8 ms·

Let me throw a wrench into things with a provocative statement (which I have no intention of citing support for): The affluence of Western Europe and the US wa

by bsanr 8y ago

Let me throw a wrench into things with a provocative statement (which I have no intention of citing support for): The affluence of Western Europe and the US was not built on hard work and ingenuity so much as the exploitation of cheap labor and the sudden access to deep veins of basic resources or economic/industrial efficiencies which were either already extant but inaccessible without a critical mass of capital, or else were inevitable on an imminent timescale given past development. Have at it.

dcow 8y ago
And now, good ol’ western civilization experiences regression to the mean.
- jjoonathan 8y ago
  Economic and industrial efficiencies don't just inevitably "run out."
  - AstralStorm 8y ago
    Externalities do, such as colonies or environment or mines or resources. Efficiency is not a one way street. You need people with will and knowledge to operate the machinery or further research. Otherwise you will inevitably be eclipsed. Recent lessons happened to Great Britain (colonies), Europe (know how and funding, war devastation), Ming China (complacency and bureaucracy), Japanese tech dominance (population got old and crammed in), Soviets (political pressure and mismanagement). It is happening to USA right now.
  - usrusr 8y ago
    They stop exponential growth, and that's a good thing in the end.
tomt2323 8y ago
While I agree with the point you're trying to make, I don't think that's a provocative statement for the rest of the world (or even all of the people living in Western Europe and the US), especially now as increased communication and analytic tools help us to better understand the ways in which massive transfers of wealth are still happening from the rest of the "postcolonial" world. I suppose an argument could be made that it was built on hard work and ingenuity in much the same way that you can say politicians really are better at something than everyone else. It's just not necessarily the thing you'd want them to be good at. In this case, that would be that the powers we're talking about made some incredible innovations in terms of colonialism and internal methods of quelling the dissent of the aforementioned cheap (or enslaved) labor. Of course, it's not at all clear to me that this hasn't been the case for every single past (or emerging) empire. But the "self-made civilization" is maybe even more ridiculous a concept than the "self-made man".
ddxxdd 8y ago
I don't think a King George Washington would preside over a young America as affluent as President George Washington did. Tyranny has a way of sequestering innovative spirit.
- pjc50 8y ago
  Washington was a slave owner. Tyranny, but only for some people.
  - wallace_f 8y ago
    I think this is misleading. I think when tossing out the credence of people such as Wadhington or Jefferson with the slavery problem, there is very little context understood about the cultural norms, science and religion those people lived in. The problem was that they did not see other races as people as they saw themselves. They saw their lives and societies and thought of them as savages. They further justified their ideology with both religion (which was more unquestionable than say, global warming is today) and scientific racism, which did things like measure brain size of different races. The slave owner like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson was in some ways like an extreme version of the modern liberal -- seeing the person of color as needing an authority to rule over them and provide them with things like welfare, access to education, etc. This has nothing to do with justifying slavery or ignoring that extreme abuses occured with such institutionalized imbalance of power. What I mean to say is to not throw away the baby with the bathwater. Some of the Founding Fathers created the greatest society to ever grace the earth and they deserve some credit for their heroic bravery and ideas on liberty, even if they lived in a truly fucked up world and had trouble seeing past that. Edit: downvote away, I guess
    - jacobush 8y ago
      And nothing in your argument, addresses the claim that wealth was amassed through slavery.
      - benj111 8y ago
raverbashing 8y ago
Several other empires exploited resources and used "free" labor, but only recently they invented industries/mass production, contributed to scientific progress and improved their quality of life with it. Slavery had a very high human cost and it was also something that prevented the evolution of better options. Edit: see below for a better explanation
- ajross 8y ago
  Do you have an example of a lasting empire that... did not do all of that stuff? I mean, honestly that statement seems kind of laughably wrong.
  - raverbashing 8y ago
