17 ms·

Industrial Literacy

330 points by sien 6y ago

CryptoPunk 6y ago
People should have basic economic literacy to go with this. They should understand that profit-motivated investment is responsible for the vast majority of the capital that makes up industry. They should understand that money, and its ability to relay information on scarcity through prices, is how large numbers of disparate actors in highly complex economies are able to coordinate so effectively.
- anm89 6y ago
  It's a shame this is being downvoted because that was the first thing I thought when I read this. Just as people rail against many pieces of industrialization without understanding the details of how they are used or where it came from, it's astonishing to me how many people I know with college degrees that could not give the simplest definition of what a bank is besides the place they deposit their money, basic details about how a government could finance a policy it has made into law, what a central bank is or what a stock or bond is. But many of they seem to hold incredibly strong opinions about how problematic these things are none the less. Literally yesterday, I had a friend tell me hedge funds are bad, their explanation being: "no one should own 6 yachts". I asked them if they could give to me any definition at all of what a hedge fund was and they had to admit that no they couldn't. To them, a hedge fund is the category of businesses where people with 6 yachts work. And the thing is there are plenty of reasons to dislike specific hedge funds and banks, although as a concept they are beneficial and necessary, but people have such strong opinions about those things being bad without having the most basic conceptions of what they are and it really makes them worse citizens in terms of their ability to advocate for better policy.
  - rland 6y ago
    OK, I'll pick up where your friend left off. Hedge funds generate liquidity in the market. They do this by placing bets on investments they judge to be sound, using capital they acquire from courting wealthy people and big funds. Some of them place bets on the velocity of such bets themselves (derivatives), or bets within a very short time (high frequency trading). They don't deserve 6 yachts, they're rewarded way too much, not taxed enough, not regulated enough, and when they conspire to purposefully, royally screw everyone (08, any pension crisis, any big city civil court docket) they don't rot in jail like they deserve, but are rather rewarded by bank bailouts, university appointments, and golden severance packages. As a concept they're beneficial and necessary, but every individual one is over-compensated, under-regulated, and under-taxed. For just a gut check on this, let's see a hedge fund manager that takes away less in a year than the median wage of the industry or area they invest in. Or even within an order of magnitude.
    - anm89 6y ago
      My argument would be something like: I don't care how much people are compensated if they made it fair and square. Nothing in the financial markets has been fair or square for a very long time, at least since the 2008 bail outs. I'm all for them having 600 yachts if they earned it if they also lose their shirts when it goes wrong. We have just set it up so they get a yacht if they win, and maybe a smaller yacht if they lose, and people are understandably angry about this. But, it's a hard problem, because we have made our entire financial system a maze of smoke and mirrors and quite honestly I don't think anybody really knows how to unwind it, and the whole thing would come crashing down calamitously if we just forced it to happen. Blindly railing against the system is particularly unproductive in my opinion though and I think some number of social justice minded people take pride in not understanding it.
    - CryptoPunk 6y ago
      By what criteria are you judging that they are over-compensated? The judgment seems entirely arbitrary and emotionally motivated. Assuming a free market, if they're earning huge amounts, it means they're unlocking subtantial new efficiency gains, which has significant positive externalities. The large profits in turn are inviting additional time and capital to be deployed into the investment activity that hedge funds engage in, to further exploit this profit opportunity, and thereby, raise the efficiency of the economy. One argument I could buy is that they are capturing more value than they should because regulations are limiting the competition they face. https://www.brookings.edu/research/make-elites-compete-why-the-1-earn-so-much-and-what-to-do-about-it/ https://www.brookings.edu/research/make-elites-compete-why-t... >>The law has also inflated the compensation of hedge fund workers—roughly $500,000 on average—by restricting competition. Mutual funds—which charge tiny fees by comparison—are currently barred from using hedge fund strategies because they have non-rich investors. If the law was changed to allow mutual funds to offer hedge fund portfolios, hundreds of billions of dollars would be transferred annually from super-rich hedge fund managers and investment bankers to ordinary investors, and even low-income workers with retirement plans. A House committee recently approved a bill that would slightly ease the accredited investor rule. Even if it became law, the bill would be a modest step—but at least one in the right direction.
  - sjy 6y ago
    I think you should be more charitable to your friend. “No one should own 6 yachts” is a defensible moral principle. Not everyone accepts it, and there is good evidence that certain ways of preventing people from owning 6 yachts result in worse outcomes for everyone. But “hedge funds are beneficial and necessary” is not a scientific fact; most heterodox economists would reject it.
    - anm89 6y ago
      And thinking people should be allowed to own 6 yachts is a defensible moral principle. My discussion wasn't about moral defensible principles. Everyone thinks their principles are morally defensible, that's not unique to you. The number of people in hedge funds who own 6 yachts could probably be counted on one hand. The whole point was that she had no idea what she was talking about and admitted as much. Nothing in economics is a scientific fact. Supply and demand isn't a scientific fact. Gravity isnt a scientific fact. So again, no idea what you are on about. This is why I make an effort to speak up on economics literacy stuff. It brings out the least informed people but with the strongest opinions.
- clairity 6y ago
  capital isn't the scoreboard of unalloyed goodness, and concentrated capital is bad because it's precision and accuracy at sniffing out the best allocation of resources is poor (loses the independence and diversity of information needed to find the best options). moreover, price signals have been distorted to represent only the interests of (concentrated) capital holders, because everything we collectively value isn't completely or even adequately represented in price. how we price isn't necessarily how we value.
  - anm89 6y ago
    Nice straw man you are attacking there. He never said "capital is a scoreboard of unalloyed goodness". He said it's a coordination mechanism which, I'll give you a 100$ if you can find a economics professor who disagrees. "concentrated capital is bad". It must be nice to see the world in black and white and hold the solution to how everyone should do things. An orphanage is a concentration of capital. A hospital is a concentration of capital, often a truly massive one in a major city. Sounds pretty evil to me. But seriously, this is cartoonishly naive.
meekmind 6y ago
One of the most important questions in philosophy is "compared to what?" It's easy to say, "that isn't perfect" or proselytize some utopian vision of a world without murder, theft, discrimination, or whatever. But without a solid understanding of where civilization was (a basis of comparison) people will have no idea what civilization is or where it is going. I could go on but for now, absolutely fantastic article.
- smhost 6y ago
  > One of the most important questions in philosophy is "compared to what?" Important compared to what? It's easy to say that any changes to the world will be imperfect and will have murder, theft, and discrimination, but without a solid understanding of why civilizations have always changed and will continue to change, you'll find yourself in an ideological position that's always being left behind by history.
  - meekmind 6y ago
    > Important compared to what? Using the question "compared to what?" here only supports "compared to what?" as one of the most important questions in philosophy. > It's easy to say that any changes to the world will be imperfect Naturally, but in my estimation we don't have an abundance of rational thinkers who are moderating societal expectations, whereas we do have a glut of self-proclaimed gurus who claim to have all the answers for a better world provided we just tear down the one we have first. I could be wrong, I hope I am. > civilizations have always changed and will continue to change, you'll find yourself in an ideological position I generally agree except that philosophy isn't an ideology, it's a discipline about how to think, not an ideology about what to think. Knowing where we come from in order to know where we are and where we are going is a philosophical position, not an ideological one.
hosh 6y ago
> they propose tearing it down, because they don’t see the use of it. Speaking for just myself, it isn't as if I don't know the various points outline in the basics. It is that my current thinking is that the extractive-value paradigm of the industrial processes has done far more harm than good. Both people and land have been turned into resources by which value is extracted and capitalized. This has lead to a wide-spread devastation in our ecology, in our communities, and our human potential. It's a process that is moving towards degeneration, and we see many of those effects -- from growing equality gaps, to the radicalization of angry young people, and so forth. Although I feel an antipathy towards all of this (in the sense of watching a dumpster fire), I have encountered some work that does not involving burning anything down (literally or metaphorically). It does require a change in paradigm and epistemology. The work I am referring to comes from Carol Sandford. I'm still learning it and slowly applying them in my life. She has been at it for over 40 years now, and have worked with Fortune 500 companies ... though I don't know how much of a transformative effect she has. Nothing that made the news in a big way. But take the idea of having to use synthetic fertilizers and pest control. There are better ways, but they eat at the profit margin if you were only to maximize on profit, yield, and market value. If the goal, however, is towards the well-being of the community and the land in which things are farmed, then there are many methods with which we can accomplish that while still feeding people without requiring a huge amount of labor. But it comes from a different way of seeing the world.
- bearer_token 6y ago
  > There are better ways, but they eat at the profit margin if you were only to maximize on profit, yield, and market value. If the goal, however, is towards the well-being of the community and the land in which things are farmed, then there are many methods with which we can accomplish that while still feeding people without requiring a huge amount of labor. But it comes from a different way of seeing the world. These goals are compatible. They require a government body, representing the well-being of the community, willing to tax externalities and use the funds to invest in revitalization. However, expecting government to be economically responsible is about as likely as expecting profit-maximizing corporate entities to be socially responsible.
csours 6y ago
I work for a car company. I think automobiles have unlocked an almost unimaginable amount of economic activity. I also think that automobiles, if they were released now, would be considered unacceptably dangerous. It's not an easy set of thoughts to square up.
- np_tedious 6y ago
  Perhaps. But "now" doesn't mean the current state of the world unless there were 100 years of automobiles already behind us. So this is a pretty difficult counterfactual to imagine
  - csours 6y ago
    I agree its hard to imagine. Thinking about places and times with fewer cars, it's not generally safer per mile traveled. Riding a horse is actually pretty dangerous. Riding a bike can be pretty dangerous too, but a lot of that danger is from cars.
- swader999 6y ago
  Yet here we are releasing self driving cars, e-scooters, drones and so on.
