9 ms·

We Were Builders Once, and Strong

92 points by barry-cotter 6y ago

todipa 6y ago
...to promote economic growth and upward mobility... I've always thought that upward mobility is what gives hope and hope is the fuel of persistence. Persistence coupled with patience and passion makes it possible to grow economically.
- rebuilder 6y ago
  But what does upward mobility look like without economic growth? Either there must be corresponding downward mobility to make room at the top, or resource distribution must become more egalitarian, at the expense of the better-off. From that I'd argue that upward mobility is enabled by economic growth.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    The important thing is not generalized upward mobility, but the hope of individual upward mobility. An economically stagnant society where anyone has a solid opportunity to better themselves and where no one is in a very bad nor hopeless situation would provide this well enough.
    - Animats 6y ago
      “Hope. It’s the only thing stronger than fear. A little hope is effective. A lot of hope is dangerous. Spark is fine, as long as it’s contained.”
      - 6510 6y ago
        We need both to function. Downward-mobility sounds fantastic to me. All we have of the kind are fines and prison.
      - trashtester 6y ago
        Hope is fueled by depravation. When someone is experiencing hunger, cold, loneliness, sexual unfulfilment or lack of a sense of meaning, the possibility of improvement in those areas can be an extreme force. This can cause people to be willing to face severe risks to improve their situation. This is what makes "hope" so dangerous, since the risky things people are willing to do can be quite destructive to themselves and others. If people are already content, fear tends to be stronger than hope. This comes with its own downsides, of course. People become passive, and society becomes stagnant and eventually corrupted due to lack of rejuvinating forces. As you say, a balance is needed. Some needs must require some positive effort in order to be fulfilled. But if only the most anti social and ruthless get their needs fulfilled, society breaks down even faster.
  - javajosh 6y ago
    Well, maybe there is another option. Call it "inward mobility". It is where your life becomes better, more organized, more healthy, within the bounds of, e.g. your energy expenditures or your draw on natural resources. There is an analogy with racing: in drag racing, you always want to go faster and faster, with no upper bound. But there is another form of racing, rally racing, which hinges on precision and control rather than raw speed. My recent experience living in Germany gave me a real sense of what that's like. There is a cultural affinity for "progress means innovation aimed at ever more closely and efficiently adhering to a standard". So this means, for example, the beer in Germany is very consistent over decades, sometimes centuries, is cheaper than soda, and there isn't much variety. (a similar story for Ireland's Guiness, BTW). Or take the German knife maker Wüsthof, which unusually for a large knife maker uses entirely one steel, one style of blade, across the line (okay there are exceptions but these are rare). They've fixed the larger values of a boundary condition, but still find room to innovate within that space. I can't help but think that this is a healthier way to think about progress and growth, rather than the very American approach that progress always means more, but never just better.
    - megameter 6y ago
      This sentiment coincides with the problem of measuring "the economy". The major notions we have inherited of economy derive from the rentier merchants of early modernity. They took to the idea of seeing a nation as a balance sheet, a tabulation of assets: men, ships, iron. From this idea we get the idea of putting more assets on the balance sheet through trade and colonization, rather than tribute. This lasted a few centuries, but by the point of transition to an industrial economy it had already become clear in the writings of Enlightenment philosphers that it was not quite as simple as possession and accounting of the raw assets, but their organization too. The gross product and employment figures we started using to measure organization generalized things, but also suffer from limited scope - if it's not a money transaction, if the work is unpaid, it's outside "the economy". In the long 19th century it was very straightforward to devise ways to purpose inventions towards economic benefit: take an existing trade, buy up more raw materials through the canals and rails, run it through the factory, sell more product. With the second industrial revolution, another "wave" of products appeared that substituted common uses of labor: canned food instead of fresh, telecommunication instead of express mail, and an increasing number of mechanized devices. It got much harder in the 20th century as more of the inventions relied on developing consumer habits and did not reflect a traditional trade. The dilemma was averted through marketing techniques: Everyone uses toothpaste and shampoo, watches the new television show, and desires a new car, a bigger house and a higher-paying job. Creative financing ideas took up the rest of the slack, allowing consumers to get their hands on the stuff and set lifestyle expectations that are higher than reasonable. So, by the early 21st century everyone simultaneously has too much "stuff", is unhappy because of the marketing, and is in debt because of the financing. But GDP is higher, so the system persists, up until now. That trend makes me think that "building" is at an end, and something more like the German system has to take hold. America's consumer economy is now developing a multitude of niches, marketed through various online storefronts, Kickstarters and viral video. Appreciation of the best stuff of past years has risen as more of that material surfaces online and rubs shoulders with "new" stuff. Where this emerging system struggles the most, it can usually be traced back to the old power structures and their large footprint on the economy. And to a great degree the measure of the economy is tied to those structures: growth and employment figures feed into the taxation and spending model. Change the measure and you have to realign what it means to tax or to spend, who is in debt to whom. It's not done so easily.
