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Howes makes a good point about the printing press, but what was the point of a printing press without a literate community. In Europe, there was a literate community of priests and scholars. The church had kept literacy alive, and, by 1453, there were universities all over Western Europe. Books were outlandishly expensive, but there were people to read them.

More importantly, those literary communities were valuable to the ruling class. A university would produce engineers, cartographers, chemists, bureaucrats, officers, propagandists, jurists and other useful persons. There was no dynamic like this in the Ottoman Empire, if only because there was a lot more inter-state competition in Europe than in the Mideast. To compete, in business, peace or war, one needed that literate community as a source of ideas as well as bureaucratic cogs.

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My problem with Noah Smith's optimism is that ignores the natural structure of market economies. He speaks of a large happy healthy middle class perhaps compromising most of society. The problem is that while market economies have have positive eigenvalues, they also have eigenvectors that lead to a concentration of wealth. This is because central planning and increasing scale raise productivity, but the same market forces that reward that increase also narrow the path for rewards to others. Worse, since this a natural resonance, the benefits to all first go to win, place and show, but then to win alone. Almost every society, market based or not, heads down the same path and subject to the same forces.

I cannot imagine how one can design a market economy that avoids that problem. The only real solution is to change the matrix and provide a countervailing force, one that lessens the individual rewards for increasing productivity by spreading them across society at large. We know how something about the necessary changes. They were demonstrated in the US by the New Deal and in many countries after World War II. One big problem flows from the aggregated prisoner's dilemma. There are always enough survivors who have benefitted from betrayal and enough followers inspired by their success to form a powerful political force against a middle class society.

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Construction - without going into a deep, or even shallow, dive, I've come across remarks about supply chain disruptions resulting from the lack of preparation for a rebound as a consequence of the "efficient" way we've been managing supply chains - with the lumber industry prominent in that list. In a similar vein I've heard (literally - not read) that the rental car businesses sold off a good portion of their fleets, and this is not a good time to go looking for a rental.

Incidentally that earlier video about chip manufacturing is rather frightening in terms of market concentration in the machines used for the process.

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