Never Forget: Is our world a better place than ever before?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Sep 19, 2012 1:49 am

The US also outproduces #2 Manufacturing power China by forty percent. The fact is that the US has a manufacturing base that is so mind boggling titanic that that sector alone constitutes the GDP of India.

-Username17

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Wed Sep 19, 2012 12:17 pm

nockermensch wrote: As for the arguments for believing in our technological future, a problem I have with the "We are so good that we've never failed to do it yet." line it's that it sounds like those anthropic universe arguments: It's a given that the situation we're living right now shows a string of succeses. (Just as our life supporting planet only exists due to a string of lucky events).

The problem with "proving" that our race can keep up advancing with a greedy approach to natural resources is how do you generalize a string of successful events into a natural law. Some idiots used the fine tuned universe arguments to demonstrate that there's a god who made this universe for us. I find this proof weak. And then, yeah, how's that actually different from us pointing that mankind breaked every predicted limitation so far?

This isn't quite apples to apples. Your first example is basically "there are a whole bunch of individual circumstances with a really low chance of happening naturally, so God must have done it", whereas your second is "In the past, people have done X, so they will likely keep doing X".

A better comparison would have been "In the past, the sun has always rose on the east and set in the west, so it will likely keep doing so". While I can't prove the sun will rise in the east tomorrow, I certainly won't bet against it. Likewise, we have every incentive to try and overcome problems, which will help us continue on our path of past performance.

Frank Shannon · Post by **Frank Shannon** » Sat Sep 22, 2012 2:40 am

Here is another little piece from the Archdruid report.

"An example from one of the most famous cases of social collapse is relevant here. On Easter Island, as I think most people know by now, the native culture built a thriving society that got most of its food from deepwater fishing, using dugout canoes made from the once-plentiful trees of the island. As the population expanded, however, the demand for food expanded as well, requiring more canoes, along with many other things made of wood. Eventually the result was deforestation so extreme that all the tree species once found on the island went extinct. Without wood for canoes, deepwater food sources were out of reach, and Easter Island's society imploded in a terrible spiral of war, starvation, and cannibalism.

It's easy to see that nothing would have offered as great an economic advantage to the people of Easter Island as a permanent source of trees for deepwater fishing canoes. It's just as easy to see that once deforestation had gone far enough, nothing on Earth could have provided them with that advantage. Well before the final crisis arrived, the people of Easter Island – even if they had grasped the nature of the trap that had closed around them – would have faced a terrible choice: leave the last few big trees standing and starve today, or cut them down to make canoes and starve later on. All the less horrific options had already been foreclosed.

Further back in Easter Island's history, when it might still have been possible to work out a scheme to manage timber production sustainably and produce a steady supply of trees for canoes, this would have required harsh tradeoffs: one additional canoe per year, for example, might have required building or repairing one less house each year. Both the canoe and the house would have yielded significant economic advantage, but it wouldn't have been possible to get both. In a world of limited resources, in other words, it's not enough to insist that a given allocation of resources has economic advantages; you must also show that the same resources would not be better used in some other way or for some other need."

I stole that from an essay arguing that the internet won't survive. I disagree with that but he does raise some good points about economics.

This bit is a little longer.

" In a world where the cost of energy is a major economic burden, these differences will matter, and give a massive economic advantage to less energy-intensive ways of accomplishing things.

One useful way to assess the vulnerability of any current technology in a world on the far side of Hubbert's peak, in fact, is to note the difference between the direct and indirect energy inputs needed to keep it working and the inputs needed for other, potentially competing technologies that can provide some form of the same goods or services. All other factors being equal, a technology that depends on large inputs of energy will be more vulnerable and less economically viable in an age of energy scarcity than a technology that depends on less, and the bigger the disparity in energy use, the greater the economic difference. In turn, communities, businesses, and nations that choose less vulnerable and more economical options will prosper at the expense of those that do not, leading to a generalization of the more economical technology. It really is as simple as that.

You might think that this sort of economic analysis would be an obvious and uncontroversial part of peak oil planning. Of course it's nothing of the kind. Most discussion and planning around the subject of peak oil these days pays no more than lip service to economics, if it deals with that dimension at all, and a great many of the plans being circulated these days look very appealing until you do the math and discover that the most basic questions about resource inputs and economic outputs haven't been addressed.

Now part of this blindness to the economic dimension is hardwired into contemporary culture. It hardly needed the mass exodus into delusion that drove the recent real estate bubble to prove that most people in the industrial world nowadays think that getting something for nothing is a perfectly reasonable expectation. We have lived with such abundance for so long that a great many of us seem to have lost any sense that there are limits we can't borrow or bluster our way around. To a very great extent, indeed, the last three hundred years of economic expansion have been driven by a borrowing binge even more colossal, and ultimately more catastrophic, than the one imploding around us right now. Instead of borrowing from banks, we borrowed from the Earth's stockpile of fossil carbon, and squandered most of our borrowings on vaster equivalents of the salad shooters and granite countertops that absorbed so much fictitious value during the late boom. By the time Nature's collection agencies get through with us, in turn, they may just have repossessed everything we bought with our borrowings – which is to say nearly everything we've built over the last three centuries.