  - jbay808 6y ago
    > Either there must be corresponding downward mobility to make room at the top.. Assuming the population remains mortal, there will be a steady stream of vacant positions at the top and plenty of room for individual growth, even without overall economic growth.
  - laurent92 6y ago
    Assuming it is a 0-sum game is a mistake. The rich can stay rich and yet other people can rise above, if we build more and more elaborated structures, and in fact, this is a goal. The 0-sum game only exists if we keep the same structures, science, tech, governance and social hierarchies. About this, 86% of today’s billionaires didn’t have billionaire parents. The elites were surprisingly well renewed for our generation. Some people would want the social elevator to work from -1 to +100 in one generation, this is unrealistic and wouldn’t even be wise because it takes a lot of knowledge to manage large groups of people. But if the top 40% can threaten the top 1% at each generation, and the bottom 60% threaten the top 40% in a single generation, then we’ve made it, we’ve given power to people who will need to keep working if they want to stay atop, and they’ll be accountable, and this is the important part.
    - thomasahle 6y ago
      > Assuming it is a 0-sum game is a mistake. The rich can stay rich and yet other people can rise above Money is not 0-sum, but power is, and power is really the point of economic inequality. So yes, right now some people have too little power in our society, and for them to rise, others have to fall (relatively speaking).
      - ghufran_syed 6y ago
        Could you please define what you mean by "power" and explain why it's zero-sum?
        newen 6y ago
        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_(social_and_political) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_(social_and_political)
wtn 6y ago
We Were Soldiers Once… and Young
taurath 6y ago
We were also owners once, and not all land and property was already spoke for and regulated against building more. One of the problems that I think could help this a lot is income inequality. The economic gains are no longer that of the people working for them, but those of the ownership class. The only way to get ahead is to become an Owner, and such a thing is harder and harder as one has to compete against entire organizations of owners.
- 8note 6y ago
  Technically the government was in the business of taking land from people to give it to other people at the time. It's not like there was just empty land
  - taurath 6y ago
    I mean, yeah there was, though yes the governments owned it and sold it to developers.
    - brundolf 6y ago
      I think 8note is referring to the native people who were being forcibly displaced
      - throwawaywrench 6y ago
        Possibly although at some point someone had to be the first humans in an area
        dcposch 6y ago
        Lot of callousness in that comment. > Possibly Definitely. > at some point someone had to be the first humans in an area Yes, and we know who they were. Hundreds of different tribes, spanning from coast to coast. They came during the last Ice Age, crossing over the Bering Straight which was solid ground at that time. The way American settlers treated the native peoples is not something that can just be "possibly"-d away.
mdorazio 6y ago
It seems like a bit of a paradox. We gave up being builders in favor of increasing productivity and giving more Americans white collar jobs that improved standard of living. But at the same time, doing that kind of doomed future generations to stagnation and decline of equality. I don't know if there is an actual way that both goals could have been accomplished.
- Baeocystin 6y ago
  Germany has a strong labor force, and their economy is one of the best in the world. It is 100% possible.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    I don't think this has much to do with a manufacturing economy. On a per capita basis, the US is competitive with or even ahead of Germany (depending on which statistics you believe) on manufacturing output.
    - nicbou 6y ago
      Then again, America has a giant, English-speaking market right at hand. The relatively new EU is comparable, but it's new, and not quite equivalent.
  - georgeplusplus 6y ago
    Germany’s economy has a negative interest rate on their Bond yields. That isnt the sign of a healthy and strong economy.
  - adventured 6y ago
    If Germany's economy is one of the best, why is their median net wealth lower than the US and why hasn't the German economy net expanded since 2007-2008? The US median adult wealth figure is now 85% higher than Germany's figure, and the US figure is nothing spectacular. If Germany's labor position is so great, why are their workers so relatively poor? People constantly applaud Germany for their supposedly great labor protections and unions. So where's the wealth? Germany's median wealth per adult is below that of Greece. Let that sink in for a moment. It's 1/2 that of South Korea. It's nearly 1/3 that of France. For 2019 Germany's GDP was $3.84 trillion. In 2008 it was $3.73 trillion. Inflation adjusted, Germany's economy contracted by at least 1/4 in a mere 11 years. That's a vanishing economy, and that's all pre-Covid. A decade plus with zero net growth is one of the best economies in the world? No it's not, it's a contracting economy with no wealth creation occurring and an impending assault by China on their high value manufacturing. Germany is standing in a very bad spot. Whether they realize that yet or not is another matter. Here's the next 20 years for the German economy: China will take a giant chunk out of their high value manufacturing export machine. The average German will have to work a lot more hours just to stand still, while they attempt to retire with very little savings at the median ($35k isn't going to cut it). The industrial hollowing out that Germany will suffer, is one that the US has already gone through, and it's a brutal thing for a society to endure, especially starting from a position of a terrible median wealth figure and an economy that is contracting persistently. Those super low hours per week that they've been enjoying? They've been trading on their future and haven't been generating enough wealth to sustain against what's coming for them.