- C1sc0cat 6y ago
  Its not as if Horses and horse riding are not dangerous as well as the poop problem.
  - mcv 6y ago
    True, but bicycles are pretty great. For short distances, if you're in sufficient health. Cars are too useful to completely get rid off, but restricting them to those uses that don't have a suitable alternative would be a big improvement.
    - bzbarsky 6y ago
      The other important bicycle qualifier is "in good weather". Bicycles are not that great during a rainstorm, for example. At least from my point of view; I know some people who really enjoy being rained on and don't mind biking in the rain. Similarly, I suspect most people would treat June-August in Florida as not "good weather" for bicycling, but some would consider it ok.
anm89 6y ago
Wow I absolutely love this.
camjohnson26 6y ago
This is a great example of how complicated the world is and how many things are invisible when they’re working well. The same force that makes people want to restart existing projects from scratch also makes them want to redesign society from the ground up, but inevitably the old ways are battle tested and have their flaws for a reason. Thinkers like Karl Popper have pushed for incremental approaches to improving society, rather than the utopia ideas that are usually promoted. Farm yields are boring, but they’ve impacted the world more than pretty much anything else, maybe even more than the internet.
- walleeee 6y ago
  Your point that existing systems tend to conceal complexity and embody tested strategies is well taken. I would just point out that incrementalism is not at all guaranteed to converge to sustainable solutions. Decisions which at one point in time appear unambiguously good often lead to ambiguous outcomes. Industrial ag caused yields to skyrocket, for instance, but it also hooked us on expensive fertilizers, damaging pesticides, and land use practices which destroy long-term soil viability. Before someone calls me a luddite this is coming from someone working on crop optimization. I'm not saying technology is bad, just that it nearly always has unforeseen consequences, and that we can better judge risks vs. benefits if we're mindful of the presence of unknown unknowns.
  - jbay808 6y ago
    Indeed. I'm all for more literacy, but that shouldn't be just blind appreciation of the status quo. Imagine if we still depended on tetraethyl lead to keep society rolling. Instead, it should be the level of detailed understanding that is a prerequisite for figuring out how to do better. That's not quite as easy as the article suggests though, I think.
  - ekianjo 6y ago
    > Industrial ag caused yields to skyrocket, for instance, but it also hooked us on expensive fertilizers, damaging pesticides, and land use practices which destroy long-term soil viability. It also solved human starvation, and enabled a lot less people to work in farming and therefore increase their level of life and in the end increase the technological level of the whole human race. We need not to forget the long reaching tail of agricultural improvements.
Karrot_Kream 6y ago
I'm not a fan of this framing of industrial tech. In this reading, all of our industrial technologies seem to be part of some Grand Narrative of Progress, and these tenets are Holy and cannot be violated. > That those same crops would not be able to feed us if they were not also protected from pests, who will ravage entire fields if given a chance. That whole regions used to see seasons where they would lose large swaths of their produce to swarms of insects, such as boll weevils attacking cotton plants in the American South, or the phylloxera devouring grapes in the vineyards of France. This depends on where and when you're looking at the world. The Indian subcontinent has ancient references using poisonous plants as pesticides. Pesticides are also more necessary in today's large scale industrial farming rather than smaller plots that were more common in the past. > That before we had electricity and clean natural gas, people burned unrefined solid fuels in their homes—wood, coal, even dung (!)—to cook their food and to keep from freezing in winter. Many cultures would use charcoal to light furnaces, which was a lot cleaner than biomass burning (the Kotatsu is a good example in Japan). Other cultures would heat bricks and bring those in to heat their homes. > sewing clothes by hand, since store-bought ones were too expensive for most families What? Specialization and commerce definitely existed before mechanization and industrialization. Indeed, the average person really didn't have access to a variety of clothes and often mended their own clothes, but they didn't hand sew everything. The Indian subcontinent had a long history of textile production. > laundering clothes in a basin, scrubbing laboriously by hand, then hanging them up to dry What? I _still_ often hand wash clothing. It really isn't that difficult. People in many parts of the world hand wash clothing to this day. > That automobiles are a lifeline to people who live in rural areas (almost 20% in the US alone), and who were deeply isolated in the era before the car People didn't live in remote areas most of the time. I'm fact, many countries still don't dump large amounts of energy laying roads in areas where only a few would live. This is really an American phenomenon that comes from a long dynamic of rural and urban (Senate, three fifths compromise, electoral college) power sharing. Some of these are true. Plastics really have made certain applications, especially those hygeine related, much cleaner and cheaper. Vaccines have absolutely enabled more humans to live with fewer diseases. But this reads like an ode to Western, namely American, development. That everything must be developed this way because there's No Alternative to Western Industrialization or otherwise abject poverty and deep inequality.
solatic 6y ago
> With industrial literacy, you can see the economy as a set of solutions to problems. Then, and only then, are you informed enough to have an opinion on how those solutions might be improved. Yes, they were solutions - but often enough, solutions which created negative externalities (e.g. pollution) which were not accounted nor paid for when the solutions were adopted. That's not an argument that we should necessarily dump any of these solutions today because of these externalities; rather it is an argument that we should acknowledge their shortcomings so that we can be open-minded about proposed replacements. > A lack of industrial literacy (among other factors) is turning what ought to be economic discussions about how best to improve human health and prosperity into political debates fueled by misinformation and scare tactics. We see this on climate change, plastic recycling, automation and job loss, even vaccines. Without knowing the basics, industrial civilization is one big Chesterton’s Fence to some people: they propose tearing it down, because they don’t see the use of it. The author seems to have some bogeymen in mind that aren't referenced. Does the antivax crowd qualify as "industrially illiterate", by the author's definition? Sure. Is supporting hemp as a replacement for petroleum-based plastics akin to trying to resurrect the ivory trade? No. Is promoting mass-transit replacements for private automobiles (at least, in cities) akin to bringing back rivers of horse excrement in city sewers? No. Is promoting self-sufficient farming that shuns monocultures (see i.e. The Omnivore's Dilemma), where possible, the same as advocating for the starvation of billions? No, it is not.
dzonga 6y ago
the article skips a lot of things that I would consider to human industrial literacy. only thing, that explains human development is a bbc documentary by james burke called connections. then you'll see things like the plough that transformed human lives.
eat_veggies 6y ago
Yeah that's chill but we should also recognize that our relative comfort today is borrowed from tomorrow, and deflecting any criticism of this with "things were much worse before" kind of misses the point. Industrial literacy is understanding * Synthetic fertilizers are hugely beneficial, but they are in part necessitated by, and directly enable (in a cycle, see), crop monocultures that don't allow the soil to replenish its fertility. * Housework was a full time job, and now it's not. We have different full time jobs that aren't that much more fun, but they've unlocked record levels of profits. We don't have time or energy to maintain our bodies anymore. Wages haven't gone up in decades. * Plastic is an incredibly useful technology, and has saved the lives of those tortoises whose shells we once carved products from. These days, plastic particles drift across every mile of the ocean, and kills those tortoises a different way. * Automobiles are a lifeline for people in rural and suburban areas, but it is a lifeline in the same way an abusive lover is a lifeline -- the centrality of the car made us build our communities and cities around the car. The car created a need and then filled it, and now we think ourselves lucky to have them. Don't take this as a call to return back to the age of riding horses and burning dung. It's too late to go back, and in any case, we wouldn't want to. I'm grateful to be alive during this period and to live among the small percentage of the population that gets to enjoy it. But recognize that everything contains the seeds of its own destruction.
- jbay808 6y ago
  Very well put. > Synthetic fertilizers are hugely beneficial, but they are in part necessitated by, and directly enable (in a cycle, see), crop monocultures that don't allow the soil to replenish its fertility. Yes. The article gives the impression that modern organic and permaculture farms are basically using medieval techniques, when that's far from the case. I hope the author does know better.
  - creato 6y ago
    Do these alternatives scale at a cost that people can afford? I tried googling for permaculture information (like cost per unit of food) and I only found absurd cult-like propaganda or people complaining about the myths of permaculture.
TeeMassive 6y ago
I like this kind of perspective because without it we just forget what we take for granted. In case of a nuclear holocaust knowledge would be lost in everything electronic and most libraries and homes would be burned. I've always wondered if there were project to print in micro formats the knowledge necessary to reboot modern civilization other than having a copy of Wikipedia on CD. I know GitHub did that with all its source code on micro films but without electronics this is totally useless.
- eindiran 6y ago
  Check out The Long Now Foundation (site: https://longnow.org/ https://longnow.org/ wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation). They are a foundation that has spent some time thinking about that problem and several adjacent problems; see especially the "Manual for Civilization" library project at the Interval bar in SF.
- evilsetg 6y ago
  I would like that we have an Industry Wiki were for industrial processes the basic structure, context and specific implementations are described. If we had a collaborative economy this would be so cool!
bkjelden 6y ago
It's not mentioned in the article, but as someone who's taken up remodeling my house as something of a hobby, it's always amazing to me to think about the amount of labor that modern power tools have removed from construction projects. I have a book on framing carpentry, and in it the author mentions that when he first started out, all of the older carpenters had bad repetitive strain injuries from swinging a hammer for a living for decades. Not so for the younger guys who had been using pneumatic nail guns all of their careers. I also have a theory that, in the US, this is why houses are so much larger than they used to be - the amount of labor involved to build one bigger has decreased dramatically.
coderintherye 6y ago
