[quote=“doctorow, post:1, topic:50645”]
As we contemplate a future where ALL the dividends of automation accrue to investors, rather than being divided with laborers
[/quote] (emphasis mine)
A great article, but I disagree with the…uh, simpleness, of this statement. Many dividends of automation have been accrued to the labor class since the Middle Ages. As less work and capital has gone in to making shirts, for example, more money and effort has been spent on developing technology for all. I can be a laborer today and be paid poorly, but my community and I have access to antibiotics, fast and safe transportation, safe water and waste systems, the internet and phone systems, etc, etc.
I’m not saying that the distribution of wealth from technology improvements has been fair or smooth. But, I think that if someone could go back in time and give a Middle Ages textile worker a view of what they could get in the future, they would not say that ALL the dividends have gone to a privileged few.
Many of the major scientific and infrastructure leaps that have been made since the Middle Ages could only be made by amassing large amounts of capital and (non-laboring) people to create projects of ground breaking scope.
That means that the cost of health care and education will rise whenever the cost of manufacturing falls – not because health care is getting more expensive, but because everything else is getting cheaper.
So, basically, get used to being bankrupted by the medical and pharmacalogical businesses, peasant.
Honestly, Cory, maybe you need to come over to this side of the pond, south of the Canadian border. Honestly, I live in a state where the median household income is higher than the U.S. national average, but my part of the state is much lower, closer to Alabama. I was driving down a country road, and saw a black blur passing me; it was a 7-series BMW. I caught the blur just quick enough to see a parking sticker for, unsurprisingly, one of the local hospitals.
Doubtless, doctors deserve higher pay for the knowledge, hours, and just the grueling, soul-crushing nature of healthcare. However, here in the U.S., many doctors live life like they’re minor lords and ladies. It’s obscene.
It’s also obscene when a family takes a kid to the hospital for–and I’m pulling this example from someone I know–getting hit in the head by a baseball at a little-league game. The ER doctor terrified the family into flying their son 100 miles away to Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, where they did an MRI, examined the MRI, said, “He’ll be fine,” and sent him back to the original hospital in an ambulance. The insurance company refused to pay anything, and they’re left owing more for a helicopter flight than I owe on my house. And that’s far from the only example.
Of the things a person could choose to hold up as examples, the areas chosen were areas where, here in the U.S., at least, they’re overpriced, and fraud is rampant.
I dunno how many doctors fall in that category though… my friend who is a doctor had to shutter her family practice because she couldn’t make money with the overhead and costs. She took out personal loans to make pay roll. Currently she is doing ER rotations at a hospital, which evidently pays very well…
So yeah - the system seems broke on many levels.
Actually, as spinning goes, a lot of the spinning still was done the same way through the 1600s…although spinning wheels were getting widespread, usually there was only one spinning wheel in the household if they had one, and the daughters of a household would be spinning the same ancient way with a spindle, so it’s not totally off on that…and kids sent off to tend the sheep would often be sent off with a spindle and fiber to keep their hands busy…but by the mid 1700s, the knowledge of how to spin that way was beginning to fade in many places.
At the beginning of the industrial era - around say the year 1800. People didn’t really have a lot of clothes like we do today. They might have sunday clothing for church and clothing for working in and that’s it. There were few factories making clothes, so much was done by weavers, tailors working from home, and of course a lot of clothing was home made.
I’m not saying nobody was using a drop spindle 200 years ago. But I’d bet that most thread in Europe and North America was spun on a spinning wheel or a spinning Jenny, so the analysis is probably more relevant to 300 years ago than 200. A wikipedia article that includes some economic analysis of spinning in 1700s… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_jenny Another notable thing about pre-modern times was the fact that it was a world without small change. The smallest coin in common circulation in England was the Penny. (there were half pennies and farthings but minting them wasn’t as profitable so they weren’t overly common) A semi-skilled laborar earned a penny or two a day. So picture a world with no currency smaller that a $50 bill. An Idea which is so foreign to the modern man that they invented “small change” for D+D.
I hesitate to quote Wikipedia on this matter, since this sort of “back of the envelope” calculation really demands to be redone with the expert analysis of specialists in medieval textiles, and medieval economics. But
Until the 13th century, requirements for small change were often met by “cut coinage” i.e., pennies cut into halves or quarters, usually along the cross which formed a prominent part of the reverse of the coin. It was long considered that the first silver farthings were produced in the reign of King Edward I (1272–1307). However in recent years five examples have been discovered dating from the reign of King Henry III (1216–1272). All are in the short-cross style of that period, produced between 1216 and 1247, and are similar in design to the pennies, but only a quarter the size.
and
Contemporary records show that over four million farthings were produced during the reign of King Edward I, (1272–1307), but comparatively few have survived.
On the other hand, isn’t bimetallism a kind of expression of the need for small change?