Yet there's another source feeding into this blindness, because the theories of economics that have been used to try to make sense of the flows of natural and manufactured wealth in our societies are hopelessly inadequate to the task. It's difficult to construct a meaningful economic analysis of the future within a paradigm that insists that resources magically appear whenever there's money to pay for them, for example, or claims that damage inflicted by human economic activities on the natural systems that allow our economy to function in the first place are "externalities" that need not be considered in cost-benefit analyses. Current economic theory commits both these howlers, and others as well."

K · Post by K » Sat Sep 22, 2012 3:34 am

The problem with your allegory is that the prevailing theory is that the islanders of Easter Island actually cut down all the trees over the course of a few years to make the rollers necessary to get the giant face statues from the mountain to the beach. It wasn't a story of resource depletion, but a story of religion and the ignorance of tree biology.

I understand the arguments about closed systems that people try to make every time they call up the ghost of Easter Island, but we don't live in a closed system. Unlike the islanders, we live in a technological system where boats can be made of wood, metal, plastic, ice, carbon nanotubes, or any other damned thing that we can figure out how to make them out of, so it's not like we can't fish because we ran out of wood for boats.

To abandon the allegory, don't mistake the inertia behind fossil fuels as a form of absolute dependence. We can produce electricity from the sun, wind, the tides, the heat in the earth, radiation, the rivers, weed crops that grow in land that's unsuitable for food crops, the thermal variance from the surface in the ocean to the depths, and a number of other even more exotic sources.

Don't mistake the huge cost of transferring from a non-oil energy economy with the consequences of peak oil. The only real issue is when we have to abandon the oil economy because the short-term expense of transferring is seen as cheaper than the long-term expense of continuing an oil economy that is becoming increasingly expensive.

Considering the growth in energy efficiency, that could be a very long time indeed. For example, we can build net-zero energy efficient houses right now at considerable expense when we are making them as automated research labs for energy efficiency, and there is no reason to believe that in fifty years we won't be able to make net-zero houses for mere living at the barest fraction of the cost.

Frank Shannon · Post by **Frank Shannon** » Mon Oct 01, 2012 9:32 am

K- I haven't been ignoring you, but I did have a hard time coming up with a good reply. I think there is much to what you say, but I'm still not altogether convinced. The fact that it is possible to generate electricity from many sources doesn't necessarily mean that it will be economical to do so even at the very high prices that will obtain when fossil fuels run short.

Also generating electricity is just one part of the puzzle, right now we are very dependent on oil for transportation of goods. I am not aware of any good substitute for trucks.

Here is another bit stolen from the archives of the Archdruid report that somewhat bears on the topic.

The Specialization Trap
Few ideas are quite as unpopular nowadays as the suggestion that the fate of past civilizations has something to teach us about the likely destiny of our own. This lack of enthusiasm for the lessons of history pervades contemporary culture; what makes this interesting is that it is also among the most fruitful sources of disaster in the modern world. The ongoing implosion of real estate prices around the industrial world is simply one example out of many.

Long before the phrase “condo flipper” entered common usage, one thing should have been obvious: anybody who claims that an asset class can keep on increasing in value forever is shoveling smoke. From the 17th century Dutch tulip mania to the internet bubble of the late 1990s, financial history is littered with the blackened ruins of speculative booms that crashed and burned while in hot pursuit of the fantasy of endless appreciation. None of this kept investors in the last few years from betting the future on the belief that this time was different, and real estate prices would keep rising forever – or from lambasting those few spoilsports who suggested that what went up would inevitably, in due time, come down.

Those of us who insist on reading today’s headlines about peak oil in the light of history risk a similar reaction. Still, it’s a risk worth taking. The logic that insists that while all other civilizations have risen and fallen, ours will just keep rising forever, differs not a whit from the logic underlying the late real estate bubble; the only difference is one of scale. It’s for this reason among others that I try to keep up with scholarship on the decline and fall of past civilizations, and that was what brought me to Bryan Ward-Perkins’ valuable book The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford UP, 2005).

Those of my readers who don’t keep track of current fashions in historiography may not know that for several decades now, such phrases as “the Dark Ages” and “the fall of Rome” have been nomina non grata in scholarly circles. The transition that turned western Europe from the crowded, cosmopolitan Roman world into the depopulated, impoverished patchwork of barbarian chiefdoms that succeeded it has been recast by several influential writers as a process of positive cultural evolution that just happened to feature such awkward incidents as, say, the sack of Rome by the Visigoths.