This is entitled "Industrial Literacy" but the first paragraph is filled with inaccurate statements with no references"=. "That if synthetic fertilizer was suddenly lost, a mass famine would ensue and billions would starve" No source and arguably incorrect. First of all we have natural fertilizer, it doesn't just magically disappear from the earth in the already far-fetched scenario of synthetic fertilizers magically disappearing: https://www.epa.gov/agriculture/agriculture-nutrient-management-and-fertilizer https://www.epa.gov/agriculture/agriculture-nutrient-managem... Second, in the U.S. synthetic fertilizer use is heavily concentrated in corn and soybeans which together make up the vast majority of the use: https://cfpub.epa.gov/roe/indicator.cfm?i=55 https://cfpub.epa.gov/roe/indicator.cfm?i=55 Third, many farmers across the world still don't use synthetic fertilizer. Less than half of the world population is fed by synthetic fertilizers: https://ourworldindata.org/fertilizers#how-many-people-does-synthetic-fertilizer-feed https://ourworldindata.org/fertilizers#how-many-people-does-... Fourth, the world produces far more food than is required to sustain sustenance for everyone on Earth: https://ourworldindata.org/food-supply https://ourworldindata.org/food-supply What will actually happen in the magic event of synthetic fertilizer disappearing is unknowable, but what is much more likely than "billions would starve" is _food prices will increase drastically. In the poorest economies, the poorest farmers are already growing without synthetic fertilizer, so their lives may vary well improve because food prices will go up. However, non-farmer impoverished people would see undernourishment because they would not be able to afford the increased prices. I implore the author if promoting literacy, to actually read some books on this matter and cite sources. I suggest "The Global Food Economy: The Battle for the Future of Farming."
austhrow743 6y ago
>are essential to our ... happiness. Citation needed. The idea that we'd be miserable without things invented incredibly recently on an evolutionary timescale is a pretty extraordinary claim and flies in the face of basic thought or world experience.
- leafmeal 6y ago
  I hear your point. we can be happy without many of these things. Happiness doesn't depend strictly on material conditions. At the same time, consider infant mortality. people are happy their children can grow up safely.
- noahtallen 6y ago
  I think many of the points in the article directly make us happier, and others at least give us the opportunity to be happier: - people are less sick - infants do not die as easily - people are less hungry - people are cleaner - people do less grueling manual labor - people are more comfortable - people have more free time These aren’t happiness in and of themselves, but it’s obvious that if you take it all away, people are much more likely to be dead, or at least very uncomfortable and strained. I think other modern amenities, like cars and computers have less of an affect on happiness. But certainly, being alive is a prerequisite to being happy!
pitzips 6y ago
I've recently finished 2 books that helped give a nice macro level to human's "progress". 'Sapiens' & 'The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World' Stuff You Should Know (podcast) has also been a gem for learning broadly about industrial and material topics.
hoseja 6y ago
Lot of these solutions are also getting to over a hundred years old and increasingly sclerotized, as large industries rely on them not getting solved in a more efficient, clever manner. We could have crops that produce all their own fertilizer, in a much more natural manner for example. Lot of primitivist stuff (BIO foods, non-GMO, anti-nuclear...) feel like obviously deranged/non-viable controlled opposition to protect the status quo.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
hristov 6y ago
Boy that is a dumb straw man argument. Nobody is seriously proposing getting rid of wire insulation for pete's sake. People are proposing getting rid of single use plastics, that are intended to be tossed out. If you bring your own bag to the grocery store or drink from a paper cup, you are not ending civilization.
justatdotin 6y ago
> clean natural gas GFY: gas is a dirty old fossil fuel.
- mcv 6y ago
  It's the cleanest of the fossil fuels. Still dirty, but not as dirty as coal.
  - justatdotin 6y ago
    even if I agree with you to ignore full life cycle fugitive emissions, 'not as dirty as coal' != 'clean
keiferski 6y ago
Pretty much every serious problem facing humanity in 2020 is the consequence of over-industrialization, but more specifically, over-consumerization. To conflate the two is to miss a fundamental point about modern consumer capitalism. Virtually all of the "basic accomplishments" listed in the article add up to about 1% (a rough estimate) of the actual industrial output today. It's unclear to me how say, the mass apparel industry (clothes, shoes, etc.), which is about 10% of Co2 emissions, [1] could be considered "progress" or anything other than a massive consumerism disaster...and I say that as someone with a deep respect for the art and craft of fashion designers. Now, you might say "we would never have these developments without mass industrialization and consumerism." Maybe, but I'm of the opinion that a pretty significant part of the modern economy is both frivolous and ecologically disastrous. Is it really "progress" to have IKEA disposable furniture at the cost of cutting down forests? Etc. 1. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2019/09/23/costo-moda-medio-ambiente https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2019/09/23/costo-m... > The fashion industry is responsible for 10 % of annual global carbon emissions, more than all international flights and maritime shipping.
- NalNezumi 6y ago
  But the authors point does neither miss the fundamental point about modern consumer capitalism, or refute it, in my option. Being Industrially literate as the author claim one should be seems to be about acknowledging the good part of industrialization, hence he focuses on the achievements we have gained through industrialization that we hold very dear (health, safety, etc). This is not the same as justifying the fashion industry practices you point out. On contrary, with the knowledge of good industrial effect (and it's side effects) maybe we can make a better judgement on the solution to it. We can see that certain industrial practice(such as fashion) should not be seen with the same respect as the one mentioned, instead of just black & white paint all of industrialization. Hence the mention of Chesterton's Fence at the end.
  - keiferski 6y ago
    The article is written from a very Whig-oriented, "Progress" point of view. The facts listed are all presented as unquestionably good. > When you know these facts of history—which many schools do not teach—you understand what “industrial civilization” is and why it is the benefactor of everyone who is lucky enough to live in it. It's basically an over-simplified account of history, in which scientific progress and consumer capitalism are inextricable. That is the point I'm making.
blackbear_ 6y ago
> Let’s recognize the value of industrial literacy and commit to improving it—starting with ourselves. Okay, I'm interested to know more. So what's a good book to learn about this?
- sien 6y ago
  There is a Bibliography on the site : https://rootsofprogress.org/bibliography https://rootsofprogress.org/bibliography But it seems like Jason Crawford, the author of the piece, might be heading toward writing a book.
  - blackbear_ 6y ago
    Lots of interesting books there, thank you!
tmilard 6y ago
A bit exagerated (WE need not returning tohorseback ... electrical cars will do fine, but I agree : here in France the illiteracy for economics in general is high. So high.
joe_the_user 6y ago
The article mixes together some good points, some true but somewhat slanted positions and some highly debatable points. And calls this "literacy", in analogy to very basic, object things everyone should know. It's extremely off-putting. Example of highly debateable position: "That automobiles are a lifeline to people who live in rural areas (almost 20% in the US alone), and who were deeply isolated in the era before the car and the telephone." Automobile based urbanization has entirely reshaped the landscape of rural America rather than just giving previous here a way to get around. Where I live, once there were small cities, 1000-2000 people in walking distance of each other, dotting the landscape. Now it's a carpet of dispersed single family homes. Many debate the value of the landscape - in California, huge level of urban-wildland interface development has rather disastrous consequence, being a significant factor in our massive fires.
- baybal2 6y ago
  I see this not changing the fact that genuinely rural populations genuinely need an automobile. Yes, American urban population, and city builders can certainly consider going without a car, and building cities without making car ownership a prerequisite to live in.
  - mcv 6y ago
    Yeah, but this works both ways: people live in rural places where they absolutely need to have a car, because they have access to cars. Without cars, less people would live there. Society adapts to the existence of the car.
    - luckylion 6y ago
      They've lived there before there were cars though. They just didn't have options to go to the next town, or the hospital when they'd need it. People lived before modern medicine as well. Without modern medicine, less people would live. Society adapts to the existence of modern medicine.
  - joe_the_user 6y ago
NalNezumi 6y ago
The core message I found from this article was that, to be a valuable participant on the discussion of improvement in society, when it comes to industry, is: based on Chesterton's Fence principle, we need to inform ourselves of the good industrialization have brought us (and accept it), and from there acknowledge their short-comings/side effects so that an proposed solution does not undermine the good that was added by it. This includes pointing out where industrialization is not doing much good (such as fashion and its CO2 emission as someone pointed out) Isn't being pedantic about each bullet point (that obviously can't go in to fine detail because of short summary) kind of ignoring the overall point? Is the core argument such an emotion inducing controversial point that justify almost straw-man-like criticism? edit: I now understand that it seems to be a bit of a politically heated topic. For me, a non-american, I saw similarity in "Industrial Literacy" and what Hans Rosling[1] told us a couple of years ago: "Hey, it is not as bad as you think" [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sm5xF-UYgdg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sm5xF-UYgdg
ciconia 6y ago
> That before twentieth-century appliances, housework was a full-time job, which invariably fell on women. This implies, but does not mention, the transition to a services economy. I don't see why housework is inherently negative. In addition, at least in the countryside, on homesteads or farms, the men stayed at home as well and did their share of the housework. The problem with getting housework done by someone else so you could go and work a "real job", is that you need to earn enough in order to pay someone else to do the housework. This inevitably leads to economic inequality and a pyramid-like society where people who earn more pay people who earn less to provide them with services such as housework. Just look at the people who clean your toilets for you at your office, or those who remove your garbage for you. What about their housework? The massive rise in inequality and salary stagnation in the last 40 years just made more apparent the false promise of service-oriented economies in the developed world. Look at what's called the NINJA generation (no job, no income, no assets) - how are they supposed to pay someone else to do their housework for them?
- sjy 6y ago
  I don’t follow. The part of the article you quoted is about appliances that allow us to achieve a given standard of living with less human labour. Isn’t this a good thing, whether the labour that is still needed is done by the people who benefit from it, or outsourced to service workers? How does the development of these appliances imply the transition to a services economy?
mcv 6y ago
Much of this article reads like a justification for pollution. Of course there are reasons why we ended up where we are, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to solve the problems caused by the previous generation of solutions. We do need to cut back on the amount of plastic and fossil fuels. If fertilizer and pesticides cause problems, we should address those problems and not pretend the only alternative is famine. We can do better than that.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  We should try to solve problems, but it's important to understand why the solutions aren't as simple as just "give a hoot, don't pollute!" And I think this is something that isn't commonly understood; I've seen more than a few arguments that corporate greed is the only thing standing between us and a perfectly sustainable climate.
theon144 6y ago
