The centralisation is abnormal. Used to have one blacksmith in each village making clone horseshoes and earning a living. Now there's one company in South Korea that makes all the world's horseshoes and earns a million livings while each village has minus one living. And the guy who invented the horseshoe is sleeping under a bridge.
Centralization offers efficiency gains, else it won't happen. Your imaginary company in South Korea likely makes a million horseshoes employing only 1000 people, and the horseshoes are good quality, and the price is like 5% of the price of a handcrafted horseshoe. Many more people can afford horseshoes as a result.
But think of the jobs! There used to be a million people involved in horseshoe-making, now there is only a thousand, and the rest of that million now has to do something else! And since there is literally nothing else for them to do, they'll have to die out :(
The most bizarre thing about the economical systems is that there indeed were cases where former workers of the industries that collapsed/disappeared indeed went the way of the dodo.
It depends on the speed of change though. If a million-strong industry collapses overnight, it can lead to really painful social disturbances. If it winds down in 10 years, the transition can be much more smooth.
At the start of the last century the UK had a million people working in the coal mining industry. Now it is effectively zero.
That reduction happened over a long period but it wasn't without its problems. Even now there are old coal mining villages that have never really recovered economically.
Very much so, nothing was done to even give them opportunities to get work anywhere else either. And then on top of that the Tories destroyed everything else.
This is an intentional policy choice btw. You could just legislate the horseshoe company pays 90% of each displaced blacksmith decreasing by 5% per year.
And hey, almost a million blacksmiths displaced is a huge block of voters that any elected politician would be glad to capture! Although I struggle to recall any of the examples of something like this happening in the real-world history.
I always find this line of thought interesting. Because it implies the manufacturer has all the power. But they don't. The consumer does.
Ultimately the manufacturer wins the horse-shoe battle because they are cheaper. And the consumers in the village prefer cheap shoes to locally made (expensive) ones.
Fundamentally consumers like cheap stuff. Manufacturing shifts happen because as soon as there's a cheaper output, you've won. Consumers will reliably switch to cheap. At the start there may be some brand loyalty, there may even be a quality difference, but both those erode quickly.
Lots of people promote the idea of buying locally, even if it's more expensive. But it's a hard message to sell, and a tough one to buy. I'm sorry for the blacksmith, but times are hard and I need my horses shod.
It's easy to blame capitalism or factory owners or foreign cheap labor or any other convenient political scapegoat. But the root of the problem is consumer preference for cheap (even if inferior) to the exclusion of everything else.
This is perhaps culturally most evident where the premise above is false. In the US for example food is low quality, but plentiful. In Europe food generally costs more, but is of a much higher standard. Portions are smaller. Quality is more important than quantity.
This is not by accident. Europe has deliberately fostered local food markets, local food production, and promoted a narrative around history and good production. Cheap food is available, but quality food has a strong foothold.
As to your general point, I don't think the blame can lie with the consumer as the consumer almost always does not have the expertise to recognize quality and understand the consequences of buying lower quality. Nor can you expect everyone to be an expert in everything. Without that expertise, buying a more expensive product is a gamble while a lower priced one is at least a known quantity even if it isn't the theoretically best deal.
But, of course, there's no law of nature saying that we have to organise our society according to "rational" market dynamics. Many writers (famously Adam Smith) have opined on the subject.
> I always find this line of thought interesting. Because it implies the manufacturer has all the power. But they don't. The consumer does.
There is difference between the political power and the economical power. The economical power of the aggregate consumer is vast, but it's unconsolidated, and doesn't usually translate into the political power. The economical power of several centralized/monopolized producers is also vast, but it's consolidated and usually does translate into the political power. Plus, you know, class consciousness and all that — the gentlemen and the nobles in the Parliament may bicker and backstab each other, but the moment the peasants revolt against the Enclosure Acts, they put their differences behind them and start the hangings.
> Ultimately the manufacturer wins the horse-shoe battle because they are cheaper.
Yeah, but they can speed their victory up by paying the legislature (or straight up being a large part of that legislature) to crack down on those small-scale manufacturers. License the blacksmithing itself, require obtaining certificates of quality for horseshoes for sale, and tax shoe-fitting unless it's done with the authorized horseshoes — and that's only barely scratching the surface.
You should share your crystal ball that tells you the future so you can help leaders accurately predict changes in supply and demand curves so that they can make better policy choices.