Now it’s only fair to say that, like most revisionist histories, this one made a necessary point. An older generation of historians had gone so far in the other direction – demonizing the barbarians, ignoring the real cultural achievements of the centuries following Rome’s fall, and paying too little attention to the survival of the eastern Roman Empire during the years when its western twin imploded – that a reaction was overdue. Like most revisionist histories, however, the reaction pushed itself to the point of absurdity, and Ward-Perkins’ book is a useful corrective.

One of the tools he uses to document the real scale and impact of the western empire’s collapse is the humble but eloquent voice of pottery. The Roman pottery industry was huge, capable, and highly centralized, churning out fine tableware, storage vessels, roof tiles, and many other goods in such vast quantities that archeologists across Roman Europe struggle to cope with the fragments today. The pottery works at La Graufesenque in what is now southern France and was then the province of Gallia Narbonense, for instance, shipped exquisite products throughout the western empire, and beyond it – goods bearing the La Graufesenque stamp have been found in Denmark and eastern Germany. Good pottery was so cheap and widely available that even rural farm families could afford elegant tableware, sturdy cooking pots, and watertight roof tiles.

Rome’s fall changed all this. When archeologists uncovered the grave of a sixth-century Saxon king at Sutton Hoo in eastern Britain, for example, the pottery found among the grave goods told an astonishing tale of technical collapse. Had it been made in fourth century Britain, the Sutton Hoo pottery would have been unusually crude for a peasant farmhouse; two centuries later, it sat on the table of a king. What’s more, much of it had to be imported, because so simple a tool as a potter’s wheel dropped entirely out of use in post-Roman Britain, as part of a cascading collapse that took Britain down to levels of economic and social complexity not seen there since the subsistence crises of the middle Bronze Age more than a thousand years before.

Ward-Perkins’ book contains many other illustrations of the human cost of the Roman collapse – the demographic traces of massive depopulation, the way that trends in graffiti track the end of widespread literacy, the decline in the size of post-Roman cattle as a marker of agricultural contraction, and much more – but I want to focus on the pottery here, because it tells a tale with more than a little relevance to our own time. Cooking vessels, food containers, and roofing that keeps the rain out, after all, are basic to any form of settled life. An agricultural society that cannot produce them is impoverished by any definition; an agricultural society that had the ability to produce them, and loses it, has clearly undergone an appalling decline.

What happened to put such obviously useful items out of the reach of the survivors of Rome’s collapse? As Ward-Perkins shows, the post-Roman economic collapse had its roots in the very sophistication and specialization that made the Roman economy so efficient. Pottery, again, makes an excellent example of the wider process. Huge pottery factories like the one at La Graufesenque, which used specialist labor to turn out quality goods in immense volume, could make a profit only by marketing their wares on a nearly continental scale, using sophisticated networks of transport and exchange to reach consumers all over the western empire who wanted pottery and had denarii to spend on it. The Roman world was rich, complex, and stable enough to support such networks – but the post-Roman world was not.

The implosion of the western empire thus turned what had been a massive economic advantage into a fatal vulnerability. As the networks of transport and exchange came apart, the Roman economy went down with it, and that economy had relied on centralized production and specialized labor for so long that there was nothing in place to take up the slack. During the Roman Empire’s heyday, people in the towns and villas near Sutton Hoo could buy their pottery from local merchants, who shipped them in from southern Britain, Gaul, and points further off. They didn’t need local pottery factories, and so didn’t have them, and that meant their descendants very nearly ended up with no pottery at all.

Even where Roman pottery factories existed, they were geared toward mass production of specialized types, not to small-scale manufacture of the whole range of pottery products needed by local communities. Worse, as population levels declined and the economy contracted, the pottery on hand would have been more than adequate for immediate needs, removing any market for new production. A single generation of social chaos and demographic contraction thus could easily have been enough to break the transmission of the complex craft traditions of Roman pottery-making, leaving the survivors with only the dimmest idea of how to make good pottery.

Trace any other economic specialty through the trajectory of the post-Roman world and the same pattern appears. Economic specialization and centralized production, the core strategies of Roman economic success, left Rome’s successor states with few choices and fewer resources in a world where local needs had to be met by local production. Caught in the trap of their own specialization, most parts of the western empire came out the other end of the process of decline far more impoverished and fragmented than they had been before the centralized Roman economy evolved in the first place.

Map this same process onto the most likely future of industrial society, in turn, and the parallels have daunting implications. In modern industrial nations, the production and distribution of goods are far more centralized than anything Rome ever achieved. Nearly all workers at every level of the economy perform highly specialized niche jobs, most of which only function within the structure of a highly centralized, mechanized, and energy-intensive global economy, and many of which have no meaning or value at all outside that structure. If the structure falters, access to even the most basic goods and services could become a challenge very quickly.