I absolutely agree with the article in the sense that this sort of "industrial literacy", or rather just "system awareness" is necessary to make proper judgments about the techno/societal mechanisms that we utilize and wish to modify, but I absolutely disagree with its tone of holier-than-thou justification of the current mode of industrial civilization. It does the classic naive-libertarian pirouette of pointing at the state of the world as it is, justifying it in terms of its historical determinants, and thus claiming it as inherently natural and unavoidable. There's a whole lot of hidden assumptions behind every single statement in the article that are left unclarified (for obvious reasons, which the rest of this comment section has already dug into). So yes, proper understanding the functioning of the civilization we live in is absolutely crucial, and at present, sorely lacking. But let's not stop there and think of it as the end goal.
- bzbarsky 6y ago
  > and thus claiming it as inherently natural and unavoidable Where do you see that in the article? What I see is a call to basic understanding of the current state of the world and how it got there as a prerequisite to being able to propose changes in a sane way. They are not saying the current state is "inherently natural" (and it's not, any more than the state of northern Europe in 1350 was "inherently natural") or "unavoidable" (it has clearly been avoided in the past, and will likely be in the future, which will likely look upon the way we live in ways similar to the ways we look at 1350 northern Europe). > But let's not stop there and think of it as the end goal. It's the minimal starting point, not the end goal, and that's what the article is saying as far as I can tell. So I think you're in violent agreement with the author here.
  - theon144 6y ago
    Eh, kinda. There's a lot of stuff hidden in there that I would violently disagree with, for instance: >[synthetic fertilizers are] needed for for agricultural productivity, because all soil loses its fertility naturally over time if it is not deliberately replenished No it doesn't, it only does when you do agriculture the way current industrial society practices it, it's not in any way "needed" for food production as such. >[synthetic pesticides are needed to protect] from pests [...] will ravage entire fields if given a chance Sure they will, because monocultures are terrible! And synthetic pesticides doubly so. But this is also not a requirement for scalable food production. >hauling water from the well for drinking Water supply is not a twentieth-century invention, nor an industrial one. >cooking every meal from scratch This is blatantly false, both because cities have offered public dining for much longer than industrial civilization, and cooking a meal from scratch does not require industrial civilization either. >That plastics are produced in enormous quantities because, for so many purposes—from food containers to electrical wire coatings to children’s toys—we need a material that is cheap, light, flexible, waterproof, and insulating, and that can easily be made in any shape and color (including transparent!) Conveniently, all these plastic products aren't single purpose, which constitutes the biggest chunk of all current plastic production; not because we couldn't do without it, but because it's cheaper than the alternatives. >That automobiles are a lifeline to people who live in rural areas (almost 20% in the US alone), and who were deeply isolated in the era before the car and the telephone. As others have pointed out, this is also self-fulfilling; the automobile allowed people to live that remotely in the first place, it's not a solution to a problem, it's what allowed the problem to emerge at all. And so on and so on; the current techno-economical system is presented solely, and in the author's own words, as "a set of solutions to problems". This is simply incorrect, and it necessarily presupposes that these problems exist somehow independently, waiting for a technology to solve it. This is why I see it making similar claims as do "naive-libertarianis" (whom I should note, I think of as separate from libertarianism in general), in that it looks at the way incentive systems are set up at present, but instead takes it as the starting point, failing to reflect on what the system doesn't take into account because it literally doesn't "see" it (e.g. every "social cost", or environmental costs). In other words, yes, industrial civilization is absolutely needed to support, well, industrial civilization. But I don't think it's necessary for the "modern standard of living".
PaulAJ 6y ago
This isn't "literacy", its a collection of factoids. Real industrial literacy means knowing something of the end-to-end lifecycle of industrial goods, and the supply chains that bring them to us. In addition to the list in the article it also means understanding what plastic pollution is doing to ocean food chains, what CO2 is doing to global temperature, and in turn what these things are going to do to industrial civilization itself. It means understanding that our current trajectory is not sustainable. We are running out of things. The things we are running out of turn out to be more the capacity of the planet to absorb our waste, rather than the raw materials as everyone feared 50 years ago, but it doesn't change the fact that we are running out of them. It means understanding the sheer fragility of our civilization, the fact that it could all blow a fuse tomorrow, and that if it did 99.99% of us would die horribly within a year (and probably take quite a lot of the rest of the biosphere with us). And it also means understanding that there is no alternative; we are in a race between our ingenuity and our ingenuity, and its still an open question which one will win.
dangerface 6y ago
The author needs to read more about industry and history, they are wrong or ignorant about a lot of what they say. > all soil loses its fertility naturally over time Here the author is demonstrating their lack of understanding in soil biology. Think about this for a second, if soil naturally loses fertility over time then over the past million years the world would have become a barren waste land before humans got to it. Industrial agriculture uses heavy machinery that compacts the soil and tilling, both kill the microbial activity that naturally fertilises the soil. Because industrial agriculture destroys the soil fertility it must be artificially replaced not the other way around. > That those same crops would not be able to feed us if they were not also protected from pests Here the author is demonstrating their literacy lack and understanding of natural systems. In nature plants grow wild, in industrial agriculture we create monocultures of plants that allow pests and disease to spread easily between the plants resulting in famines like the Irish potato famine. > before we had electricity and clean natural gas, people burned unrefined solid fuels in their homes—wood, coal, even dung Here the author demonstrates their lack of history coal is one of the keys of the industrial revolution. They make it sound like we always produced CO2 at the levels of industry, this simply isn't true. https://www.climate.gov/sites/default/files/CO2_emissions_vs_concentrations_1751-2019_lrg.gif https://www.climate.gov/sites/default/files/CO2_emissions_vs... > plastics are produced in enormous quantities because, for so many purposes—from food containers to electrical wire coatings to children’s toys - we need a material that is cheap, light, flexible, waterproof, and insulating, and that can easily be made in any shape and color (including transparent!) We don't need to use plastics for the stated consumer purposes. I had a sandwich and some strawberries for lunch, the food was consumed immediately after purchase, the plastic packaging they came in will last forever, I can hand them down to my children and grand children long after I am dead. I didn't need them packaged in this way paper would have done or nothing at all. > Industrial literacy means understanding that the components of the global economy are not arbitrary. Each one is there for a reason—often a matter of life and death. Mater of life and death? Citation needed, the author makes it clear that their understanding of the global economy and industrial literacy are lacking or based on climate change denial propaganda, all of their examples demonstrate one consistent thing about industry. Industry consistently sacrifices long term sustainability for short term gain. Which is beneficial for me and the author at the cost of every human to come.
lucioperca 6y ago
I like the idea of this article but the point it makes are not well developed. Take the first: "That the food you eat is grown using synthetic fertilizers, and that this is needed for agricultural productivity, because all soil loses its fertility naturally over time if it is not deliberately replenished. That before we had modern agriculture, more than half the workforce had to labor on farms, just to feed the other half. That if synthetic fertilizer was suddenly lost, a mass famine would ensue and billions would starve." But what are the factors which drives the immense productivity? There is also this new machinery and selective breeding. Now what part in all of this does account for the immense productivity gain? Certainly it is not enough to give credit to the results of the Haber-Bosch process. Then the other point is that this immense productivity seems to have negative returns, as one can see in the USA, where the food makes people more fat and sick every year. Similar holds for the planet which slashed rain-forest for soybeans show.
gdubs 6y ago
I feel like what this list is missing is how so much of our industry is patching holes created by previous applications of industry. For instance, with agriculture: industrialization has provided food for billions. It’s also created the monocultures that encourage disease, pests, and the ever-escalating need for more “inputs”.
growlist 6y ago
It's almost like there are groups that are deliberately seeking to keep us ignorant.
vannevar 6y ago
I'm not sure what the message is here. Is the author suggesting that we shouldn't seek further progress, now that these solutions to old problems exist? I think he overlooks the fairly obvious fact that today's solutions are tomorrow's problems, and that this is the march of progress. One day people will be reading that, before [innovative new material], we had to use PLASTIC everywhere! Imagine how terrible it would be to go back to those bad old days, with plastic infiltrating all stages of the food chain and causing all manner of problems. So everyone criticizing [innovative new material], you should become industrially literate so you can see how bad plastic was before you go trying to limit or improve [innovative new material].
- jasoncrawford 6y ago
  No, that is the exact opposite of what I'm suggesting! We should appreciate the progress we've made so far, and we should absolutely seek further progress.
imtringued 6y ago
>That the food you eat is grown using synthetic fertilizers, and that this is needed for agricultural productivity, because all soil loses its fertility naturally over time if it is not deliberately replenished. That before we had modern agriculture, more than half the workforce had to labor on farms, just to feed the other half. That if synthetic fertilizer was suddenly lost, a mass famine would ensue and billions would starve. I think this is not just a gross oversimplification, it's also wrong. Soil does not lose its fertility "naturally" over time. In fact, the opposite happens. It restores itself if you leave it alone. How do forests grow without human intervention? Shouldn't they wither over time by this logic? The truth is that soil depletion is caused by human farmers. When you harvest food you are also taking away biomass from the local soil and probably send it off to e.g. a factory farm in the US. Animals eat biomass and produce manure, but since the factory farmer does not own any land and he would have to ship the manure to a different country it is going to accumulate in the US. The other factor is that tilling soil is just a mechanical herbicide. By digging up roots you are killing all plants equally and ready the field for productive plants. However, soil is not just dirt. There is a whole microbiological environment inside it. Top soil is consists of colonies of microbes generating the necessary chemicals for plants to grow on their own. After years of tilling and sending off the harvest your topsoil is no longer productive. You have to leave it be or supplement the missing chemicals. Of course in our modern industrial society we are fully dependent on that supplementation but there is still room to research ways of farming that don't destroy the fertility of the land.