    Compare the evolution of the big empires of the past with the evolution in the last 500 years or even the last 250 years. The Roman Empire had a water system and concrete to make the Coliseum. Relied on slave labour up until the end. Made a plant that was used as contraception extinct. Given the time they stood, I'd say their scientific/mathematical progress was nimble. Egyptian empire: invented geometry, still had slaves pushing stones up to form pyramids. The Portuguese and the Spanish conquered half the world, but still relied on manual labour and got behind when the English started using machine labour.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Have you ever seen Connections[0]? Do watch it if you haven't[1]. They communicate well what's IMO a crucial point: almost never a single person had invented the "whole solution". The story of civilization is one of individual inventions being made over time, and then coming together to click into place and create something pushing us forward even further. It did happen in the past like it is happening today; both then and now it seems to work better under a stable governance - hence big empires do in fact contribute to scientific progress by their very existence. It's happening faster today than it was then because we're further along the exponential curve - but it's the same curve, the same process, we've been following for thousands of years. Like it often is with wealth, we're not special - our current empires just had richer parents and bigger accumulated base of inventions. We can build cooler stuff now than our ancestors - but let's never forget that "what makes one step a giant leap is all the steps before"[2]. -- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)#Connections_(1978) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)#Connec... [1] - I think I've seen them on dailymotion; of course I don't encourage copyright infringement, it's very important to keep our most important works unaccessible until everyone who might be interested in them dies off and only archaeologists will care. [2] - http://www.ovff.org/pegasus/songs/toast-for-unknown-heroes.html http://www.ovff.org/pegasus/songs/toast-for-unknown-heroes.h... / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zotaRLROtw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zotaRLROtw
wallace_f 8y ago
Other nations such as China or Russia have comparable or arguably better cheap labor stocks or natural resources. Then Japan has almost zero natural resources and nearly had a shot at taking over the world...
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > Then Japan has almost zero natural resources and nearly had a shot at taking over the world... Did they? Or was that just something American businessmen liked to scare each other with in a post-war era?
  - wallace_f 8y ago
    Also during the war, they put up a pretty good fight for it all things considered.
  - dalbasal 8y ago
    Japanese industry, during the height of its growth phase (say 1980) was very good, and the trend (projected indefinitely, a mistake we always make) implied crazy things.
- crimsonalucard 8y ago
  nah they were dead in the water. Resource embargo was basically a death sentence. The Nuke was done to end it quickly.
- Gupie 8y ago
  But the first step in Japan's plan to "take over the world" was to take control of China.
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    China has a leg up in that plan. They already control China. Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, here we come!
mnm1 8y ago
In other words, anyone could build a prosperous society on the back of slaves if they have some natural resources to exploit. It's not even a great feat or accomplishment. The legacy of that is still what drives a lot of the economy in the US even today.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  In other words, anyone could build a prosperous society on the back of slaves if they have some natural resources to exploit. But that ceases to be competitive past a certain level of technology and value-add. Even slaves in the American South got paid extra for work requiring exceptional skill and attention to detail. It turns out you can't whip people into producing quality past a very basic level. The legacy of that is still what drives a lot of the economy in the US even today. No. That's a propaganda fiction used by the Far Left to bring down the current order.
  - mnm1 8y ago
    Are you saying that black people aren't suffering today due to slavery and Jim Crow? How do you explain that the median white household wealth is sixteen times that of black households? Or is that a leftist conspiracy also? https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2015/03/26/the-racial-wealth-gap-why-a-typical-white-household-has-16-times-the-wealth-of-a-black-one/#513202511f45 https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2015/03/26/the-racial...
    - vixen99 8y ago
      You should check a general reference on slavery across the world (including slavery of Europeans during the late middle ages). There seems to be not a single country whose citizens have not enslaved someone or other at sometime throughout history. I am not as rich as Jeff Bezos or indeed hundreds of thousands of other folk. Now how can you explain that? Answer to your question: yes, a leftist conspiracy. If you really want some explanations for the lower relative wealth of black households, try reading Thomas Sowell. https://tsowell.com/ https://tsowell.com/
chillacy 8y ago
It wasn’t nice but subjugating and enslaving populations definitely was made possible by what I’d call ingenuity or inventiveness in the realm of technology. See Guns, Germs, and Steel.
tormeh 8y ago
I think the causality goes the other way around. If the Aztecs could have conquered the world, they would have. It's not as if they were a particularly nice people. Anyway, this is an argument people will still be having 200 years in the future.