nl 6y ago
Clearly this is written by someone who only values physical building and doesn't understand that software is exactly the same thing.
- defterGoose 6y ago
  I disagree, though im not surprised to see this sentiment iterated here on HN. I think we've already started to see the beginning of diminishing returns on our software investments. I agree that we haven't in any way reached peak deployment of productive, intelligent software in the world, but even once we get there the robots still need to actuate in the physical world. Jointly, I think the sheer amount of investment thrown at pure software ventures in the past 20 years has certainly colored our perception of their potential agency, since financial output is only a fuzzy indicator of economic good. If general AI was on the horizon, I might be able to give this attitude the benefit of the doubt, but we cant even rigorously prove that it's possible at this juncture. The largest deployments of the latest generation of software acumen are probably social media, and I hope we've learned that that's anything but a panacea.
  - nl 6y ago
    It was only 2020 that people outside the software industry started using video conference as more than a novelty. It seems surprising that people think software is close to done (and even if it was, it doesn't invalidate the supposition). > robots still need to actuate in the physical world I suspect they might need a little bit of software written. More people work on apps for the iPhone than worked building the iPhone.
  - parksy 6y ago
    Social media and mass data analytics are just tips of the iceberg in terms of the impact these types of technology can have on society (for better or worse) From these beginnings we have seen a rise in mass groups of people organising behaviours in cohesion even despite the rudimentary interface of keyboard, camera and screen, and going out on a bit of a limb viewed from above it operates like a group brain or gestalt entity. In that view we've seen the birth in recent decades a form of aggregate intelligence that hasn't existed before in history except perhaps crude and 1-way through newspapers and television propaganda. One can imagine a platform using real time analytics, more deeply integrated into people's thinking and behaviours, that can be set to more productive goals than targeted content, advertising, and disinformation, and that may be driven less by central authority and more by the will of the collective, as weird as that sounds I can't see how it's not a possible future. Again for better or worse I don't think we've seen the end of what we call "social media" and its ilk, and I think despite efforts to control it, there is a good chance for some upset to the status quo as further iterations of the technologies become more ingrained and capable and exert greater influence on the various forces and tensions in the world. Or not, who knows, weird times we're living in.
dash2 6y ago
Really interesting. One tiny point: I think it’s bad to use the word “Karen”, since it has a racist flavour analogous to “Aunt Jemima”. (NB: I have no desire to sidetrack a potentially interesting discussion into a dull one about race, whiteness etc., so please don’t be offended if I don’t reply to replies.)
- ewmiller 6y ago
  That seems a bit much, but I do feel bad for anyone named Karen now that it's become a meme. It seems really insensitive to turn a person's name into a pejorative.
  - Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
    A John or Chad is a colloquialism for certain types of men. I've met countless men named both and never heard them complain about sharing a name with these slang terms. There are countless other examples in English and other languages. Amazon coopted Alexa. Apple, siri. I've met more than one person named Isis. Unfortunately language is still a rough tool. We name things from mathematical proofs, to sea slugs, or even groups of people with certain identifiable characteristics, arbitrarily and sometimes capriciously. Ultimately those effected find a way to adapt to an environment that's coopted one of their identifiers under a new definition in the collective lexicon. Trying to fight it usually just makes things worse.
charliebrownau 6y ago
We were also Unifed Nation Unifed Race Unifed Community Thanks JEWS Without jews we would of never had Black slave Trade KKK ANTIFA WWI/WWII/Gulf War Diversity Feminism Female voteing Non native immergration Multi racial society Group rights Pussy pass Lower standards for non ethnic native population
Sniffnoy 6y ago
Non-mobile link: https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/10/we-were-builders-once-and-strong.html https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/10/we-were-builders...
- dang 6y ago
  Changed from https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/10/we-were-builders-once-and-strong.html?m=1 https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/10/we-were-builders.... Thanks!
99_00 6y ago
It comes down to this: >New England led the WORLD in educational facilities and literacy at midcentury.
sien 6y ago
To paraphrase Monty Python: Look, other than building Amazon, Netflix, Google, Facebook, the Iphone, Tesla, SpaceX, Uber, Lyft, Stripe, AirBnB, Epic Games, Steam, Instacart and others what have Americans built lately?
- WalterBright 6y ago
  The billionaires have gotten younger and younger, too.
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    making the whole eat the rich idea much more enticing.
- gambiting 6y ago