330 points by sien 6y ago

People should have basic economic literacy to go with this. They should understand that profit-motivated investment is responsible for the vast majority of the capital that makes up industry. They should understand that money, and its ability to relay information on scarcity through prices, is how large numbers of disparate actors in highly complex economies are able to coordinate so effectively.

anm89 6y ago
It's a shame this is being downvoted because that was the first thing I thought when I read this. Just as people rail against many pieces of industrialization without understanding the details of how they are used or where it came from, it's astonishing to me how many people I know with college degrees that could not give the simplest definition of what a bank is besides the place they deposit their money, basic details about how a government could finance a policy it has made into law, what a central bank is or what a stock or bond is. But many of they seem to hold incredibly strong opinions about how problematic these things are none the less. Literally yesterday, I had a friend tell me hedge funds are bad, their explanation being: "no one should own 6 yachts". I asked them if they could give to me any definition at all of what a hedge fund was and they had to admit that no they couldn't. To them, a hedge fund is the category of businesses where people with 6 yachts work. And the thing is there are plenty of reasons to dislike specific hedge funds and banks, although as a concept they are beneficial and necessary, but people have such strong opinions about those things being bad without having the most basic conceptions of what they are and it really makes them worse citizens in terms of their ability to advocate for better policy.
- rland 6y ago
  OK, I'll pick up where your friend left off. Hedge funds generate liquidity in the market. They do this by placing bets on investments they judge to be sound, using capital they acquire from courting wealthy people and big funds. Some of them place bets on the velocity of such bets themselves (derivatives), or bets within a very short time (high frequency trading). They don't deserve 6 yachts, they're rewarded way too much, not taxed enough, not regulated enough, and when they conspire to purposefully, royally screw everyone (08, any pension crisis, any big city civil court docket) they don't rot in jail like they deserve, but are rather rewarded by bank bailouts, university appointments, and golden severance packages. As a concept they're beneficial and necessary, but every individual one is over-compensated, under-regulated, and under-taxed. For just a gut check on this, let's see a hedge fund manager that takes away less in a year than the median wage of the industry or area they invest in. Or even within an order of magnitude.
  - anm89 6y ago
    My argument would be something like: I don't care how much people are compensated if they made it fair and square. Nothing in the financial markets has been fair or square for a very long time, at least since the 2008 bail outs. I'm all for them having 600 yachts if they earned it if they also lose their shirts when it goes wrong. We have just set it up so they get a yacht if they win, and maybe a smaller yacht if they lose, and people are understandably angry about this. But, it's a hard problem, because we have made our entire financial system a maze of smoke and mirrors and quite honestly I don't think anybody really knows how to unwind it, and the whole thing would come crashing down calamitously if we just forced it to happen. Blindly railing against the system is particularly unproductive in my opinion though and I think some number of social justice minded people take pride in not understanding it.
  - CryptoPunk 6y ago
    By what criteria are you judging that they are over-compensated? The judgment seems entirely arbitrary and emotionally motivated. Assuming a free market, if they're earning huge amounts, it means they're unlocking subtantial new efficiency gains, which has significant positive externalities. The large profits in turn are inviting additional time and capital to be deployed into the investment activity that hedge funds engage in, to further exploit this profit opportunity, and thereby, raise the efficiency of the economy. One argument I could buy is that they are capturing more value than they should because regulations are limiting the competition they face. https://www.brookings.edu/research/make-elites-compete-why-the-1-earn-so-much-and-what-to-do-about-it/ https://www.brookings.edu/research/make-elites-compete-why-t... >>The law has also inflated the compensation of hedge fund workers—roughly $500,000 on average—by restricting competition. Mutual funds—which charge tiny fees by comparison—are currently barred from using hedge fund strategies because they have non-rich investors. If the law was changed to allow mutual funds to offer hedge fund portfolios, hundreds of billions of dollars would be transferred annually from super-rich hedge fund managers and investment bankers to ordinary investors, and even low-income workers with retirement plans. A House committee recently approved a bill that would slightly ease the accredited investor rule. Even if it became law, the bill would be a modest step—but at least one in the right direction.
- sjy 6y ago
  I think you should be more charitable to your friend. “No one should own 6 yachts” is a defensible moral principle. Not everyone accepts it, and there is good evidence that certain ways of preventing people from owning 6 yachts result in worse outcomes for everyone. But “hedge funds are beneficial and necessary” is not a scientific fact; most heterodox economists would reject it.
  - anm89 6y ago
    And thinking people should be allowed to own 6 yachts is a defensible moral principle. My discussion wasn't about moral defensible principles. Everyone thinks their principles are morally defensible, that's not unique to you. The number of people in hedge funds who own 6 yachts could probably be counted on one hand. The whole point was that she had no idea what she was talking about and admitted as much. Nothing in economics is a scientific fact. Supply and demand isn't a scientific fact. Gravity isnt a scientific fact. So again, no idea what you are on about. This is why I make an effort to speak up on economics literacy stuff. It brings out the least informed people but with the strongest opinions.
clairity 6y ago
capital isn't the scoreboard of unalloyed goodness, and concentrated capital is bad because it's precision and accuracy at sniffing out the best allocation of resources is poor (loses the independence and diversity of information needed to find the best options). moreover, price signals have been distorted to represent only the interests of (concentrated) capital holders, because everything we collectively value isn't completely or even adequately represented in price. how we price isn't necessarily how we value.
- anm89 6y ago
  Nice straw man you are attacking there. He never said "capital is a scoreboard of unalloyed goodness". He said it's a coordination mechanism which, I'll give you a 100$ if you can find a economics professor who disagrees. "concentrated capital is bad". It must be nice to see the world in black and white and hold the solution to how everyone should do things. An orphanage is a concentration of capital. A hospital is a concentration of capital, often a truly massive one in a major city. Sounds pretty evil to me. But seriously, this is cartoonishly naive.

meekmind 6y ago

One of the most important questions in philosophy is "compared to what?" It's easy to say, "that isn't perfect" or proselytize some utopian vision of a world without murder, theft, discrimination, or whatever. But without a solid understanding of where civilization was (a basis of comparison) people will have no idea what civilization is or where it is going. I could go on but for now, absolutely fantastic article.

smhost 6y ago
> One of the most important questions in philosophy is "compared to what?" Important compared to what? It's easy to say that any changes to the world will be imperfect and will have murder, theft, and discrimination, but without a solid understanding of why civilizations have always changed and will continue to change, you'll find yourself in an ideological position that's always being left behind by history.
- meekmind 6y ago
  > Important compared to what? Using the question "compared to what?" here only supports "compared to what?" as one of the most important questions in philosophy. > It's easy to say that any changes to the world will be imperfect Naturally, but in my estimation we don't have an abundance of rational thinkers who are moderating societal expectations, whereas we do have a glut of self-proclaimed gurus who claim to have all the answers for a better world provided we just tear down the one we have first. I could be wrong, I hope I am. > civilizations have always changed and will continue to change, you'll find yourself in an ideological position I generally agree except that philosophy isn't an ideology, it's a discipline about how to think, not an ideology about what to think. Knowing where we come from in order to know where we are and where we are going is a philosophical position, not an ideological one.

hosh 6y ago

> they propose tearing it down, because they don’t see the use of it. Speaking for just myself, it isn't as if I don't know the various points outline in the basics. It is that my current thinking is that the extractive-value paradigm of the industrial processes has done far more harm than good. Both people and land have been turned into resources by which value is extracted and capitalized. This has lead to a wide-spread devastation in our ecology, in our communities, and our human potential. It's a process that is moving towards degeneration, and we see many of those effects -- from growing equality gaps, to the radicalization of angry young people, and so forth. Although I feel an antipathy towards all of this (in the sense of watching a dumpster fire), I have encountered some work that does not involving burning anything down (literally or metaphorically). It does require a change in paradigm and epistemology. The work I am referring to comes from Carol Sandford. I'm still learning it and slowly applying them in my life. She has been at it for over 40 years now, and have worked with Fortune 500 companies ... though I don't know how much of a transformative effect she has. Nothing that made the news in a big way. But take the idea of having to use synthetic fertilizers and pest control. There are better ways, but they eat at the profit margin if you were only to maximize on profit, yield, and market value. If the goal, however, is towards the well-being of the community and the land in which things are farmed, then there are many methods with which we can accomplish that while still feeding people without requiring a huge amount of labor. But it comes from a different way of seeing the world.

bearer_token 6y ago
> There are better ways, but they eat at the profit margin if you were only to maximize on profit, yield, and market value. If the goal, however, is towards the well-being of the community and the land in which things are farmed, then there are many methods with which we can accomplish that while still feeding people without requiring a huge amount of labor. But it comes from a different way of seeing the world. These goals are compatible. They require a government body, representing the well-being of the community, willing to tax externalities and use the funds to invest in revitalization. However, expecting government to be economically responsible is about as likely as expecting profit-maximizing corporate entities to be socially responsible.

csours 6y ago

I work for a car company. I think automobiles have unlocked an almost unimaginable amount of economic activity. I also think that automobiles, if they were released now, would be considered unacceptably dangerous. It's not an easy set of thoughts to square up.