Food is the obvious example – a very small number of people in any industrial nation have the skills necessary to grow their own food, and even fewer could count on access to the land, tools, and seed stock to give it a try – but the same principle holds for every other necessity of life, not to mention countless other things that would be good to have in the deindustrial dark age that looms up ahead of us in most of our possible futures. Consider the suite of skills needed, for example, to locate and process suitable fibers, spin and weave them into cloth, and make the cloth into clothing. Not many people these days have any of those skills, much less all of them; the tools needed to do most of them are not exactly household items in most homes these days, and the ability to build and repair those tools are even more specialized.

Our situation is thus far more precarious than Rome’s was. On the other hand, we have an advantage that the Roman world apparently lacked – if we choose to use it. The possibility of a future dark age apparently never entered the cultural dialogue in Roman times, but it has been raised repeatedly in ours. Preventive action – the deliberate revival of nonindustrial ways of providing necessary goods and services – is well within the reach of individuals and local communities, and indeed some of this work has already been done by hobbyists and people involved in historical reenactment societies of various kinds.

A great deal more of the same thing will be needed, though, to keep the decline of industrial society from leaving the same sort of economic vacuum in its wake that Rome’s fall left behind. I am coming to think that one of the most useful things anyone concerned about the future can do is to adopt some practical craft that produces goods or services useful in a deindustrializing world, and get skilled at it. If we are to get much of anything out from between the jaws of the specialization trap, projects such as this are a crucial step.

If you read this far thanks.

Frank Shannon · Post by **Frank Shannon** » Mon Oct 01, 2012 9:55 am

At the risk of annoying everyone here is some more:

The Specialization Trap
Few ideas are quite as unpopular nowadays as the suggestion that the fate of past civilizations has something to teach us about the likely destiny of our own. This lack of enthusiasm for the lessons of history pervades contemporary culture; what makes this interesting is that it is also among the most fruitful sources of disaster in the modern world. The ongoing implosion of real estate prices around the industrial world is simply one example out of many.

Long before the phrase “condo flipper” entered common usage, one thing should have been obvious: anybody who claims that an asset class can keep on increasing in value forever is shoveling smoke. From the 17th century Dutch tulip mania to the internet bubble of the late 1990s, financial history is littered with the blackened ruins of speculative booms that crashed and burned while in hot pursuit of the fantasy of endless appreciation. None of this kept investors in the last few years from betting the future on the belief that this time was different, and real estate prices would keep rising forever – or from lambasting those few spoilsports who suggested that what went up would inevitably, in due time, come down.

Those of us who insist on reading today’s headlines about peak oil in the light of history risk a similar reaction. Still, it’s a risk worth taking. The logic that insists that while all other civilizations have risen and fallen, ours will just keep rising forever, differs not a whit from the logic underlying the late real estate bubble; the only difference is one of scale. It’s for this reason among others that I try to keep up with scholarship on the decline and fall of past civilizations, and that was what brought me to Bryan Ward-Perkins’ valuable book The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford UP, 2005).

Those of my readers who don’t keep track of current fashions in historiography may not know that for several decades now, such phrases as “the Dark Ages” and “the fall of Rome” have been nomina non grata in scholarly circles. The transition that turned western Europe from the crowded, cosmopolitan Roman world into the depopulated, impoverished patchwork of barbarian chiefdoms that succeeded it has been recast by several influential writers as a process of positive cultural evolution that just happened to feature such awkward incidents as, say, the sack of Rome by the Visigoths.

Now it’s only fair to say that, like most revisionist histories, this one made a necessary point. An older generation of historians had gone so far in the other direction – demonizing the barbarians, ignoring the real cultural achievements of the centuries following Rome’s fall, and paying too little attention to the survival of the eastern Roman Empire during the years when its western twin imploded – that a reaction was overdue. Like most revisionist histories, however, the reaction pushed itself to the point of absurdity, and Ward-Perkins’ book is a useful corrective.

One of the tools he uses to document the real scale and impact of the western empire’s collapse is the humble but eloquent voice of pottery. The Roman pottery industry was huge, capable, and highly centralized, churning out fine tableware, storage vessels, roof tiles, and many other goods in such vast quantities that archeologists across Roman Europe struggle to cope with the fragments today. The pottery works at La Graufesenque in what is now southern France and was then the province of Gallia Narbonense, for instance, shipped exquisite products throughout the western empire, and beyond it – goods bearing the La Graufesenque stamp have been found in Denmark and eastern Germany. Good pottery was so cheap and widely available that even rural farm families could afford elegant tableware, sturdy cooking pots, and watertight roof tiles.

Rome’s fall changed all this. When archeologists uncovered the grave of a sixth-century Saxon king at Sutton Hoo in eastern Britain, for example, the pottery found among the grave goods told an astonishing tale of technical collapse. Had it been made in fourth century Britain, the Sutton Hoo pottery would have been unusually crude for a peasant farmhouse; two centuries later, it sat on the table of a king. What’s more, much of it had to be imported, because so simple a tool as a potter’s wheel dropped entirely out of use in post-Roman Britain, as part of a cascading collapse that took Britain down to levels of economic and social complexity not seen there since the subsistence crises of the middle Bronze Age more than a thousand years before.

