufacturing after the war. For my parents’ generation and mine (the first couple decades, anyway), they had always been there.
My point is that the extent to which a particular person experiences waves of change as actual, and destabilizing, change depends in part on the amplitude and frequency of the waves. I think that one of the reasons many people in my part of the world have gone a bit crazy in recent years is that the waves are coming too high and fast. There’s not enough time between waves for things to solidify into a new normality, which can then be experienced as stable and dependable. All that is solid melts into air, as somebody once said, and many people don’t like to see their world melting.
None of this is news to you, of course, but your description of what has been going on in the long 20th century definitely resonates with my subjective impression of what has happened here in Ohio during my lifetime.
No weak men in the books at home
The strong men who have made the world
History lives on the books at home
The books at home
The books at home
It's not made by great men
It's not made by great men
It's not made by great men
It's not made by great men
But in later years, Jon sang "no women" instead of "no weak men".