The opposite is actually true in reality. More people can afford X than ever before, for nearly any X that doesn’t involve directly paying for someone else’s labor.
Depends on the overarching economical policies. During the British rule, the Indian textile weavers went out of manufacturing business and had to switch to sustenance farming, and then perish during one of the many famines. And the Parliament legally forbade the public relief efforts, such as fundraisers to buy and send corn to the affected regions, explicitly citing the concerns that such efforts would skew the market forces and unbalance the trade.
Well, the guy who invented the horseshoe died thousands of years ago.
And the idea that one location making all the horseshoes means each village is minus one living is ignoring the other effects.
Now, all the villagers can get cheaper horseshoes, so they don’t have to spend as many resources on shoes for their horses, and can now invest more into what their village is best at, and sell those goods to other villages.
Of course, that doesn’t mean the blacksmith isn’t out of a job, but I always hate that so many people think the solution to that problem is to just give up the economic benefits of specialization instead of working to improve the distribution of the gains.
I've come to view the goal of things being cheap as an anti goal. The biggest contribution to us speed running killing our ecosystems. Maybe all of us going without more often would end up with a significantly higher standard of living in the long term.
>Now, all the villagers can get cheaper horseshoes, so they don’t have to spend as many resources on shoes for their horses, and can now invest more into what their village is best at, and sell those goods to other villages.
And for a village that had 50 such specialties... they can make do with 49 specialties. Then with 48. And 45 as well. 25 eventually. But some day in the future, their great-grandchildren wake up, and there are no jobs. That Korean factory even ships in tractors, so there's no farm labor work to be had for the 200 who didn't have a specialty. But the food still costs money. And it doesn't matter if the village is gone because those people moved to the city, there's not much work there either. And maybe there are even fewer people to worry about this, because when the moved to the city, those people stopped having children.
> And maybe there are even fewer people to worry about this, because when the moved to the city, those people stopped having children.
> Who is this good for? Is it good for you?
Well, as a global population reduction is sorely needed, this is good for pretty much everybody. There's absolutely no way we can keep extracting resources and polluting at the rate demanded by our current enormous population (which has more than doubled in my life time).
Unfortunately, your theory isn't working, as the population still grows.
>Well, as a global population reduction is sorely needed,
Retards in the 1960s believed such. But the reality is that it's not even needed a little. And subreplacement fertility isn't "population reduces for a bit, then stabilizes"... subreplacement fertility is actually "the population continues to shrink, accelerating and shrinking faster until extinction inevitably ensues".
So you're not really a "I want a lower population", you're part of a death cult that wants humans gone. Forever.
>this is good for pretty much everybody.
It hasn't been good for anyone, except some tiny minority that is measured as much less than 1%.
>There's absolutely no way we can keep extracting resources and polluting at the rate demanded by our current enormous population (which has more than doubled in my life time).
Already shrinking. Visibly, indisputably shrinking. And the western world isn't doing the polluting.
>Unfortunately, your theory isn't working, as the population still grows.
No, it already stopped growing. Ran out of gas, but as the car coasts to a stop you can delusionally pretend that the engine's still on, and that we aren't coasting up the hill. If somehow I were wrong, it wouldn't be unfortunate at all, it'd be a wondrous miracle.
I think this is missing the part of the story where the blacksmith in South Korea comes to open a shop in your backyard and yet you delay them for years for inane reasons.
The centralisation is abnormal. Used to have one blacksmith in each village making clone horseshoes and earning a living. Now there's one company in South Korea that makes all the world's horseshoes and earns a million livings while each village has minus one living. And the guy who invented the horseshoe is sleeping under a bridge.
Centralization offers efficiency gains, else it won't happen. Your imaginary company in South Korea likely makes a million horseshoes employing only 1000 people, and the horseshoes are good quality, and the price is like 5% of the price of a handcrafted horseshoe. Many more people can afford horseshoes as a result.
But think of the jobs! There used to be a million people involved in horseshoe-making, now there is only a thousand, and the rest of that million now has to do something else! And since there is literally nothing else for them to do, they'll have to die out :(
The most bizarre thing about the economical systems is that there indeed were cases where former workers of the industries that collapsed/disappeared indeed went the way of the dodo.
It depends on the speed of change though. If a million-strong industry collapses overnight, it can lead to really painful social disturbances. If it winds down in 10 years, the transition can be much more smooth.