np_tedious 6y ago
Perhaps. But "now" doesn't mean the current state of the world unless there were 100 years of automobiles already behind us. So this is a pretty difficult counterfactual to imagine
- csours 6y ago
  I agree its hard to imagine. Thinking about places and times with fewer cars, it's not generally safer per mile traveled. Riding a horse is actually pretty dangerous. Riding a bike can be pretty dangerous too, but a lot of that danger is from cars.
swader999 6y ago
Yet here we are releasing self driving cars, e-scooters, drones and so on.
C1sc0cat 6y ago
Its not as if Horses and horse riding are not dangerous as well as the poop problem.
- mcv 6y ago
  True, but bicycles are pretty great. For short distances, if you're in sufficient health. Cars are too useful to completely get rid off, but restricting them to those uses that don't have a suitable alternative would be a big improvement.
  - bzbarsky 6y ago
    The other important bicycle qualifier is "in good weather". Bicycles are not that great during a rainstorm, for example. At least from my point of view; I know some people who really enjoy being rained on and don't mind biking in the rain. Similarly, I suspect most people would treat June-August in Florida as not "good weather" for bicycling, but some would consider it ok.

anm89 6y ago

Wow I absolutely love this.

camjohnson26 6y ago

This is a great example of how complicated the world is and how many things are invisible when they’re working well. The same force that makes people want to restart existing projects from scratch also makes them want to redesign society from the ground up, but inevitably the old ways are battle tested and have their flaws for a reason. Thinkers like Karl Popper have pushed for incremental approaches to improving society, rather than the utopia ideas that are usually promoted. Farm yields are boring, but they’ve impacted the world more than pretty much anything else, maybe even more than the internet.

walleeee 6y ago
Your point that existing systems tend to conceal complexity and embody tested strategies is well taken. I would just point out that incrementalism is not at all guaranteed to converge to sustainable solutions. Decisions which at one point in time appear unambiguously good often lead to ambiguous outcomes. Industrial ag caused yields to skyrocket, for instance, but it also hooked us on expensive fertilizers, damaging pesticides, and land use practices which destroy long-term soil viability. Before someone calls me a luddite this is coming from someone working on crop optimization. I'm not saying technology is bad, just that it nearly always has unforeseen consequences, and that we can better judge risks vs. benefits if we're mindful of the presence of unknown unknowns.
- jbay808 6y ago
  Indeed. I'm all for more literacy, but that shouldn't be just blind appreciation of the status quo. Imagine if we still depended on tetraethyl lead to keep society rolling. Instead, it should be the level of detailed understanding that is a prerequisite for figuring out how to do better. That's not quite as easy as the article suggests though, I think.
- ekianjo 6y ago
  > Industrial ag caused yields to skyrocket, for instance, but it also hooked us on expensive fertilizers, damaging pesticides, and land use practices which destroy long-term soil viability. It also solved human starvation, and enabled a lot less people to work in farming and therefore increase their level of life and in the end increase the technological level of the whole human race. We need not to forget the long reaching tail of agricultural improvements.

Karrot_Kream 6y ago

I'm not a fan of this framing of industrial tech. In this reading, all of our industrial technologies seem to be part of some Grand Narrative of Progress, and these tenets are Holy and cannot be violated. > That those same crops would not be able to feed us if they were not also protected from pests, who will ravage entire fields if given a chance. That whole regions used to see seasons where they would lose large swaths of their produce to swarms of insects, such as boll weevils attacking cotton plants in the American South, or the phylloxera devouring grapes in the vineyards of France. This depends on where and when you're looking at the world. The Indian subcontinent has ancient references using poisonous plants as pesticides. Pesticides are also more necessary in today's large scale industrial farming rather than smaller plots that were more common in the past. > That before we had electricity and clean natural gas, people burned unrefined solid fuels in their homes—wood, coal, even dung (!)—to cook their food and to keep from freezing in winter. Many cultures would use charcoal to light furnaces, which was a lot cleaner than biomass burning (the Kotatsu is a good example in Japan). Other cultures would heat bricks and bring those in to heat their homes. > sewing clothes by hand, since store-bought ones were too expensive for most families What? Specialization and commerce definitely existed before mechanization and industrialization. Indeed, the average person really didn't have access to a variety of clothes and often mended their own clothes, but they didn't hand sew everything. The Indian subcontinent had a long history of textile production. > laundering clothes in a basin, scrubbing laboriously by hand, then hanging them up to dry What? I _still_ often hand wash clothing. It really isn't that difficult. People in many parts of the world hand wash clothing to this day. > That automobiles are a lifeline to people who live in rural areas (almost 20% in the US alone), and who were deeply isolated in the era before the car People didn't live in remote areas most of the time. I'm fact, many countries still don't dump large amounts of energy laying roads in areas where only a few would live. This is really an American phenomenon that comes from a long dynamic of rural and urban (Senate, three fifths compromise, electoral college) power sharing. Some of these are true. Plastics really have made certain applications, especially those hygeine related, much cleaner and cheaper. Vaccines have absolutely enabled more humans to live with fewer diseases. But this reads like an ode to Western, namely American, development. That everything must be developed this way because there's No Alternative to Western Industrialization or otherwise abject poverty and deep inequality.

solatic 6y ago

> With industrial literacy, you can see the economy as a set of solutions to problems. Then, and only then, are you informed enough to have an opinion on how those solutions might be improved. Yes, they were solutions - but often enough, solutions which created negative externalities (e.g. pollution) which were not accounted nor paid for when the solutions were adopted. That's not an argument that we should necessarily dump any of these solutions today because of these externalities; rather it is an argument that we should acknowledge their shortcomings so that we can be open-minded about proposed replacements. > A lack of industrial literacy (among other factors) is turning what ought to be economic discussions about how best to improve human health and prosperity into political debates fueled by misinformation and scare tactics. We see this on climate change, plastic recycling, automation and job loss, even vaccines. Without knowing the basics, industrial civilization is one big Chesterton’s Fence to some people: they propose tearing it down, because they don’t see the use of it. The author seems to have some bogeymen in mind that aren't referenced. Does the antivax crowd qualify as "industrially illiterate", by the author's definition? Sure. Is supporting hemp as a replacement for petroleum-based plastics akin to trying to resurrect the ivory trade? No. Is promoting mass-transit replacements for private automobiles (at least, in cities) akin to bringing back rivers of horse excrement in city sewers? No. Is promoting self-sufficient farming that shuns monocultures (see i.e. The Omnivore's Dilemma), where possible, the same as advocating for the starvation of billions? No, it is not.

dzonga 6y ago

the article skips a lot of things that I would consider to human industrial literacy. only thing, that explains human development is a bbc documentary by james burke called connections. then you'll see things like the plough that transformed human lives.

eat_veggies 6y ago

Yeah that's chill but we should also recognize that our relative comfort today is borrowed from tomorrow, and deflecting any criticism of this with "things were much worse before" kind of misses the point. Industrial literacy is understanding * Synthetic fertilizers are hugely beneficial, but they are in part necessitated by, and directly enable (in a cycle, see), crop monocultures that don't allow the soil to replenish its fertility. * Housework was a full time job, and now it's not. We have different full time jobs that aren't that much more fun, but they've unlocked record levels of profits. We don't have time or energy to maintain our bodies anymore. Wages haven't gone up in decades. * Plastic is an incredibly useful technology, and has saved the lives of those tortoises whose shells we once carved products from. These days, plastic particles drift across every mile of the ocean, and kills those tortoises a different way. * Automobiles are a lifeline for people in rural and suburban areas, but it is a lifeline in the same way an abusive lover is a lifeline -- the centrality of the car made us build our communities and cities around the car. The car created a need and then filled it, and now we think ourselves lucky to have them. Don't take this as a call to return back to the age of riding horses and burning dung. It's too late to go back, and in any case, we wouldn't want to. I'm grateful to be alive during this period and to live among the small percentage of the population that gets to enjoy it. But recognize that everything contains the seeds of its own destruction.

jbay808 6y ago
Very well put. > Synthetic fertilizers are hugely beneficial, but they are in part necessitated by, and directly enable (in a cycle, see), crop monocultures that don't allow the soil to replenish its fertility. Yes. The article gives the impression that modern organic and permaculture farms are basically using medieval techniques, when that's far from the case. I hope the author does know better.
- creato 6y ago
  Do these alternatives scale at a cost that people can afford? I tried googling for permaculture information (like cost per unit of food) and I only found absurd cult-like propaganda or people complaining about the myths of permaculture.

TeeMassive 6y ago

I like this kind of perspective because without it we just forget what we take for granted. In case of a nuclear holocaust knowledge would be lost in everything electronic and most libraries and homes would be burned. I've always wondered if there were project to print in micro formats the knowledge necessary to reboot modern civilization other than having a copy of Wikipedia on CD. I know GitHub did that with all its source code on micro films but without electronics this is totally useless.

eindiran 6y ago
Check out The Long Now Foundation (site: https://longnow.org/ https://longnow.org/ wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation). They are a foundation that has spent some time thinking about that problem and several adjacent problems; see especially the "Manual for Civilization" library project at the Interval bar in SF.
evilsetg 6y ago
I would like that we have an Industry Wiki were for industrial processes the basic structure, context and specific implementations are described. If we had a collaborative economy this would be so cool!

bkjelden 6y ago

It's not mentioned in the article, but as someone who's taken up remodeling my house as something of a hobby, it's always amazing to me to think about the amount of labor that modern power tools have removed from construction projects. I have a book on framing carpentry, and in it the author mentions that when he first started out, all of the older carpenters had bad repetitive strain injuries from swinging a hammer for a living for decades. Not so for the younger guys who had been using pneumatic nail guns all of their careers. I also have a theory that, in the US, this is why houses are so much larger than they used to be - the amount of labor involved to build one bigger has decreased dramatically.