Ward-Perkins’ book contains many other illustrations of the human cost of the Roman collapse – the demographic traces of massive depopulation, the way that trends in graffiti track the end of widespread literacy, the decline in the size of post-Roman cattle as a marker of agricultural contraction, and much more – but I want to focus on the pottery here, because it tells a tale with more than a little relevance to our own time. Cooking vessels, food containers, and roofing that keeps the rain out, after all, are basic to any form of settled life. An agricultural society that cannot produce them is impoverished by any definition; an agricultural society that had the ability to produce them, and loses it, has clearly undergone an appalling decline.

What happened to put such obviously useful items out of the reach of the survivors of Rome’s collapse? As Ward-Perkins shows, the post-Roman economic collapse had its roots in the very sophistication and specialization that made the Roman economy so efficient. Pottery, again, makes an excellent example of the wider process. Huge pottery factories like the one at La Graufesenque, which used specialist labor to turn out quality goods in immense volume, could make a profit only by marketing their wares on a nearly continental scale, using sophisticated networks of transport and exchange to reach consumers all over the western empire who wanted pottery and had denarii to spend on it. The Roman world was rich, complex, and stable enough to support such networks – but the post-Roman world was not.

The implosion of the western empire thus turned what had been a massive economic advantage into a fatal vulnerability. As the networks of transport and exchange came apart, the Roman economy went down with it, and that economy had relied on centralized production and specialized labor for so long that there was nothing in place to take up the slack. During the Roman Empire’s heyday, people in the towns and villas near Sutton Hoo could buy their pottery from local merchants, who shipped them in from southern Britain, Gaul, and points further off. They didn’t need local pottery factories, and so didn’t have them, and that meant their descendants very nearly ended up with no pottery at all.

Even where Roman pottery factories existed, they were geared toward mass production of specialized types, not to small-scale manufacture of the whole range of pottery products needed by local communities. Worse, as population levels declined and the economy contracted, the pottery on hand would have been more than adequate for immediate needs, removing any market for new production. A single generation of social chaos and demographic contraction thus could easily have been enough to break the transmission of the complex craft traditions of Roman pottery-making, leaving the survivors with only the dimmest idea of how to make good pottery.

Trace any other economic specialty through the trajectory of the post-Roman world and the same pattern appears. Economic specialization and centralized production, the core strategies of Roman economic success, left Rome’s successor states with few choices and fewer resources in a world where local needs had to be met by local production. Caught in the trap of their own specialization, most parts of the western empire came out the other end of the process of decline far more impoverished and fragmented than they had been before the centralized Roman economy evolved in the first place.

Map this same process onto the most likely future of industrial society, in turn, and the parallels have daunting implications. In modern industrial nations, the production and distribution of goods are far more centralized than anything Rome ever achieved. Nearly all workers at every level of the economy perform highly specialized niche jobs, most of which only function within the structure of a highly centralized, mechanized, and energy-intensive global economy, and many of which have no meaning or value at all outside that structure. If the structure falters, access to even the most basic goods and services could become a challenge very quickly.

Food is the obvious example – a very small number of people in any industrial nation have the skills necessary to grow their own food, and even fewer could count on access to the land, tools, and seed stock to give it a try – but the same principle holds for every other necessity of life, not to mention countless other things that would be good to have in the deindustrial dark age that looms up ahead of us in most of our possible futures. Consider the suite of skills needed, for example, to locate and process suitable fibers, spin and weave them into cloth, and make the cloth into clothing. Not many people these days have any of those skills, much less all of them; the tools needed to do most of them are not exactly household items in most homes these days, and the ability to build and repair those tools are even more specialized.

Our situation is thus far more precarious than Rome’s was. On the other hand, we have an advantage that the Roman world apparently lacked – if we choose to use it. The possibility of a future dark age apparently never entered the cultural dialogue in Roman times, but it has been raised repeatedly in ours. Preventive action – the deliberate revival of nonindustrial ways of providing necessary goods and services – is well within the reach of individuals and local communities, and indeed some of this work has already been done by hobbyists and people involved in historical reenactment societies of various kinds.

A great deal more of the same thing will be needed, though, to keep the decline of industrial society from leaving the same sort of economic vacuum in its wake that Rome’s fall left behind. I am coming to think that one of the most useful things anyone concerned about the future can do is to adopt some practical craft that produces goods or services useful in a deindustrializing world, and get skilled at it. If we are to get much of anything out from between the jaws of the specialization trap, projects such as this are a crucial step.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Mon Oct 01, 2012 10:37 am

I'm getting a real tzor-ish 'but the Dark Ages had happy fun bath time vibe' from your post.