  Almost all of these are products of the wealthy, for the wealthy. America used to stand for quality and ingenuity - american tools, cars, or even just methods of work and production were world class and many countries strived to copy them, import them, buy them. Nowadays America has turned into a playground for the rich, with American products generally considered sub-par, with systems and methods being studied as how to "not" do things, and generally settling into a position of a global player who only has to be respected because it's wealthy, not because it is actually a leader in anything other than wealth extraction. To put it in a different way - America is falling down in almost every metric that measures quality of life globally. But yeah, they built Facebook and Apple, and Apple is one of it not the wealthiest companies in the world, so that counts for something, yeah?
  - travisoneill1 6y ago
    You make more money selling to rich people. And, yeah, having the wealthiest companies in the world counts for a lot.
    - LunaSea 6y ago
      For whom?
pjc50 6y ago
If I may offer a non-American's view on this: the article devotes most of its effort to the conflict in the 1850s between "Yankees" (northern, educated, industrious) and "Southrons" (less educated, militaristic, pro-slavery, belief in extracting wealth through coerced physical labour of others). > "This is what a healthy building culture looks like. The Southrons did not have it, and partially lost their war because of it. America grew strong in their loss: the Yankee culture of building came out of the war triumphant, and those who won the war would go on to build the country we live in today." (This reads like Yankee propaganda, but it's not historically inaccurate) However, the Southrons never went away. Somehow they built statues to their defeated leaders. And it seems - again, as an outsider - that so many of the US's current problems stem from the south rising again and replacing "builder" culture with supremacist, anti-science culture.
wonnage 6y ago
This trope of cultures growing decadent and lazy before being overthrown is simply not true outside of fantasy novels. Here's a series that goes through actual history: https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/ https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
- dash2 6y ago
  Maybe, but plenty of intelligent specialists have thought otherwise. * It was a common idea about the Roman empire. Gibbon found it plausible though he invoked other mechanisms. * John Stuart Mill, who was hardly a pompous conservative: https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/12/11/luxury-and-societal-decadence/ https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/12/11/luxury-and-societa... * Toynbee too. * More recently Francis Fukuyama wrote Political Order and Political Decay.
CalRobert 6y ago
The line from creator to consumer has become increasingly long and tenuous. This can increase efficiency (knitting your own clothes is slow and the capital required for a clothes factory prohibitive), but it also means that the learning required to improve things is something for specialists, and not an everyday person. I think the wonder of software, at least at one point (80's to early 2000's), was that you were using a thing that you could also improve - it was a short path from consuming web sites to creating them, for instance. The clever youngster described in the article could easily look at something and think "I can make this better" and learn how in a practical time frame. I'm not sure that's still possible now. It's still easy to make a 90's website, but building production-quality work is increasingly specialized. It hasn't really materialized, but this was part of the early excitement behind 3d printing - finally, when you saw a plastic widget that could be made better, you could try it out on your own, cheaply and quickly! It probably doesn't help, either, that our most valuable assets are controlled by cartels and monopolies. If you want to build a home near decent jobs, you will find doing so defaults to being illegal, and you need to beg for an exemption to be allowed to do so. We allow owners of homes to vote whether to allow building more homes (making them effectively a cartel). If you want to produce software for phones, you need to give a cut to the two big manufacturers, or risk irrelevance. The existing players have such big network effects there's very little room for new entrants to the market. If you have a clever idea for an invention, and want to use it, you risk inviting extremely expensive lawsuits from huge companies who have coopted the patent system to show they have prior art for nearly anything you can imagine, and have worked to capture the courts deciding these cases. It's not completely unlike a cobbler's guild shutting down a clever new shoe design that threatens incumbents. What does the clever young person with a good idea do now, aside from try to win VC in an incredibly crowded and competitive market?
scottlocklin 6y ago
Terrible take; basically flinging poop at the agricultural southern economy without mentioning, you know, how the North kind of burned most of it down. He quotes a nice description of the American skilled working class of the 1800s, then somehow forgets about those people: you know -the people who actually built everything. The genius of our skilled working class machinist types is now wasted in coming up with new workman's comp schemes rather than building things, because you shipped most of his jobs and his future prosperity overseas. This is pretty much all of it in a nutshell. In Germany those people are building things. In America, it's difficult to make a living building things, so the brightest of them go into IT or whatever. Scumbag economists make up excuses for why improving some scam figure like the overall GDP is good for the 50 year old machinist whose job has been shipped to China, and who has to go to work as a Walmart greeter or janitor in a heroin clinic. It's not good for him, his family and community, or the country. And it's not good for my blood pressure reading ding dongs like this talking about the South versus the North versus Karen. Talk about the human capital we've destroyed with our imbecile looter pyramid scheme economic theories. Everyone gabbles on about training for "STEM jobs" -the ones involving matter actually count if you want to become a society of builders.