coderintherye 6y ago

This is entitled "Industrial Literacy" but the first paragraph is filled with inaccurate statements with no references"=. "That if synthetic fertilizer was suddenly lost, a mass famine would ensue and billions would starve" No source and arguably incorrect. First of all we have natural fertilizer, it doesn't just magically disappear from the earth in the already far-fetched scenario of synthetic fertilizers magically disappearing: https://www.epa.gov/agriculture/agriculture-nutrient-management-and-fertilizer https://www.epa.gov/agriculture/agriculture-nutrient-managem... Second, in the U.S. synthetic fertilizer use is heavily concentrated in corn and soybeans which together make up the vast majority of the use: https://cfpub.epa.gov/roe/indicator.cfm?i=55 https://cfpub.epa.gov/roe/indicator.cfm?i=55 Third, many farmers across the world still don't use synthetic fertilizer. Less than half of the world population is fed by synthetic fertilizers: https://ourworldindata.org/fertilizers#how-many-people-does-synthetic-fertilizer-feed https://ourworldindata.org/fertilizers#how-many-people-does-... Fourth, the world produces far more food than is required to sustain sustenance for everyone on Earth: https://ourworldindata.org/food-supply https://ourworldindata.org/food-supply What will actually happen in the magic event of synthetic fertilizer disappearing is unknowable, but what is much more likely than "billions would starve" is _food prices will increase drastically. In the poorest economies, the poorest farmers are already growing without synthetic fertilizer, so their lives may vary well improve because food prices will go up. However, non-farmer impoverished people would see undernourishment because they would not be able to afford the increased prices. I implore the author if promoting literacy, to actually read some books on this matter and cite sources. I suggest "The Global Food Economy: The Battle for the Future of Farming."

austhrow743 6y ago

>are essential to our ... happiness. Citation needed. The idea that we'd be miserable without things invented incredibly recently on an evolutionary timescale is a pretty extraordinary claim and flies in the face of basic thought or world experience.

leafmeal 6y ago
I hear your point. we can be happy without many of these things. Happiness doesn't depend strictly on material conditions. At the same time, consider infant mortality. people are happy their children can grow up safely.
noahtallen 6y ago
I think many of the points in the article directly make us happier, and others at least give us the opportunity to be happier: - people are less sick - infants do not die as easily - people are less hungry - people are cleaner - people do less grueling manual labor - people are more comfortable - people have more free time These aren’t happiness in and of themselves, but it’s obvious that if you take it all away, people are much more likely to be dead, or at least very uncomfortable and strained. I think other modern amenities, like cars and computers have less of an affect on happiness. But certainly, being alive is a prerequisite to being happy!

pitzips 6y ago

I've recently finished 2 books that helped give a nice macro level to human's "progress". 'Sapiens' & 'The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World' Stuff You Should Know (podcast) has also been a gem for learning broadly about industrial and material topics.

hoseja 6y ago

Lot of these solutions are also getting to over a hundred years old and increasingly sclerotized, as large industries rely on them not getting solved in a more efficient, clever manner. We could have crops that produce all their own fertilizer, in a much more natural manner for example. Lot of primitivist stuff (BIO foods, non-GMO, anti-nuclear...) feel like obviously deranged/non-viable controlled opposition to protect the status quo.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

hristov 6y ago

Boy that is a dumb straw man argument. Nobody is seriously proposing getting rid of wire insulation for pete's sake. People are proposing getting rid of single use plastics, that are intended to be tossed out. If you bring your own bag to the grocery store or drink from a paper cup, you are not ending civilization.

justatdotin 6y ago

> clean natural gas GFY: gas is a dirty old fossil fuel.

mcv 6y ago
It's the cleanest of the fossil fuels. Still dirty, but not as dirty as coal.
- justatdotin 6y ago
  even if I agree with you to ignore full life cycle fugitive emissions, 'not as dirty as coal' != 'clean

keiferski 6y ago

Pretty much every serious problem facing humanity in 2020 is the consequence of over-industrialization, but more specifically, over-consumerization. To conflate the two is to miss a fundamental point about modern consumer capitalism. Virtually all of the "basic accomplishments" listed in the article add up to about 1% (a rough estimate) of the actual industrial output today. It's unclear to me how say, the mass apparel industry (clothes, shoes, etc.), which is about 10% of Co2 emissions, [1] could be considered "progress" or anything other than a massive consumerism disaster...and I say that as someone with a deep respect for the art and craft of fashion designers. Now, you might say "we would never have these developments without mass industrialization and consumerism." Maybe, but I'm of the opinion that a pretty significant part of the modern economy is both frivolous and ecologically disastrous. Is it really "progress" to have IKEA disposable furniture at the cost of cutting down forests? Etc. 1. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2019/09/23/costo-moda-medio-ambiente https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2019/09/23/costo-m... > The fashion industry is responsible for 10 % of annual global carbon emissions, more than all international flights and maritime shipping.

NalNezumi 6y ago
But the authors point does neither miss the fundamental point about modern consumer capitalism, or refute it, in my option. Being Industrially literate as the author claim one should be seems to be about acknowledging the good part of industrialization, hence he focuses on the achievements we have gained through industrialization that we hold very dear (health, safety, etc). This is not the same as justifying the fashion industry practices you point out. On contrary, with the knowledge of good industrial effect (and it's side effects) maybe we can make a better judgement on the solution to it. We can see that certain industrial practice(such as fashion) should not be seen with the same respect as the one mentioned, instead of just black & white paint all of industrialization. Hence the mention of Chesterton's Fence at the end.
- keiferski 6y ago
  The article is written from a very Whig-oriented, "Progress" point of view. The facts listed are all presented as unquestionably good. > When you know these facts of history—which many schools do not teach—you understand what “industrial civilization” is and why it is the benefactor of everyone who is lucky enough to live in it. It's basically an over-simplified account of history, in which scientific progress and consumer capitalism are inextricable. That is the point I'm making.

blackbear_ 6y ago

> Let’s recognize the value of industrial literacy and commit to improving it—starting with ourselves. Okay, I'm interested to know more. So what's a good book to learn about this?

sien 6y ago
There is a Bibliography on the site : https://rootsofprogress.org/bibliography https://rootsofprogress.org/bibliography But it seems like Jason Crawford, the author of the piece, might be heading toward writing a book.
- blackbear_ 6y ago
  Lots of interesting books there, thank you!

tmilard 6y ago

A bit exagerated (WE need not returning tohorseback ... electrical cars will do fine, but I agree : here in France the illiteracy for economics in general is high. So high.

joe_the_user 6y ago

The article mixes together some good points, some true but somewhat slanted positions and some highly debatable points. And calls this "literacy", in analogy to very basic, object things everyone should know. It's extremely off-putting. Example of highly debateable position: "That automobiles are a lifeline to people who live in rural areas (almost 20% in the US alone), and who were deeply isolated in the era before the car and the telephone." Automobile based urbanization has entirely reshaped the landscape of rural America rather than just giving previous here a way to get around. Where I live, once there were small cities, 1000-2000 people in walking distance of each other, dotting the landscape. Now it's a carpet of dispersed single family homes. Many debate the value of the landscape - in California, huge level of urban-wildland interface development has rather disastrous consequence, being a significant factor in our massive fires.

baybal2 6y ago
I see this not changing the fact that genuinely rural populations genuinely need an automobile. Yes, American urban population, and city builders can certainly consider going without a car, and building cities without making car ownership a prerequisite to live in.
- mcv 6y ago
  Yeah, but this works both ways: people live in rural places where they absolutely need to have a car, because they have access to cars. Without cars, less people would live there. Society adapts to the existence of the car.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    They've lived there before there were cars though. They just didn't have options to go to the next town, or the hospital when they'd need it. People lived before modern medicine as well. Without modern medicine, less people would live. Society adapts to the existence of modern medicine.
- joe_the_user 6y ago

NalNezumi 6y ago

The core message I found from this article was that, to be a valuable participant on the discussion of improvement in society, when it comes to industry, is: based on Chesterton's Fence principle, we need to inform ourselves of the good industrialization have brought us (and accept it), and from there acknowledge their short-comings/side effects so that an proposed solution does not undermine the good that was added by it. This includes pointing out where industrialization is not doing much good (such as fashion and its CO2 emission as someone pointed out) Isn't being pedantic about each bullet point (that obviously can't go in to fine detail because of short summary) kind of ignoring the overall point? Is the core argument such an emotion inducing controversial point that justify almost straw-man-like criticism? edit: I now understand that it seems to be a bit of a politically heated topic. For me, a non-american, I saw similarity in "Industrial Literacy" and what Hans Rosling[1] told us a couple of years ago: "Hey, it is not as bad as you think" [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sm5xF-UYgdg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sm5xF-UYgdg

ciconia 6y ago

> That before twentieth-century appliances, housework was a full-time job, which invariably fell on women. This implies, but does not mention, the transition to a services economy. I don't see why housework is inherently negative. In addition, at least in the countryside, on homesteads or farms, the men stayed at home as well and did their share of the housework. The problem with getting housework done by someone else so you could go and work a "real job", is that you need to earn enough in order to pay someone else to do the housework. This inevitably leads to economic inequality and a pyramid-like society where people who earn more pay people who earn less to provide them with services such as housework. Just look at the people who clean your toilets for you at your office, or those who remove your garbage for you. What about their housework? The massive rise in inequality and salary stagnation in the last 40 years just made more apparent the false promise of service-oriented economies in the developed world. Look at what's called the NINJA generation (no job, no income, no assets) - how are they supposed to pay someone else to do their housework for them?

sjy 6y ago
I don’t follow. The part of the article you quoted is about appliances that allow us to achieve a given standard of living with less human labour. Isn’t this a good thing, whether the labour that is still needed is done by the people who benefit from it, or outsourced to service workers? How does the development of these appliances imply the transition to a services economy?

mcv 6y ago

Much of this article reads like a justification for pollution. Of course there are reasons why we ended up where we are, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to solve the problems caused by the previous generation of solutions. We do need to cut back on the amount of plastic and fossil fuels. If fertilizer and pesticides cause problems, we should address those problems and not pretend the only alternative is famine. We can do better than that.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
We should try to solve problems, but it's important to understand why the solutions aren't as simple as just "give a hoot, don't pollute!" And I think this is something that isn't commonly understood; I've seen more than a few arguments that corporate greed is the only thing standing between us and a perfectly sustainable climate.