Frank Shannon wrote:The logic that insists that while all other civilizations have risen and fallen, ours will just keep rising forever, differs not a whit from the logic underlying the late real estate bubble; the only difference is one of scale.

It's probably because 'rising forever' is a bullshit equivocation. What a late Victorian-era Londoner and a contemporary one would see as 'rising forever' are two completely divergent points of view. Even when you frame it in strictly economic terms.

Frank Shannon wrote:A great deal more of the same thing will be needed, though, to keep the decline of industrial society from leaving the same sort of economic vacuum in its wake that Rome’s fall left behind. I am coming to think that one of the most useful things anyone concerned about the future can do is to adopt some practical craft that produces goods or services useful in a deindustrializing world, and get skilled at it. If we are to get much of anything out from between the jaws of the specialization trap, projects such as this are a crucial step.

The person who wrote this intuition pump drivel is an idiot. And you posting this without any kind of skepticism or irony on your behalf makes you an even bigger idiot.

Decentralization makes you poorer and less competitive. The Thomas Jeffersonian ideal of people breaking up the land and capital and using it to create self-contained, self-reliant homesteads is narcissistic bunk and was disproved in his lifetime. And not just in the 'o wait, I am actually a retarded slave-raping parasite and I don't actually produce anything' sense either. The Embargo Act didn't end with France and Great Britain gasping that their lifelines were cut and all they had were worthless manufactured goods with the U.S. kept on smugly trucking since they had ALL ZEE AGRICULTURE; what happened was that they opened up new markets with their manufactured goods while the United States were the ones who plunged into depression.

The Embargo Act doesn't teach us that centralization of industry is a bad thing. What it teaches us is that when the center falls out you make a new one. Devolving (in the hierarchal sense) your industrial production counterintuitively makes you less competitive. Much less than just recentralizing. Yes, even when your product is something everyone needs, like clothes or agriculture.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Oct 01, 2012 12:38 pm

Yeah, the whole article is absurd on every level. I live in Czech Republic, a country that was overthrown six times in the twentieth century alone. Despite being repeatedly kicked to the curb and even taken over by actual Nazis - industry still happens. Or, as is rather more accurate: Industry happens again.

Industrialization is more efficient than non-industrialization. Specialization makes us richer and more productive. If energy became more expensive we might make less, but we wouldn't stop making things. If our civilization collapsed, we'd just go have a different civilization that did most of the same things.

Rome is simply an incredibly shitty example. Rome is still there. The people are still Italians. They kept being Italian the whole time. They never stopped eating garlic or cheating on their spouses. Secrets of concrete manufacturing were lost and the economy collapsed and the political system fragmented, but the culture was still there.

If you really want an example of things really collapsing, you want to go to the Maya Empire of Guatemala. Million person cities connected by concrete highways 30 meters wide - all reduced to rubble and reclaimed by the jungle over the course of a couple of generations. That is a civilizational collapse. And yet: while that is an example of how climate change can render cities uninhabitable, it is not an example of it being in any way preferable to give up specialization of labor. There are no examples of any time in history when it has ever been a good idea to despecialize and stop having skilled labor. The entire idea is fucking moronic.

-Username17

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Mon Oct 01, 2012 12:54 pm

All right. I tried to ignore this up until now, but it's been slapping me in the face recently. So here goes.

First of all, I do not deny that climate change or massive, permanent resource depletion are things. They totally are and will probably end up killing tens of millions of people (at least) for no good reason. Fish stock, water stock, and agricultural depletion are real things and will require real solutions that we probably won't be getting -- and not even because of the next problem.

So faced with this rather grim news what is with all of the batshit insane solutions? Hydrogen economy and decentralization of industry? What the fuck? I mean, people are even saying things like 'unlimited or positive growth is impossible forever'. Which is true only if you put in massive qualifications. But when people say stuff like that they don't mean 'growth based on the consumption of fossil fuels can't be permanent' or 'growth with the current level of ecological depredation will hit a hard limit', what they mean is 'there is a limit to how much productivity you can squeeze out of an economy and this is based on ecology'. Which sounds similar but leads to wildly different conclusions and solutions.

I mean, I think it's pretty obvious that pollution, land spoilage, and deprivation is correlated with but not caused by population density. And it the correlation with GDP and/or industrialization levels only exists if you fit it onto a bell curve with a massive amount of historical presentism. I mean, late 19th century Chicago or pre-collapse Soviet Union versus modern Japan. Really now.