92 points by barry-cotter 6y ago

...to promote economic growth and upward mobility... I've always thought that upward mobility is what gives hope and hope is the fuel of persistence. Persistence coupled with patience and passion makes it possible to grow economically.

rebuilder 6y ago
But what does upward mobility look like without economic growth? Either there must be corresponding downward mobility to make room at the top, or resource distribution must become more egalitarian, at the expense of the better-off. From that I'd argue that upward mobility is enabled by economic growth.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  The important thing is not generalized upward mobility, but the hope of individual upward mobility. An economically stagnant society where anyone has a solid opportunity to better themselves and where no one is in a very bad nor hopeless situation would provide this well enough.
  - Animats 6y ago
    “Hope. It’s the only thing stronger than fear. A little hope is effective. A lot of hope is dangerous. Spark is fine, as long as it’s contained.”
    - 6510 6y ago
      We need both to function. Downward-mobility sounds fantastic to me. All we have of the kind are fines and prison.
    - trashtester 6y ago
      Hope is fueled by depravation. When someone is experiencing hunger, cold, loneliness, sexual unfulfilment or lack of a sense of meaning, the possibility of improvement in those areas can be an extreme force. This can cause people to be willing to face severe risks to improve their situation. This is what makes "hope" so dangerous, since the risky things people are willing to do can be quite destructive to themselves and others. If people are already content, fear tends to be stronger than hope. This comes with its own downsides, of course. People become passive, and society becomes stagnant and eventually corrupted due to lack of rejuvinating forces. As you say, a balance is needed. Some needs must require some positive effort in order to be fulfilled. But if only the most anti social and ruthless get their needs fulfilled, society breaks down even faster.
- javajosh 6y ago
  Well, maybe there is another option. Call it "inward mobility". It is where your life becomes better, more organized, more healthy, within the bounds of, e.g. your energy expenditures or your draw on natural resources. There is an analogy with racing: in drag racing, you always want to go faster and faster, with no upper bound. But there is another form of racing, rally racing, which hinges on precision and control rather than raw speed. My recent experience living in Germany gave me a real sense of what that's like. There is a cultural affinity for "progress means innovation aimed at ever more closely and efficiently adhering to a standard". So this means, for example, the beer in Germany is very consistent over decades, sometimes centuries, is cheaper than soda, and there isn't much variety. (a similar story for Ireland's Guiness, BTW). Or take the German knife maker Wüsthof, which unusually for a large knife maker uses entirely one steel, one style of blade, across the line (okay there are exceptions but these are rare). They've fixed the larger values of a boundary condition, but still find room to innovate within that space. I can't help but think that this is a healthier way to think about progress and growth, rather than the very American approach that progress always means more, but never just better.
  - megameter 6y ago
    This sentiment coincides with the problem of measuring "the economy". The major notions we have inherited of economy derive from the rentier merchants of early modernity. They took to the idea of seeing a nation as a balance sheet, a tabulation of assets: men, ships, iron. From this idea we get the idea of putting more assets on the balance sheet through trade and colonization, rather than tribute. This lasted a few centuries, but by the point of transition to an industrial economy it had already become clear in the writings of Enlightenment philosphers that it was not quite as simple as possession and accounting of the raw assets, but their organization too. The gross product and employment figures we started using to measure organization generalized things, but also suffer from limited scope - if it's not a money transaction, if the work is unpaid, it's outside "the economy". In the long 19th century it was very straightforward to devise ways to purpose inventions towards economic benefit: take an existing trade, buy up more raw materials through the canals and rails, run it through the factory, sell more product. With the second industrial revolution, another "wave" of products appeared that substituted common uses of labor: canned food instead of fresh, telecommunication instead of express mail, and an increasing number of mechanized devices. It got much harder in the 20th century as more of the inventions relied on developing consumer habits and did not reflect a traditional trade. The dilemma was averted through marketing techniques: Everyone uses toothpaste and shampoo, watches the new television show, and desires a new car, a bigger house and a higher-paying job. Creative financing ideas took up the rest of the slack, allowing consumers to get their hands on the stuff and set lifestyle expectations that are higher than reasonable. So, by the early 21st century everyone simultaneously has too much "stuff", is unhappy because of the marketing, and is in debt because of the financing. But GDP is higher, so the system persists, up until now. That trend makes me think that "building" is at an end, and something more like the German system has to take hold. America's consumer economy is now developing a multitude of niches, marketed through various online storefronts, Kickstarters and viral video. Appreciation of the best stuff of past years has risen as more of that material surfaces online and rubs shoulders with "new" stuff. Where this emerging system struggles the most, it can usually be traced back to the old power structures and their large footprint on the economy. And to a great degree the measure of the economy is tied to those structures: growth and employment figures feed into the taxation and spending model. Change the measure and you have to realign what it means to tax or to spend, who is in debt to whom. It's not done so easily.
- jbay808 6y ago
  > Either there must be corresponding downward mobility to make room at the top.. Assuming the population remains mortal, there will be a steady stream of vacant positions at the top and plenty of room for individual growth, even without overall economic growth.
- laurent92 6y ago
  Assuming it is a 0-sum game is a mistake. The rich can stay rich and yet other people can rise above, if we build more and more elaborated structures, and in fact, this is a goal. The 0-sum game only exists if we keep the same structures, science, tech, governance and social hierarchies. About this, 86% of today’s billionaires didn’t have billionaire parents. The elites were surprisingly well renewed for our generation. Some people would want the social elevator to work from -1 to +100 in one generation, this is unrealistic and wouldn’t even be wise because it takes a lot of knowledge to manage large groups of people. But if the top 40% can threaten the top 1% at each generation, and the bottom 60% threaten the top 40% in a single generation, then we’ve made it, we’ve given power to people who will need to keep working if they want to stay atop, and they’ll be accountable, and this is the important part.
  - thomasahle 6y ago
    > Assuming it is a 0-sum game is a mistake. The rich can stay rich and yet other people can rise above Money is not 0-sum, but power is, and power is really the point of economic inequality. So yes, right now some people have too little power in our society, and for them to rise, others have to fall (relatively speaking).
    - ghufran_syed 6y ago
      Could you please define what you mean by "power" and explain why it's zero-sum?
      - newen 6y ago
        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_(social_and_political) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_(social_and_political)