by bsanr 8y ago

dcow 8y ago

And now, good ol’ western civilization experiences regression to the mean.

jjoonathan 8y ago
Economic and industrial efficiencies don't just inevitably "run out."
- AstralStorm 8y ago
  Externalities do, such as colonies or environment or mines or resources. Efficiency is not a one way street. You need people with will and knowledge to operate the machinery or further research. Otherwise you will inevitably be eclipsed. Recent lessons happened to Great Britain (colonies), Europe (know how and funding, war devastation), Ming China (complacency and bureaucracy), Japanese tech dominance (population got old and crammed in), Soviets (political pressure and mismanagement). It is happening to USA right now.
- usrusr 8y ago
  They stop exponential growth, and that's a good thing in the end.

tomt2323 8y ago

While I agree with the point you're trying to make, I don't think that's a provocative statement for the rest of the world (or even all of the people living in Western Europe and the US), especially now as increased communication and analytic tools help us to better understand the ways in which massive transfers of wealth are still happening from the rest of the "postcolonial" world. I suppose an argument could be made that it was built on hard work and ingenuity in much the same way that you can say politicians really are better at something than everyone else. It's just not necessarily the thing you'd want them to be good at. In this case, that would be that the powers we're talking about made some incredible innovations in terms of colonialism and internal methods of quelling the dissent of the aforementioned cheap (or enslaved) labor. Of course, it's not at all clear to me that this hasn't been the case for every single past (or emerging) empire. But the "self-made civilization" is maybe even more ridiculous a concept than the "self-made man".

ddxxdd 8y ago

I don't think a King George Washington would preside over a young America as affluent as President George Washington did. Tyranny has a way of sequestering innovative spirit.

pjc50 8y ago
Washington was a slave owner. Tyranny, but only for some people.
- wallace_f 8y ago
  I think this is misleading. I think when tossing out the credence of people such as Wadhington or Jefferson with the slavery problem, there is very little context understood about the cultural norms, science and religion those people lived in. The problem was that they did not see other races as people as they saw themselves. They saw their lives and societies and thought of them as savages. They further justified their ideology with both religion (which was more unquestionable than say, global warming is today) and scientific racism, which did things like measure brain size of different races. The slave owner like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson was in some ways like an extreme version of the modern liberal -- seeing the person of color as needing an authority to rule over them and provide them with things like welfare, access to education, etc. This has nothing to do with justifying slavery or ignoring that extreme abuses occured with such institutionalized imbalance of power. What I mean to say is to not throw away the baby with the bathwater. Some of the Founding Fathers created the greatest society to ever grace the earth and they deserve some credit for their heroic bravery and ideas on liberty, even if they lived in a truly fucked up world and had trouble seeing past that. Edit: downvote away, I guess
  - jacobush 8y ago
    And nothing in your argument, addresses the claim that wealth was amassed through slavery.
    - benj111 8y ago

raverbashing 8y ago

Several other empires exploited resources and used "free" labor, but only recently they invented industries/mass production, contributed to scientific progress and improved their quality of life with it. Slavery had a very high human cost and it was also something that prevented the evolution of better options. Edit: see below for a better explanation