Taishan · Post by **Taishan** » Mon Oct 01, 2012 4:09 pm

To be fair, I think this is the first time I've heard of industrial specialization being linked to the downfall of Rome. Possibly cause other economic problems, like debased coinage and generations of civil wars draining the treasury seem more likely and less ridiculous than the fact that some villages made a lot of good pottery.

sabs · Post by **sabs** » Mon Oct 01, 2012 4:17 pm

I would have thought the systematic under-funding of their military and a move from an all Roman Legion, to basically nothing but barbarian auxiliaries, would have played a big part. By the end of the 3rd Century, the famed Roman Legions were basically just barbarian units with pretty armor.
Not to mention economic issues, Christianity, The never ending succession of Huns, Vandals, and other central Asian hordes running rampage over the Roman Empire. Absolute political instability, East vs West Schisms. Blaming the downfall of Rome on Industrialization is so painfully stupid as to be hilarious.

The days of Phyrus and Caesar were /long/ gone by the time Rome fell.
Really, the Legions stopped being the Legions sometime around the fall of the Republic (Octavius)

Not to mention that Globalization is kind of here to stay. We're not going to go back to horse drawn carriages and bows and arrows. We have tons of non-fossil fuel based options for travel. We just don't want to do any of them because they are more expensive in the short term.

nockermensch · Post by **nockermensch** » Mon Oct 01, 2012 4:48 pm

Taishan wrote:To be fair, I think this is the first time I've heard of industrial specialization being linked to the downfall of Rome. Possibly cause other economic problems, like debased coinage and generations of civil wars draining the treasury seem more likely and less ridiculous than the fact that some villages made a lot of good pottery.

It's a rather obvious thing: If you depend on other countries for basic products and suddenly international commerce implodes, you're shit out of luck.

Then again, so what? Archdruid's doesn't provide a viable solution. Yes, if I stopped programming for one day a week to learn how to plant potatoes, I could marginally improve my chances of survival in the case of society collapsing, something that may or may not happen during our lifetimes, while producing less of what actually puts food on my table and having a shittier existence, with a 100% certainty.

What irks me about these "stop consuming" arguments is that they're all seem directed to people who could be bored from living in very nice places. That's it, that their real use is more like serving as a hobby for western europeans that find life too easy. A whole lot of the world still lacks the amenities that people like Archdruid probably take as granted, and you don't tell those people to stop specializing and working more on life sustaining skills. This is what they already do as a matter of necessity, and it's shitty.

TL;DR: You can't sell "back to nature" to people who are already knee deep into subsistence practices. Unless you want to get shot, that's it.

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Mon Oct 01, 2012 5:22 pm

sabs wrote: Not to mention economic issues, Christianity, The never ending succession of Huns, Vandals, and other central Asian hordes running rampage over the Roman Empire. Absolute political instability, East vs West Schisms. Blaming the downfall of Rome on Industrialization is so painfully stupid as to be hilarious.

I don't know much about the fall of the Roman empire, and I've seen Christianity listed as the prime reason for the dark ages, but was that a serious cause of the fall of the empire?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Oct 01, 2012 6:04 pm

RobbyPants wrote:
sabs wrote: Not to mention economic issues, Christianity, The never ending succession of Huns, Vandals, and other central Asian hordes running rampage over the Roman Empire. Absolute political instability, East vs West Schisms. Blaming the downfall of Rome on Industrialization is so painfully stupid as to be hilarious.
I don't know much about the fall of the Roman empire, and I've seen Christianity listed as the prime reason for the dark ages, but was that a serious cause of the fall of the empire?

Christianity certainly didn't help. The "fall" can be thought of as being one of several things:

The political fragmentation of the Empire itself, causing the Empire to devolve into various kingdoms and baronies.
The loss of Greek and Roman knowledge that prevented Rome from fixing its crumbling infrastructure, allowing the roads and bridges that were Rome to literally fall down.
The economic collapse of Europe and the widespread poverty and depression that entailed.

Now of those, Christianity is a big contributor to all three.

Rome was an Empire, the Romans themselves exercised a relatively light hand and allowed local religions to do pretty much whatever they wanted to do (except the Druids, who were banned for their human sacrifice deal). With Christianity in charge, secular tolerance was off the table, and simple peaceful coexistence with Wotanists and Huns was no longer possible. And as it happened those Vandals and Huns literally tore the empire into pieces and sacked Italy's major cities. So there's that.

Engineering texts were considered "sorcery", and Christians ran around burning them. Rome's bridges fell down because the secret of Roman concrete was lost, and the secret of Roman concrete was lost because Christians fucking set actual fire to the actual scrolls that had the actual secrets of Roman concrete written on them. So there's that.

Christian teachings were extremely strict on the subject of usury - the art of lending money at interest. When Christians took over, they shut down the fucking banks, creating a permanent financial crisis not unlike the Panic of 1873. Except unlike the Panic of 1873, it didn't end in six years because Christianity didn't stop banning financial liquidity for over a thousand years. So you know, there's that.

Depending on when exactly you think Rome "fell" and what precisely you mean by it having "fallen", a very good argument that Christian teachings and Christian religious leadership were extremely instrumental in it having done so.

-Username17

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Mon Oct 01, 2012 6:55 pm

Wow. The more you know.