wtn 6y ago

We Were Soldiers Once… and Young

taurath 6y ago

We were also owners once, and not all land and property was already spoke for and regulated against building more. One of the problems that I think could help this a lot is income inequality. The economic gains are no longer that of the people working for them, but those of the ownership class. The only way to get ahead is to become an Owner, and such a thing is harder and harder as one has to compete against entire organizations of owners.

8note 6y ago
Technically the government was in the business of taking land from people to give it to other people at the time. It's not like there was just empty land
- taurath 6y ago
  I mean, yeah there was, though yes the governments owned it and sold it to developers.
  - brundolf 6y ago
    I think 8note is referring to the native people who were being forcibly displaced
    - throwawaywrench 6y ago
      Possibly although at some point someone had to be the first humans in an area
      - dcposch 6y ago
        Lot of callousness in that comment. > Possibly Definitely. > at some point someone had to be the first humans in an area Yes, and we know who they were. Hundreds of different tribes, spanning from coast to coast. They came during the last Ice Age, crossing over the Bering Straight which was solid ground at that time. The way American settlers treated the native peoples is not something that can just be "possibly"-d away.

mdorazio 6y ago

It seems like a bit of a paradox. We gave up being builders in favor of increasing productivity and giving more Americans white collar jobs that improved standard of living. But at the same time, doing that kind of doomed future generations to stagnation and decline of equality. I don't know if there is an actual way that both goals could have been accomplished.

Baeocystin 6y ago
Germany has a strong labor force, and their economy is one of the best in the world. It is 100% possible.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  I don't think this has much to do with a manufacturing economy. On a per capita basis, the US is competitive with or even ahead of Germany (depending on which statistics you believe) on manufacturing output.
  - nicbou 6y ago
    Then again, America has a giant, English-speaking market right at hand. The relatively new EU is comparable, but it's new, and not quite equivalent.
- georgeplusplus 6y ago
  Germany’s economy has a negative interest rate on their Bond yields. That isnt the sign of a healthy and strong economy.
- adventured 6y ago
  If Germany's economy is one of the best, why is their median net wealth lower than the US and why hasn't the German economy net expanded since 2007-2008? The US median adult wealth figure is now 85% higher than Germany's figure, and the US figure is nothing spectacular. If Germany's labor position is so great, why are their workers so relatively poor? People constantly applaud Germany for their supposedly great labor protections and unions. So where's the wealth? Germany's median wealth per adult is below that of Greece. Let that sink in for a moment. It's 1/2 that of South Korea. It's nearly 1/3 that of France. For 2019 Germany's GDP was $3.84 trillion. In 2008 it was $3.73 trillion. Inflation adjusted, Germany's economy contracted by at least 1/4 in a mere 11 years. That's a vanishing economy, and that's all pre-Covid. A decade plus with zero net growth is one of the best economies in the world? No it's not, it's a contracting economy with no wealth creation occurring and an impending assault by China on their high value manufacturing. Germany is standing in a very bad spot. Whether they realize that yet or not is another matter. Here's the next 20 years for the German economy: China will take a giant chunk out of their high value manufacturing export machine. The average German will have to work a lot more hours just to stand still, while they attempt to retire with very little savings at the median ($35k isn't going to cut it). The industrial hollowing out that Germany will suffer, is one that the US has already gone through, and it's a brutal thing for a society to endure, especially starting from a position of a terrible median wealth figure and an economy that is contracting persistently. Those super low hours per week that they've been enjoying? They've been trading on their future and haven't been generating enough wealth to sustain against what's coming for them.

