In A Crisis We Can Only Afford What We Can Already Do

Yup.

As a side note, the “certain technical truth” to the law of comparative advantage is more minimal than is generally realized. There are two basic problems with the law of comparative advantage. One of them was already a fatal flaw back when Ricardo came up with it–it assumes there is no such thing as the future or change. So, if your country is bad at manufacturing, it will ALWAYS be bad at manufacturing so there is no point in trying to do it or build up your ability to do it. The people Ricardo was lecturing about this largely ignored him if they had any choice–notably the Americans, who the British would have preferred if they just kept growing cotton or tobacco or whatever and kept importing British manufacture. Had the Americans followed this advice, history would have been very different. But they didn’t, they went protectionist and worked hard to build up indigenous industry.

The other was not a problem in Ricardo’s day, and might well have led him, if he arrived in the present, to point out that his law does not apply to modern circumstances. That is, in Ricardo’s day capital mostly did not move across national boundaries; foreign investment wasn’t much of a thing. When foreign investment is a thing, it changes the math and comparative advantage stops working.

Back when free trade first started being a thing, when I was much less politically and economically radical than I am now, even then I pointed out repeatedly that everyone was talking about free TRADE, but a lot of the big stuff in the agreements was actually about free INVESTMENT, which was a very different thing likely to have very bad results. IMO it has.

I was talking with my wife the other day about how completely dysfunctional every company we have ever worked for has been.

For most of my adult life I worked in a small industry with small businesses, usually held by the founder or a small group of founders. I believed that the dysfunction I encountered in those companies was a result of the lack of business sense of the founders and the fact that the companies existed as much to expand the reach if their egos as to produce product and make a profit.

Then when that industry went pear shaped I started working in the “real world,” for companies for whom the profits of that prior industry would seem like a quarterly accounting error.

I discovered that, contrary to my belief that I’d finally be working for a “professional company,” that the vastly bigger companies were vastly, exponentially more dysfunctional, from the bottom all the way to the top.

I’d now long considered that this was a fairly recent development, since Reagan and etc., but after long discussions with older workers and this recent conversation with my wife, realized…

American business has always been a dysfunctional shit show, buried in piles of waste and foolishness.

It was only ever the vast, “unexploited” resources that were seized from the natives that allowed US businesses to operate as they did and do. That was a HUGE leg up, and still, with all the US industry, for lost if it’s history it was barely able to support it’s own needs.

Recall that until WWII, most Americans lived under effective Third World conditions for the time, living a subsistence lifestyle combining wage slavery and gardening their small farm like plots that enabled them to survive through recessions and depressions. Of course their corporate masters lived in palatial mansions that put the castles if kings to shame.

But then WWII left the rest of the industrial world in rubble, usually with severe manpower issues, and the US hit it’s peak. The Average Joe got yo at least lick the brass ring, for a while.

And it’s all been downhill from there, ca. 1970s and peak oil, further exacerbated by off shoring and other shenanigans designed to return all the profit back to the hands of the corporate masters.

And it all survived American’s utter inability to properly run businesses in any reasonable manner. The egos of owners and managers have ALWAYS been paramount in US businesses, profitability or even survival be damned.

Now that business, like society, is reverting to type here in the states, it will be interesting to see how quickly and completely remaining business collapses once all the regulations are taken away and the egos are completely free to wallow in their own crapulence with the rickety house of oil soaked moth eaten cards that remains…

civilizations and states must reproduce themselves continuously, as any organic thing does

it is as that reproduction cycle fails that the real trouble begins — when the political economy no longer has the capacity to produce what it produced in the past but which must be replaced

rapid technological advance has meant that many elaborate systems built historically have been abandoned, replaced not by reproduction so much as displaced by new production we never replaced sailing ships we never replaced the elaborate network of streetcars we are not replacing copper-wire telephone systems

but our collective instinct in the face of the challenges of climate change, resource depletion and ecological collapse seems to be a panicky conservatism wanting to replace the petroleum-based automotive transportation system with an exact analog powered (magically?) by electricity