(Quite literally)

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Mon Oct 01, 2012 10:42 pm

While I don't think anyone's actually proved Christians burnt the specific texts that described how to make Roman concrete (because that's pretty much impossible, it was a long fucking time ago and someone burnt all the god damn books that would tell us that), it's pretty well documented that they went around burning down universities and libraries that had pagan affiliations (and because Christians were until recently a fairly fringe minority, that was basically all of them). Universities and libraries tend to be the places where you keep information on how to do things, so it's a pretty reasonable guess that both "Roman Concrete: How To" and its hit sequel "The Loss of Roman Concrete: One More Way Christians Hate Everyone" were both burnt by Christians as part of an attempt to destroy what they perceived as centers of pagan culture.

tl;dr 'college is an elitist intellectual propaganda machine that turns people away from God' is a conservative Christian talking point that has survived basically unchanged for almost two thousand years. Oh how far we've come.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Mon Oct 01, 2012 11:53 pm

DSMatticus wrote:tl;dr 'college is an elitist intellectual propaganda machine that turns people away from God' is a conservative Christian talking point that has survived basically unchanged for almost two thousand years. Oh how far we've come.

Well, except for the propaganda point that has a few grains of truth. I do recall a study somewhere saying that people who manage to keep onto their religious beliefs actually have them reinforced by uni. I'm sure you can draw a connection with the Salem Hypothesis.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Tue Oct 02, 2012 3:19 am

Frank Shannon wrote:If you read this far thanks.

I can't believe I read that far. I'm never getting that time back. I'll now have to spend an equal amount of time double-dipping my fun, by playing Pokemon while sneaking around putting stickers on peoplepainting, just to make up for that.

I hope you feel bad about this.

K · Post by K » Tue Oct 02, 2012 3:24 am

There is some evidence that the decline of the Roman Empire actually coincided with 300 years of shitty weather and climate change.

This makes some sense to me because food insecurity when 95-99% of the population is concerned with farming is pretty much a recipe for roaming bands of barbarians to leave their homes with conquest on their minds and/or religious zealotry to take over the rest of it.

That being said, the lessons of ancient history don't apply any more. Instead of 95+% of the population needing to be on a farm to keep the population from nosediving from starvation, only 15% now are needed for food production and food retail and we really can absorb a lot of hardship before we have to give up iPhones and strip malls.

In fact, I'd argue that we are less specialized than we ever were. People are no longer are born into the job their parents did or forced to apprentice for two decades before they are trusted to make shoes for the town. People learn to fight or make shoes or grow food for funsies now.

Knowledge is open and free and no longer the province of philosophers and priests. Even a global EM strike would be a three-week annoyance before people had uHaul trailors tied up to show-horses to haul agriculture to the people. At worst, we might have to give up the decadent practice of eating fresh fruit in the winter.

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Tue Oct 02, 2012 10:42 pm

It didn't help the Romans that they all had lead poisoning.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Tue Oct 02, 2012 11:08 pm

Roman skeletal remains vary pretty wildly in terms of lead content; you've got some who clearly had lead poisoning and some who were in better shape than most of the people in the first world. The lead pipes they did use tended to build up ridiculous huge deposits of various non-toxic impurities that actually insulated the water from the lead pipe itself, and most of the pots and such we've found are actually copper; not lead. We've also got a lot of Roman writings that basically amount to 'lead's bad, you shouldn't use it for things or you will die.'

I'm gonna guess that, like every other health issue ever, it was a poor man's problem, as a result of less education about the dangers and less opportunity/wealth to change any of the lead sources in their environment than their wealthy betters.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Oct 03, 2012 4:10 am

DSMatticus wrote:Roman skeletal remains vary pretty wildly in terms of lead content; you've got some who clearly had lead poisoning and some who were in better shape than most of the people in the first world. The lead pipes they did use tended to build up ridiculous huge deposits of various non-toxic impurities that actually insulated the water from the lead pipe itself, and most of the pots and such we've found are actually copper; not lead. We've also got a lot of Roman writings that basically amount to 'lead's bad, you shouldn't use it for things or you will die.'

I'm gonna guess that, like every other health issue ever, it was a poor man's problem, as a result of less education about the dangers and less opportunity/wealth to change any of the lead sources in their environment than their wealthy betters.

Like in modern China, some industrial workers got to hang around lead smelting furnaces and Vitruvius described the people who worked there as being "pallid in color" and theorized that lead fumes "destroy the vigor of the blood".

But rich people basically scooped lead onto their food. The standard sweetening agent was fruit syrup and the standard way of making that was to simmer fruit in a lead pot until it reduced.

It was the middle classes and poor people who got their water through terra cotta piping and couldn't afford to sweeten their food who got the smallest lead dose. Still fairly high amounts of lead by modern standards because there was a lot of lead pumped into the air because Rome ran smelting operations night and day and had not invented the fume hood.

-Username17