theon144 6y ago

I absolutely agree with the article in the sense that this sort of "industrial literacy", or rather just "system awareness" is necessary to make proper judgments about the techno/societal mechanisms that we utilize and wish to modify, but I absolutely disagree with its tone of holier-than-thou justification of the current mode of industrial civilization. It does the classic naive-libertarian pirouette of pointing at the state of the world as it is, justifying it in terms of its historical determinants, and thus claiming it as inherently natural and unavoidable. There's a whole lot of hidden assumptions behind every single statement in the article that are left unclarified (for obvious reasons, which the rest of this comment section has already dug into). So yes, proper understanding the functioning of the civilization we live in is absolutely crucial, and at present, sorely lacking. But let's not stop there and think of it as the end goal.

bzbarsky 6y ago
> and thus claiming it as inherently natural and unavoidable Where do you see that in the article? What I see is a call to basic understanding of the current state of the world and how it got there as a prerequisite to being able to propose changes in a sane way. They are not saying the current state is "inherently natural" (and it's not, any more than the state of northern Europe in 1350 was "inherently natural") or "unavoidable" (it has clearly been avoided in the past, and will likely be in the future, which will likely look upon the way we live in ways similar to the ways we look at 1350 northern Europe). > But let's not stop there and think of it as the end goal. It's the minimal starting point, not the end goal, and that's what the article is saying as far as I can tell. So I think you're in violent agreement with the author here.
- theon144 6y ago
  Eh, kinda. There's a lot of stuff hidden in there that I would violently disagree with, for instance: >[synthetic fertilizers are] needed for for agricultural productivity, because all soil loses its fertility naturally over time if it is not deliberately replenished No it doesn't, it only does when you do agriculture the way current industrial society practices it, it's not in any way "needed" for food production as such. >[synthetic pesticides are needed to protect] from pests [...] will ravage entire fields if given a chance Sure they will, because monocultures are terrible! And synthetic pesticides doubly so. But this is also not a requirement for scalable food production. >hauling water from the well for drinking Water supply is not a twentieth-century invention, nor an industrial one. >cooking every meal from scratch This is blatantly false, both because cities have offered public dining for much longer than industrial civilization, and cooking a meal from scratch does not require industrial civilization either. >That plastics are produced in enormous quantities because, for so many purposes—from food containers to electrical wire coatings to children’s toys—we need a material that is cheap, light, flexible, waterproof, and insulating, and that can easily be made in any shape and color (including transparent!) Conveniently, all these plastic products aren't single purpose, which constitutes the biggest chunk of all current plastic production; not because we couldn't do without it, but because it's cheaper than the alternatives. >That automobiles are a lifeline to people who live in rural areas (almost 20% in the US alone), and who were deeply isolated in the era before the car and the telephone. As others have pointed out, this is also self-fulfilling; the automobile allowed people to live that remotely in the first place, it's not a solution to a problem, it's what allowed the problem to emerge at all. And so on and so on; the current techno-economical system is presented solely, and in the author's own words, as "a set of solutions to problems". This is simply incorrect, and it necessarily presupposes that these problems exist somehow independently, waiting for a technology to solve it. This is why I see it making similar claims as do "naive-libertarianis" (whom I should note, I think of as separate from libertarianism in general), in that it looks at the way incentive systems are set up at present, but instead takes it as the starting point, failing to reflect on what the system doesn't take into account because it literally doesn't "see" it (e.g. every "social cost", or environmental costs). In other words, yes, industrial civilization is absolutely needed to support, well, industrial civilization. But I don't think it's necessary for the "modern standard of living".

PaulAJ 6y ago

This isn't "literacy", its a collection of factoids. Real industrial literacy means knowing something of the end-to-end lifecycle of industrial goods, and the supply chains that bring them to us. In addition to the list in the article it also means understanding what plastic pollution is doing to ocean food chains, what CO2 is doing to global temperature, and in turn what these things are going to do to industrial civilization itself. It means understanding that our current trajectory is not sustainable. We are running out of things. The things we are running out of turn out to be more the capacity of the planet to absorb our waste, rather than the raw materials as everyone feared 50 years ago, but it doesn't change the fact that we are running out of them. It means understanding the sheer fragility of our civilization, the fact that it could all blow a fuse tomorrow, and that if it did 99.99% of us would die horribly within a year (and probably take quite a lot of the rest of the biosphere with us). And it also means understanding that there is no alternative; we are in a race between our ingenuity and our ingenuity, and its still an open question which one will win.

dangerface 6y ago

The author needs to read more about industry and history, they are wrong or ignorant about a lot of what they say. > all soil loses its fertility naturally over time Here the author is demonstrating their lack of understanding in soil biology. Think about this for a second, if soil naturally loses fertility over time then over the past million years the world would have become a barren waste land before humans got to it. Industrial agriculture uses heavy machinery that compacts the soil and tilling, both kill the microbial activity that naturally fertilises the soil. Because industrial agriculture destroys the soil fertility it must be artificially replaced not the other way around. > That those same crops would not be able to feed us if they were not also protected from pests Here the author is demonstrating their literacy lack and understanding of natural systems. In nature plants grow wild, in industrial agriculture we create monocultures of plants that allow pests and disease to spread easily between the plants resulting in famines like the Irish potato famine. > before we had electricity and clean natural gas, people burned unrefined solid fuels in their homes—wood, coal, even dung Here the author demonstrates their lack of history coal is one of the keys of the industrial revolution. They make it sound like we always produced CO2 at the levels of industry, this simply isn't true. https://www.climate.gov/sites/default/files/CO2_emissions_vs_concentrations_1751-2019_lrg.gif https://www.climate.gov/sites/default/files/CO2_emissions_vs... > plastics are produced in enormous quantities because, for so many purposes—from food containers to electrical wire coatings to children’s toys - we need a material that is cheap, light, flexible, waterproof, and insulating, and that can easily be made in any shape and color (including transparent!) We don't need to use plastics for the stated consumer purposes. I had a sandwich and some strawberries for lunch, the food was consumed immediately after purchase, the plastic packaging they came in will last forever, I can hand them down to my children and grand children long after I am dead. I didn't need them packaged in this way paper would have done or nothing at all. > Industrial literacy means understanding that the components of the global economy are not arbitrary. Each one is there for a reason—often a matter of life and death. Mater of life and death? Citation needed, the author makes it clear that their understanding of the global economy and industrial literacy are lacking or based on climate change denial propaganda, all of their examples demonstrate one consistent thing about industry. Industry consistently sacrifices long term sustainability for short term gain. Which is beneficial for me and the author at the cost of every human to come.

lucioperca 6y ago

I like the idea of this article but the point it makes are not well developed. Take the first: "That the food you eat is grown using synthetic fertilizers, and that this is needed for agricultural productivity, because all soil loses its fertility naturally over time if it is not deliberately replenished. That before we had modern agriculture, more than half the workforce had to labor on farms, just to feed the other half. That if synthetic fertilizer was suddenly lost, a mass famine would ensue and billions would starve." But what are the factors which drives the immense productivity? There is also this new machinery and selective breeding. Now what part in all of this does account for the immense productivity gain? Certainly it is not enough to give credit to the results of the Haber-Bosch process. Then the other point is that this immense productivity seems to have negative returns, as one can see in the USA, where the food makes people more fat and sick every year. Similar holds for the planet which slashed rain-forest for soybeans show.

gdubs 6y ago

I feel like what this list is missing is how so much of our industry is patching holes created by previous applications of industry. For instance, with agriculture: industrialization has provided food for billions. It’s also created the monocultures that encourage disease, pests, and the ever-escalating need for more “inputs”.

growlist 6y ago

It's almost like there are groups that are deliberately seeking to keep us ignorant.

vannevar 6y ago

I'm not sure what the message is here. Is the author suggesting that we shouldn't seek further progress, now that these solutions to old problems exist? I think he overlooks the fairly obvious fact that today's solutions are tomorrow's problems, and that this is the march of progress. One day people will be reading that, before [innovative new material], we had to use PLASTIC everywhere! Imagine how terrible it would be to go back to those bad old days, with plastic infiltrating all stages of the food chain and causing all manner of problems. So everyone criticizing [innovative new material], you should become industrially literate so you can see how bad plastic was before you go trying to limit or improve [innovative new material].

jasoncrawford 6y ago
No, that is the exact opposite of what I'm suggesting! We should appreciate the progress we've made so far, and we should absolutely seek further progress.

imtringued 6y ago

>That the food you eat is grown using synthetic fertilizers, and that this is needed for agricultural productivity, because all soil loses its fertility naturally over time if it is not deliberately replenished. That before we had modern agriculture, more than half the workforce had to labor on farms, just to feed the other half. That if synthetic fertilizer was suddenly lost, a mass famine would ensue and billions would starve. I think this is not just a gross oversimplification, it's also wrong. Soil does not lose its fertility "naturally" over time. In fact, the opposite happens. It restores itself if you leave it alone. How do forests grow without human intervention? Shouldn't they wither over time by this logic? The truth is that soil depletion is caused by human farmers. When you harvest food you are also taking away biomass from the local soil and probably send it off to e.g. a factory farm in the US. Animals eat biomass and produce manure, but since the factory farmer does not own any land and he would have to ship the manure to a different country it is going to accumulate in the US. The other factor is that tilling soil is just a mechanical herbicide. By digging up roots you are killing all plants equally and ready the field for productive plants. However, soil is not just dirt. There is a whole microbiological environment inside it. Top soil is consists of colonies of microbes generating the necessary chemicals for plants to grow on their own. After years of tilling and sending off the harvest your topsoil is no longer productive. You have to leave it be or supplement the missing chemicals. Of course in our modern industrial society we are fully dependent on that supplementation but there is still room to research ways of farming that don't destroy the fertility of the land.