Dollars and Sense Dept:
Singularity
24 July 2015
In the current issue of The New York Review of Books, there is a piece by Edmund Phelps, a Nobel laureate and the director of the Columbia Center on Capitalism and Society. He asks, “What Is Wrong with the West’s Economies?” If I read it with cocked eyebrows, that’s because Columbia is the home of Glenn Hubbard, Bush family adviser and shill for financial rapine — also the dean of the B School there, I believe. (Hubbard ends his generally deer-in-headlights contribution to Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job with a hateful sneer.) As I read Phelps’s piece, though, I calmed down; Phelps’s goal, a society of mass flourishing, is clearly the right one. His brief discussion of economic inclusion struck me immediately as something that ought to be the subject of more political conversations.
I liked the way Phelps laid out the disappointments of capitalist democracy in the West. But when I got to his proposals for fixing things, for getting our economies back on track, I began emitting helpless noises, mostly whimpers but sometimes little screams. Nooooooo!
It’s not that Phelps’s ideas are bad. They’re just impossible. Totally impossible. Phelps seems to be unaware that the complex of technological innovations that we call the Industrial Revolution was a singularity. He seems to think that we can engineer another one.
I think of things that can’t happen again. The discovery of fire. The development of writing. You’ll say, “What about printing — surely that could be invented only once.” Technically true, perhaps, but as Andrew Pettegree shows in his important study, The Book in the Renaissance, printing launched a new business — publishing — that was beset by all sorts of marketing and distribution problems, and wouldn’t you know that many of these problems have recurred in our new digital age. The things that can’t be repeated aren’t technological breakthroughs so much as they are intellectual breakthroughs, real changes in human understanding of the world.
The Industrial Revolution was a complex of innovations each of which could be traced back to a single idea: the reproduction of things. Hitherto, artisans had created products that differed in minuscule but not insignificant ways. The screws that were made to hold one vessel together might not fit another vessel of the same kind, even one made by the same artisan. It didn’t seem to be very important. I’m not sure why it did become important — I suspect that the demands of scientific experiments, such as Lavoisier’s, for precision instruments were crucial — but I know that its importance emerged in the minds of technically sophisticated thinkers in the latter two-thirds of the Eighteenth Century. Rather than produce a thing, it became important to reproduce a model. It seems obvious now. Every iPhone is like every other, functionally identical in that it operates and can be repaired just like every other. But the goods produced before the Industrial Revolution were not uniform. This meant that the mathematical principles that governed, say, the operation of steam boilers might not apply equally to all steam boilers. With explosive results! The ever-expanding textile mills that blossomed on either side of 1800 depended on a uniformity of parts, so that they could run more or less autonomously, with no more supervision than an uneducated attendant could provide.
The railroads exemplified this singularity by demonstrating that a steady stream of replaceable parts could produce an all-but-infinite railroad. You could lay as much track, with uniform rails at a uniform gauge, with as many locomotive engines pulling as many railroad cars, as you might have need for. From Day One of animal husbandry until 1837, the possibilities of travel were absolutely limited by the speed and endurance of horses on land and the strength and persistence of winds at sea. Throughout early modern times, government-sponsored improvements in road conditions cut travel times between major cities by what seemed to be significant amounts, but these marginal improvements were blown to insignificance by the railroads. Not only did railroads cover distances much faster, but, even more, they carried orders of magnitude more passengers and goods.
The Industrial Revolution culminated with the harnessing of electric power, a breakthrough no less dependent upon the reproduction of goods. We often speak of mass production as if it were simply a matter of making a lot of things. But mass production is really the mass reproduction of one thing, always the same.
Are there more singularities ahead? Sure! Why not? But it is a terrible mistake to assume that somehow, if we roll up our sleeves, we can whip up another Industrial Revolution, and recreate the dynamism and innovation that Phelps calls for. We can tease out refinements, and indeed will continue to do just this for many years to come. But there will never be anything like the job creation that the Industrial Revolution engendered. And we should be glad about that, because those jobs were too often proto-robotic. They required workers to behave like machines. One of the final flowerings of the Industrial Revolution just might be the mass production of robots — by robots. But before we say goodbye to the Industrial Revolution, let’s remember that the discovery of microbes and the development of modern pharmaceuticals depended heavily on — you guessed it — the reproduction of models.
Does this mean that there won’t be any jobs? Not if we’re clever. Not if we can figure out how to “monetize” the task ahead — undoing all the damage of the Industrial Revolution!
We don’t need innovation in the field of making stuff. We need innovation in the field of sustaining, maintaining, and, in more cases than is desirable, discarding the stuff we make. We need to figure out how to pay people to do these things, which are just as vital and useful to all of us as the cotton mills and the railroads ever were and still are. We need breakthroughs in architecture and engineering. We need buildings and bridges that we can maintain and improve without ripping out walls or closing roads. Keeping things in good repair ought not to be as environmentally degrading as erecting them. (We’ll know that we’ve got where we need to be when a house can be built within a garden without the trampling of a single daffodil.) As I have said, we need to replace “Built to Last” with “Built to Upgrade.” And we need to make upgrading pay.
Maybe what we need is a breakthrough in the idea of Money.
The biggest difference between the Industrial Revolution for which Edmund Phelps is nostalgic and the Sustainable Revolution that can’t happen until we’ve stopped looking at the Industrial Revolution for inspiration is the colossal consumption of nonrenewable resources that fueled the Industrial Revolution. The wealth creation of the Industrial Revolution came at the cost of Earth depletion. That cannot be allowed to happen again, even were it possible.
Bon weekend à tous!