ajross 8y ago
Do you have an example of a lasting empire that... did not do all of that stuff? I mean, honestly that statement seems kind of laughably wrong.
- raverbashing 8y ago
  Compare the evolution of the big empires of the past with the evolution in the last 500 years or even the last 250 years. The Roman Empire had a water system and concrete to make the Coliseum. Relied on slave labour up until the end. Made a plant that was used as contraception extinct. Given the time they stood, I'd say their scientific/mathematical progress was nimble. Egyptian empire: invented geometry, still had slaves pushing stones up to form pyramids. The Portuguese and the Spanish conquered half the world, but still relied on manual labour and got behind when the English started using machine labour.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Have you ever seen Connections[0]? Do watch it if you haven't[1]. They communicate well what's IMO a crucial point: almost never a single person had invented the "whole solution". The story of civilization is one of individual inventions being made over time, and then coming together to click into place and create something pushing us forward even further. It did happen in the past like it is happening today; both then and now it seems to work better under a stable governance - hence big empires do in fact contribute to scientific progress by their very existence. It's happening faster today than it was then because we're further along the exponential curve - but it's the same curve, the same process, we've been following for thousands of years. Like it often is with wealth, we're not special - our current empires just had richer parents and bigger accumulated base of inventions. We can build cooler stuff now than our ancestors - but let's never forget that "what makes one step a giant leap is all the steps before"[2]. -- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)#Connections_(1978) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)#Connec... [1] - I think I've seen them on dailymotion; of course I don't encourage copyright infringement, it's very important to keep our most important works unaccessible until everyone who might be interested in them dies off and only archaeologists will care. [2] - http://www.ovff.org/pegasus/songs/toast-for-unknown-heroes.html http://www.ovff.org/pegasus/songs/toast-for-unknown-heroes.h... / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zotaRLROtw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zotaRLROtw

wallace_f 8y ago

Other nations such as China or Russia have comparable or arguably better cheap labor stocks or natural resources. Then Japan has almost zero natural resources and nearly had a shot at taking over the world...

TeMPOraL 8y ago
> Then Japan has almost zero natural resources and nearly had a shot at taking over the world... Did they? Or was that just something American businessmen liked to scare each other with in a post-war era?
- wallace_f 8y ago
  Also during the war, they put up a pretty good fight for it all things considered.
- dalbasal 8y ago
  Japanese industry, during the height of its growth phase (say 1980) was very good, and the trend (projected indefinitely, a mistake we always make) implied crazy things.
crimsonalucard 8y ago
nah they were dead in the water. Resource embargo was basically a death sentence. The Nuke was done to end it quickly.
Gupie 8y ago
But the first step in Japan's plan to "take over the world" was to take control of China.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  China has a leg up in that plan. They already control China. Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, here we come!

mnm1 8y ago

In other words, anyone could build a prosperous society on the back of slaves if they have some natural resources to exploit. It's not even a great feat or accomplishment. The legacy of that is still what drives a lot of the economy in the US even today.

stcredzero 8y ago
In other words, anyone could build a prosperous society on the back of slaves if they have some natural resources to exploit. But that ceases to be competitive past a certain level of technology and value-add. Even slaves in the American South got paid extra for work requiring exceptional skill and attention to detail. It turns out you can't whip people into producing quality past a very basic level. The legacy of that is still what drives a lot of the economy in the US even today. No. That's a propaganda fiction used by the Far Left to bring down the current order.
- mnm1 8y ago
  Are you saying that black people aren't suffering today due to slavery and Jim Crow? How do you explain that the median white household wealth is sixteen times that of black households? Or is that a leftist conspiracy also? https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2015/03/26/the-racial-wealth-gap-why-a-typical-white-household-has-16-times-the-wealth-of-a-black-one/#513202511f45 https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2015/03/26/the-racial...
  - vixen99 8y ago
    You should check a general reference on slavery across the world (including slavery of Europeans during the late middle ages). There seems to be not a single country whose citizens have not enslaved someone or other at sometime throughout history. I am not as rich as Jeff Bezos or indeed hundreds of thousands of other folk. Now how can you explain that? Answer to your question: yes, a leftist conspiracy. If you really want some explanations for the lower relative wealth of black households, try reading Thomas Sowell. https://tsowell.com/ https://tsowell.com/

chillacy 8y ago

It wasn’t nice but subjugating and enslaving populations definitely was made possible by what I’d call ingenuity or inventiveness in the realm of technology. See Guns, Germs, and Steel.

tormeh 8y ago

I think the causality goes the other way around. If the Aztecs could have conquered the world, they would have. It's not as if they were a particularly nice people. Anyway, this is an argument people will still be having 200 years in the future.