nl 6y ago

Clearly this is written by someone who only values physical building and doesn't understand that software is exactly the same thing.

defterGoose 6y ago
I disagree, though im not surprised to see this sentiment iterated here on HN. I think we've already started to see the beginning of diminishing returns on our software investments. I agree that we haven't in any way reached peak deployment of productive, intelligent software in the world, but even once we get there the robots still need to actuate in the physical world. Jointly, I think the sheer amount of investment thrown at pure software ventures in the past 20 years has certainly colored our perception of their potential agency, since financial output is only a fuzzy indicator of economic good. If general AI was on the horizon, I might be able to give this attitude the benefit of the doubt, but we cant even rigorously prove that it's possible at this juncture. The largest deployments of the latest generation of software acumen are probably social media, and I hope we've learned that that's anything but a panacea.
- nl 6y ago
  It was only 2020 that people outside the software industry started using video conference as more than a novelty. It seems surprising that people think software is close to done (and even if it was, it doesn't invalidate the supposition). > robots still need to actuate in the physical world I suspect they might need a little bit of software written. More people work on apps for the iPhone than worked building the iPhone.
- parksy 6y ago
  Social media and mass data analytics are just tips of the iceberg in terms of the impact these types of technology can have on society (for better or worse) From these beginnings we have seen a rise in mass groups of people organising behaviours in cohesion even despite the rudimentary interface of keyboard, camera and screen, and going out on a bit of a limb viewed from above it operates like a group brain or gestalt entity. In that view we've seen the birth in recent decades a form of aggregate intelligence that hasn't existed before in history except perhaps crude and 1-way through newspapers and television propaganda. One can imagine a platform using real time analytics, more deeply integrated into people's thinking and behaviours, that can be set to more productive goals than targeted content, advertising, and disinformation, and that may be driven less by central authority and more by the will of the collective, as weird as that sounds I can't see how it's not a possible future. Again for better or worse I don't think we've seen the end of what we call "social media" and its ilk, and I think despite efforts to control it, there is a good chance for some upset to the status quo as further iterations of the technologies become more ingrained and capable and exert greater influence on the various forces and tensions in the world. Or not, who knows, weird times we're living in.

dash2 6y ago

Really interesting. One tiny point: I think it’s bad to use the word “Karen”, since it has a racist flavour analogous to “Aunt Jemima”. (NB: I have no desire to sidetrack a potentially interesting discussion into a dull one about race, whiteness etc., so please don’t be offended if I don’t reply to replies.)

ewmiller 6y ago
That seems a bit much, but I do feel bad for anyone named Karen now that it's become a meme. It seems really insensitive to turn a person's name into a pejorative.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
  A John or Chad is a colloquialism for certain types of men. I've met countless men named both and never heard them complain about sharing a name with these slang terms. There are countless other examples in English and other languages. Amazon coopted Alexa. Apple, siri. I've met more than one person named Isis. Unfortunately language is still a rough tool. We name things from mathematical proofs, to sea slugs, or even groups of people with certain identifiable characteristics, arbitrarily and sometimes capriciously. Ultimately those effected find a way to adapt to an environment that's coopted one of their identifiers under a new definition in the collective lexicon. Trying to fight it usually just makes things worse.

charliebrownau 6y ago

We were also Unifed Nation Unifed Race Unifed Community Thanks JEWS Without jews we would of never had Black slave Trade KKK ANTIFA WWI/WWII/Gulf War Diversity Feminism Female voteing Non native immergration Multi racial society Group rights Pussy pass Lower standards for non ethnic native population

Sniffnoy 6y ago

Non-mobile link: https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/10/we-were-builders-once-and-strong.html https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/10/we-were-builders...

dang 6y ago
Changed from https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/10/we-were-builders-once-and-strong.html?m=1 https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/10/we-were-builders.... Thanks!

99_00 6y ago

It comes down to this: >New England led the WORLD in educational facilities and literacy at midcentury.

sien 6y ago

To paraphrase Monty Python: Look, other than building Amazon, Netflix, Google, Facebook, the Iphone, Tesla, SpaceX, Uber, Lyft, Stripe, AirBnB, Epic Games, Steam, Instacart and others what have Americans built lately?