BTW see also https://www.edge.org/conversation/gin-television-and-cogniti...
At the start of the last century the UK had a million people working in the coal mining industry. Now it is effectively zero.
That reduction happened over a long period but it wasn't without its problems. Even now there are old coal mining villages that have never really recovered economically.
Maybe the village hasn't recovered but what about the descendants of the miners who now work service jobs in London?
It's the descendants that don't leave that cause all the problems.
> Even now there are old coal mining villages that have never really recovered economically.
Are villages the correct unit to look at there though? Do individuals from these villages now have worse opportunities than they had before?
Very much so, nothing was done to even give them opportunities to get work anywhere else either. And then on top of that the Tories destroyed everything else.
This is an intentional policy choice btw. You could just legislate the horseshoe company pays 90% of each displaced blacksmith decreasing by 5% per year.
And hey, almost a million blacksmiths displaced is a huge block of voters that any elected politician would be glad to capture! Although I struggle to recall any of the examples of something like this happening in the real-world history.
Just shows how powerful capital interests are.
I always find this line of thought interesting. Because it implies the manufacturer has all the power. But they don't. The consumer does.
Ultimately the manufacturer wins the horse-shoe battle because they are cheaper. And the consumers in the village prefer cheap shoes to locally made (expensive) ones.
Fundamentally consumers like cheap stuff. Manufacturing shifts happen because as soon as there's a cheaper output, you've won. Consumers will reliably switch to cheap. At the start there may be some brand loyalty, there may even be a quality difference, but both those erode quickly.
Lots of people promote the idea of buying locally, even if it's more expensive. But it's a hard message to sell, and a tough one to buy. I'm sorry for the blacksmith, but times are hard and I need my horses shod.
It's easy to blame capitalism or factory owners or foreign cheap labor or any other convenient political scapegoat. But the root of the problem is consumer preference for cheap (even if inferior) to the exclusion of everything else.
This is perhaps culturally most evident where the premise above is false. In the US for example food is low quality, but plentiful. In Europe food generally costs more, but is of a much higher standard. Portions are smaller. Quality is more important than quantity.
This is not by accident. Europe has deliberately fostered local food markets, local food production, and promoted a narrative around history and good production. Cheap food is available, but quality food has a strong foothold.
> In Europe food generally costs more
Is this actually true?
As to your general point, I don't think the blame can lie with the consumer as the consumer almost always does not have the expertise to recognize quality and understand the consequences of buying lower quality. Nor can you expect everyone to be an expert in everything. Without that expertise, buying a more expensive product is a gamble while a lower priced one is at least a known quantity even if it isn't the theoretically best deal.
No, 10-15% higher in the US, even when they have lower quality and consume higher amounts of it.
Look up "race to the bottom", a term that describes lose-lose situations resulting from rational market dynamics.
But, of course, there's no law of nature saying that we have to organise our society according to "rational" market dynamics. Many writers (famously Adam Smith) have opined on the subject.
> I always find this line of thought interesting. Because it implies the manufacturer has all the power. But they don't. The consumer does.
There is difference between the political power and the economical power. The economical power of the aggregate consumer is vast, but it's unconsolidated, and doesn't usually translate into the political power. The economical power of several centralized/monopolized producers is also vast, but it's consolidated and usually does translate into the political power. Plus, you know, class consciousness and all that — the gentlemen and the nobles in the Parliament may bicker and backstab each other, but the moment the peasants revolt against the Enclosure Acts, they put their differences behind them and start the hangings.
> Ultimately the manufacturer wins the horse-shoe battle because they are cheaper.
Yeah, but they can speed their victory up by paying the legislature (or straight up being a large part of that legislature) to crack down on those small-scale manufacturers. License the blacksmithing itself, require obtaining certificates of quality for horseshoes for sale, and tax shoe-fitting unless it's done with the authorized horseshoes — and that's only barely scratching the surface.
That's also a way to create a new royalty class.
You should share your crystal ball that tells you the future so you can help leaders accurately predict changes in supply and demand curves so that they can make better policy choices.
Many fewer people can afford horseshoes as a result because all the money is at the horseshoe company.
The opposite is actually true in reality. More people can afford X than ever before, for nearly any X that doesn’t involve directly paying for someone else’s labor.