Every pediatrician I know lives in a 2-income family because their salary alone isn’t as high as, say, a carpenter’s or contractor’s. Raising kids cost too much money these days to live on only their salary.
Plastic surgeons, on the other hand, make a lot of money…and it’s usually cash on the barrel.
The past has also been heavily plagued by this problem. The mechanization of textile manufacturing gave rise to the Luddites who were protesting how they suffered all the downsides of industrialized clothing manufacture while the mill owners got all the benefits. In other words, this is not a technological problem as it is a political one. The worry shouldn’t be that automation will render our labour superfluous, but why our lives are subordinated to our capability to labour for others in the first place.
I never meant to imply that farthings didn’t exist. But it took almost four times as much work (clipping the blank to weight and pressing it) to mint four farthings as one penny, so most mint contractors preferred to mint pennies. ISTR that there was a slight advantage in the permitted seignorage (the farthings were permitted to be slightly less that 1/4 the weight of a penny) but when coins were essentially silver bullion any big difference would have made the users prefer pennies to farthings…(bad money drives out good) All this meant that most money was minted into pennies or even groats rather than farthings…
People seem to think that the rise of industrial capitalism made slavery obsolete, when it instead increased the exploitation of slaves in order to feed the expanding cotton mills of the British Midlands. There wouldn’t have been an American Civil War over slavery if it weren’t insanely profitable for slave owners.
And those profits in turn boosted the price of slaves so high that they didn’t make economic sense for any other purpose. That’s why there was a steady stream of slaves being sold “down the river” to be used in the hard labor of cotton plantations rather than other farms. And those high prices in turn meant that the Southern planters didn’t want to reinstate the slave trade and resume the legal importation of slaves from overseas because that would have lowered the value of the slaves that they already owned. Of course those high prices also reflect the difference between how much it cost to (very poorly) house, clothe, and feed those slaves and the labor that could be tortured out of them.
That’s how slavery was obsolete – not that the slaveowners weren’t making significant profits, but that they had little flexibility, and were hitting a limit to their growth, while industrial capital was expanding more rapidly. There were limits to how much you could expand slave plantations – so expanding slavery to new territories in the west didn’t increase the slaveowner’s economic power as much as the extension of “free” states to the west increased the power of industrial capital. The usual example is the extent of rail lines linking the industrial Northeast to the Midwest.
How much did it cost to make an arrow for a medieval speed shooter?
Mostly, they were grabbed out of the air during skirmishes with the enemy. The gesture for “I got your arrow, loser” survives today as the middle finger, or “the bird”.
When shirts cost $3,500 you wore that one shirt your whole life. You cared for it and, because you made it yourself, you had the skills to repair it or tailor it yourself. Instead today we spend $3500 on machine and cheap foreign labor made clothing and fill our closets with junk we wear once or twice a year ‘becuz fashion’. How lucky we are to have clothing that starts falling apart by design after 5 or 6 washes. Clothing you can’t repair because you have no skills to do so. It just seems cheaper to buy a new shirt, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you spend far more than $3500 on shirts today. Except back then, the cost wasn’t really $3,500, it wasn’t even so simple as being “free.” It cost the time it takes to learn a rudimentary, unremarkable skill that almost everyone had back then, and almost no one does today. Today your $10 shirt costs you the stress of your shitty job and the lifetime skill deficit of not being able to sew or repair it.
It’s a more recent shift than you think. I was in my 30s before socks were cheap enough (and I wasn’t dirt poor anymore) that it made sense to just buy new ones instead of darning the old ones.
And then there are the difficult-to-replace pieces, whether because it is a favorite one or has more (and/or bigger) pockets than what is common to find, or the material is well-worn and way softer and more comfortable than new, not speaking about possible sentimental value of a given piece. And then it is easier to break out the sewing machine (or other mending device) than to source a replacement. Even the repair sometimes takes less time than the search for the replacement, even without factoring in the shipping time or the store trip.
Capitalism serves perfectly those with mainstream tastes, enough money, and little to no imagination how the offers could be better, and leaves the others more or less on their own.
Yeah, I have an ungodly collection of clothes but it’s b/c I fix everything and when I can’t fix it I usually deconstuct it and make something else. But my tastes are eccentric and I still acually like most stuff I bought 20+ years ago.
Also alot of my stuff is for costuming so it takes up even more room than more normal clothes. Sometimes I feel like I’m hording but whenever I get rid of something I refill the niche a couple years later b/c something comes up.
I have more clothes than anyone I know but I shop less than most.
Eccentric is fun. My tastes are probably way simpler but the end result is pretty much the same.
I do that hoarding thing with electronics. Mostly broken electronics. Got too much of it.
Should find out which one of the scanners is still operational, and try hacking it into a multispectral imager (for near-IR and fluorescent imaging).