the thing is, we have never had to generate sufficient surplus from the depreciation of existing inherited systems to reproduce them nor to maintain the capacity to produce them (which is much the same thing) the U.S. does not have the capacity to produce steel or concrete neither the organizational and management skills nor the technical “manual” skills to build efficiently and effectively have been maintained — they’ve been liquidated to maintain consumption on the cheap while transferring massive wealth claims to the top

as we go forward, i would expect the falter to come one disaster or catastrophe at a time, but unfolding in slow motion Boeing furnishes a prime example the resources to design a fresh design as successor to the 737 could not be allocated given the desire to cash out executives and shareholders — classic failure to reproduce with generational succession — a series of expedients are employed to reproduce on the cheap and the space the 737 occupied gradually falls apart

the Key bridge in Baltimore collapsed like a cheap suit the first thing i thought when i saw the video was “what a stupid bridge design! . . . cheap obviously but no thought to what might happen” we don’t hold anyone accountable we look at this and think “accidents happen there’s nothing anyone could do” we do not collectively ask “who approved such an idiotic design that the whole thing falls apart, not just the parts directly connected to the impacted column no one asks, where is the disaster recovery plan? if you have a bridge that is this vulnerable, surely there’s a plan?

it won’t take much painful, prolonged delay in clearing the bridge to destroy Baltimore as a working port. maybe i will be pleasantly surprised and rapid action will take place despite the instant excuses of the helpless, hopeless Buttiegieg.

but in the medium-run, i expect more failures to rebuild rapidly or adequately or at all too much of the upward redistribution of income and wealth depends delicately not on returns on investment but on cashing out depreciating assets and capabilities by not repairing or replacing

the fires in Maui nothing is being rebuilt for the (soon to be former?) residents Gaza, yeah no Ukraine, ha ha a Florida hurricane or three? an earthquake amongst the San Juan islands? a major city actually running out of drinking water? or a heat wave with sustained wet bulb temperatures that make its region uninhabitable?

This post is highly instructive of what Ian is talking about. Start here, then map to the present. Cheap plentiful oil + industrial policy = the massive ahistoric U.S. middle class. Lay the same map on the demise of the middle class and the demise of cheap oil and industry.

We tried to do it again with the fracking boom, but the energy cost of energy is way too high. I go back to one of my pinned toots over at Mastodon:

“Capitalism is little more than an ideological hangover produced from a time long past when low hanging fruit was everywhere for the taking and people thought it would never disappear. The fruit is gone, folks. If we ever want it back, capitalism won’t take us there.”

@Eric Anderson,

Several decades ago an American historian named Walter Prescott Webb wrote a book about just this subject, called The Great Frontier. His thesis was that with the Columbian intrusion in Turtle Island ( the “discovery of America”), that the teeming masses and grasping classes of Western Europe suddenly had a whole new feast of matter, things and energy to grab and take. Medieval concepts of steady state living became obsolete and a feast of grab and take opened up which allowed the invention of new attitudes and ideologies ( like capitalism) to self-organize the approach to all those “free buffets”. Here is a link to that book.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2569175-the-great-frontier

Here is a link to a whole bunch of images of that book, of Walter Prescott Webb his own self, and related things. Every image has its own url, so more might be found out by extensive url diving as guided by the images.
https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=AwrEm2OuAgdmlgQAZCNXNyoA;_ylu=Y29sbwNiZjEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Nj?p=walter+prescott+webb+the+great+frontier&fr=sfp

Mother Earth News magazine has reposted a legacy article about Walter Prescott Webb at their current website.
https://www.motherearthnews.com/sustainable-living/nature-and-environment/walter-prescott-webb-zmaz80sozraw/

And here is a Texas Monthly article about Walter Prescott Webb called . . . ” Texas’s Most Famous Historian Looks Back at His Own, Legendary Life “.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-entertainment/texas-famous-historian-looks-back-at-life/

It seems to me that the whole Space Race, back to the moon, conquering other planets, etc. is a desperate effort to keep the Great Frontier open a while longer so as to avoid facing up to Hitting The Wall of nowhere left to grow and nothing left to grow with. Those societies or subsocieties which can successfully “go Indian” will be the ones that adjust most survivably to the coming Great Window SlamShut.