WalterBright 6y ago
The billionaires have gotten younger and younger, too.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  making the whole eat the rich idea much more enticing.
gambiting 6y ago
Almost all of these are products of the wealthy, for the wealthy. America used to stand for quality and ingenuity - american tools, cars, or even just methods of work and production were world class and many countries strived to copy them, import them, buy them. Nowadays America has turned into a playground for the rich, with American products generally considered sub-par, with systems and methods being studied as how to "not" do things, and generally settling into a position of a global player who only has to be respected because it's wealthy, not because it is actually a leader in anything other than wealth extraction. To put it in a different way - America is falling down in almost every metric that measures quality of life globally. But yeah, they built Facebook and Apple, and Apple is one of it not the wealthiest companies in the world, so that counts for something, yeah?
- travisoneill1 6y ago
  You make more money selling to rich people. And, yeah, having the wealthiest companies in the world counts for a lot.
  - LunaSea 6y ago
    For whom?

pjc50 6y ago

If I may offer a non-American's view on this: the article devotes most of its effort to the conflict in the 1850s between "Yankees" (northern, educated, industrious) and "Southrons" (less educated, militaristic, pro-slavery, belief in extracting wealth through coerced physical labour of others). > "This is what a healthy building culture looks like. The Southrons did not have it, and partially lost their war because of it. America grew strong in their loss: the Yankee culture of building came out of the war triumphant, and those who won the war would go on to build the country we live in today." (This reads like Yankee propaganda, but it's not historically inaccurate) However, the Southrons never went away. Somehow they built statues to their defeated leaders. And it seems - again, as an outsider - that so many of the US's current problems stem from the south rising again and replacing "builder" culture with supremacist, anti-science culture.

wonnage 6y ago

This trope of cultures growing decadent and lazy before being overthrown is simply not true outside of fantasy novels. Here's a series that goes through actual history: https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/ https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...

dash2 6y ago
Maybe, but plenty of intelligent specialists have thought otherwise. * It was a common idea about the Roman empire. Gibbon found it plausible though he invoked other mechanisms. * John Stuart Mill, who was hardly a pompous conservative: https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/12/11/luxury-and-societal-decadence/ https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/12/11/luxury-and-societa... * Toynbee too. * More recently Francis Fukuyama wrote Political Order and Political Decay.

CalRobert 6y ago

The line from creator to consumer has become increasingly long and tenuous. This can increase efficiency (knitting your own clothes is slow and the capital required for a clothes factory prohibitive), but it also means that the learning required to improve things is something for specialists, and not an everyday person. I think the wonder of software, at least at one point (80's to early 2000's), was that you were using a thing that you could also improve - it was a short path from consuming web sites to creating them, for instance. The clever youngster described in the article could easily look at something and think "I can make this better" and learn how in a practical time frame. I'm not sure that's still possible now. It's still easy to make a 90's website, but building production-quality work is increasingly specialized. It hasn't really materialized, but this was part of the early excitement behind 3d printing - finally, when you saw a plastic widget that could be made better, you could try it out on your own, cheaply and quickly! It probably doesn't help, either, that our most valuable assets are controlled by cartels and monopolies. If you want to build a home near decent jobs, you will find doing so defaults to being illegal, and you need to beg for an exemption to be allowed to do so. We allow owners of homes to vote whether to allow building more homes (making them effectively a cartel). If you want to produce software for phones, you need to give a cut to the two big manufacturers, or risk irrelevance. The existing players have such big network effects there's very little room for new entrants to the market. If you have a clever idea for an invention, and want to use it, you risk inviting extremely expensive lawsuits from huge companies who have coopted the patent system to show they have prior art for nearly anything you can imagine, and have worked to capture the courts deciding these cases. It's not completely unlike a cobbler's guild shutting down a clever new shoe design that threatens incumbents. What does the clever young person with a good idea do now, aside from try to win VC in an incredibly crowded and competitive market?

scottlocklin 6y ago

Terrible take; basically flinging poop at the agricultural southern economy without mentioning, you know, how the North kind of burned most of it down. He quotes a nice description of the American skilled working class of the 1800s, then somehow forgets about those people: you know -the people who actually built everything. The genius of our skilled working class machinist types is now wasted in coming up with new workman's comp schemes rather than building things, because you shipped most of his jobs and his future prosperity overseas. This is pretty much all of it in a nutshell. In Germany those people are building things. In America, it's difficult to make a living building things, so the brightest of them go into IT or whatever. Scumbag economists make up excuses for why improving some scam figure like the overall GDP is good for the 50 year old machinist whose job has been shipped to China, and who has to go to work as a Walmart greeter or janitor in a heroin clinic. It's not good for him, his family and community, or the country. And it's not good for my blood pressure reading ding dongs like this talking about the South versus the North versus Karen. Talk about the human capital we've destroyed with our imbecile looter pyramid scheme economic theories. Everyone gabbles on about training for "STEM jobs" -the ones involving matter actually count if you want to become a society of builders.