Depends on the overarching economical policies. During the British rule, the Indian textile weavers went out of manufacturing business and had to switch to sustenance farming, and then perish during one of the many famines. And the Parliament legally forbade the public relief efforts, such as fundraisers to buy and send corn to the affected regions, explicitly citing the concerns that such efforts would skew the market forces and unbalance the trade.
That seems less an indictment of economies of scale, and more an indictment of british colonialism
What doesn't involve paying for someone else's labor? You mean things that are pure profit?
You’re missing the word “directly.”
More people can afford to buy a toilet than ever before. The same may not be true of affording a plumber to install it.
Well, the guy who invented the horseshoe died thousands of years ago.
And the idea that one location making all the horseshoes means each village is minus one living is ignoring the other effects.
Now, all the villagers can get cheaper horseshoes, so they don’t have to spend as many resources on shoes for their horses, and can now invest more into what their village is best at, and sell those goods to other villages.
Basic Ricardian Economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardian_economics
Of course, that doesn’t mean the blacksmith isn’t out of a job, but I always hate that so many people think the solution to that problem is to just give up the economic benefits of specialization instead of working to improve the distribution of the gains.
>And the idea that one location making all the horseshoes means each village is minus one living is ignoring the other effects.
Ignoring all the possitive other effects as well.
I've come to view the goal of things being cheap as an anti goal. The biggest contribution to us speed running killing our ecosystems. Maybe all of us going without more often would end up with a significantly higher standard of living in the long term.
You do that by properly pricing in externalities, not by making everything harder to do so we can't put as much strain on the environment.
You are probably right that we need to have less stuff, but if we are going to have less, I would rather work less, too.
Externalities must be accounted for. Once that’s done, cheap should correlate well with being less ecologically harmful.
>Now, all the villagers can get cheaper horseshoes, so they don’t have to spend as many resources on shoes for their horses, and can now invest more into what their village is best at, and sell those goods to other villages.
And for a village that had 50 such specialties... they can make do with 49 specialties. Then with 48. And 45 as well. 25 eventually. But some day in the future, their great-grandchildren wake up, and there are no jobs. That Korean factory even ships in tractors, so there's no farm labor work to be had for the 200 who didn't have a specialty. But the food still costs money. And it doesn't matter if the village is gone because those people moved to the city, there's not much work there either. And maybe there are even fewer people to worry about this, because when the moved to the city, those people stopped having children.
Who is this good for? Is it good for you?
> And maybe there are even fewer people to worry about this, because when the moved to the city, those people stopped having children.
> Who is this good for? Is it good for you?
Well, as a global population reduction is sorely needed, this is good for pretty much everybody. There's absolutely no way we can keep extracting resources and polluting at the rate demanded by our current enormous population (which has more than doubled in my life time).
Unfortunately, your theory isn't working, as the population still grows.
It's unethical to reduce population by making people starve to death.
Of course it is. I have no idea why you'd suggest such a thing.
The population is still growing because people are living longer. There aren't many places left in the world with above replacement birth rates.
>Well, as a global population reduction is sorely needed,
Retards in the 1960s believed such. But the reality is that it's not even needed a little. And subreplacement fertility isn't "population reduces for a bit, then stabilizes"... subreplacement fertility is actually "the population continues to shrink, accelerating and shrinking faster until extinction inevitably ensues".
So you're not really a "I want a lower population", you're part of a death cult that wants humans gone. Forever.
>this is good for pretty much everybody.
It hasn't been good for anyone, except some tiny minority that is measured as much less than 1%.
>There's absolutely no way we can keep extracting resources and polluting at the rate demanded by our current enormous population (which has more than doubled in my life time).
Already shrinking. Visibly, indisputably shrinking. And the western world isn't doing the polluting.
>Unfortunately, your theory isn't working, as the population still grows.
No, it already stopped growing. Ran out of gas, but as the car coasts to a stop you can delusionally pretend that the engine's still on, and that we aren't coasting up the hill. If somehow I were wrong, it wouldn't be unfortunate at all, it'd be a wondrous miracle.
The other side of that is where there was a factory for the villagers to work in, and everybody had a wage, and a community.
The factory is now all robots, and only 3 people have a job there.
I think this is missing the part of the story where the blacksmith in South Korea comes to open a shop in your backyard and yet you delay them for years for inane reasons.
sure, but if the blacksmith starting passing off really shitty horseshoes he'd get driven out of town
The village grew as the world got smaller. The world has one blacksmith.