Literary Hub » From Breezes to Tornadoes: What Happens When the Wind Turns Deadly?
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@Dianora There are a few other economic concepts which are IMO key to developing any remedies and/or alternatives. I'll try to touch on the major ones here.
Wage/Rent pricing, mentioned above, is a key stumbling point. Smith:
A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more, otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page%3AThe_wealth_of_nations%2C_volume_1.djvu/135
The Law of Rent and Iron Law of Wages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_wages) dictate that these dynamics are always in conflict and play, and crush the working class, most especially those who live by wage labour (or worse: piecework pay, see Smith's discussion of this for an eye-opener), and rent rather than own their domeciles. Both concepts date to the 18th / early 19th centuries, but are largely ignored in contemporary orthodoxy.
The "obvious" solutions, of, say, providing free/subsidised essentials to the working class or of critical goods and services (food, clothing, housing, education, healthcare) largely further exacerbate the existing perverse market dynamics. I am not saying DON'T help those in dire need. What I am saying is that if this is the sole and widespread remedy, that the underlying problems get worse: wages fall (because "welfare" benefits subsidise its costs rather than employers paying a living wage), education, housing, healthcare and other services get more expensive (because subsidies provide additional revenues).
Winston Churchill (another unlikely champion) noted this in 1906:
Some years ago in London there was a toll bar on a bridge across the Thames, and all the working people who lived on the south side of the river had to pay a daily toll of one penny for going and returning from their work. The spectacle of these poor people thus mulcted of so large a proportion of their earnings offended the public conscience, and agitation was set on foot, municipal authorities were roused, and at the cost of the taxpayers, the bridge was freed and the toll removed. All those people who used the bridge were saved sixpence a week, but within a very short time rents on the south side of the river were found to have risen about sixpence a week, or the amount of the toll which had been remitted!
https://www.landvaluetax.org/history/winston-churchill-said-it-all-better-then-we-can
Instead, a dual strategy of taxing rents (generally: providers of the goods/services above or those acting similarly economically), and providing for increased labour bargaining power though an improved best alternative to negotiated agreement (BATNA) and coordinated negotiation power (a/k/a Labour Unionisation) is necessary. Both of course run into the Wealth is Power and Logic of Collective Action (Mancur Olson, 1965: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action) problems.
Direct subsidies / contributions as emergency measures directed at dire immediate circumstances are ABSOLUTELY of value. **But they should result in direction to directly addressing the rents/wages dichotomy.
A business which cannot pay a living wage and survive economically is a charity conducted to the benefit of its owner at the cost of its workers, or is provisioning public goods which should see a subsidy in their provision through tax revenues and transfer payments. Below-subsistence wages and labour supports only exacerbate the underlying problem.
Private ownership of real estate is a surprisingly recent development, displacing earlier feudal or monarchical rents (often very long-term leases) largely in the late 19th century. Among the few explorations of this history I've found is Simon Winchester's Land (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_(book)). And of course there's Henry George's Progress and Poverty (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Progress_and_Poverty_(George,_D._Appleton_%26_Company,_fifth_edition)), championing the Land Value Tax (along with: Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Milton Friedman (!!!), to name just a few. Social housing has its failures, but also successes, including the Fuggerei (Augsburg, Germany, created by the Fugger family in 1516 and continuing to serve to this day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuggerei), Vienna, and Japan (through both market and government actions, in part through some idiosyncratic practices).
Housing cannot be both affordable and an investment asset. And of the two, the first function is primal.
Incidentally, I suspect that a large part of the US growth in homelessness may be directly attributable to going off the gold standard, itself a response to the country's peak-oil moment and reliance on foreign energy imports, driving banks and financial institutions to find an alternate asset class: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21304603.
Next are some more obscure economic principles, somewhat addressed in the mainstream, but highly underappreciated ...
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What’s a #nonfiction #book you would recommend to others? Mine is #Atlantic by #simonwinchester #suggestions needed
Books You Should Read: The Perfectionists
After pulling late hours in my school machine shop for a few years, I couldn't help but wonder, who measures the measurement tools? How did they come to be? I'd heard anecdotes from other students and engineers while they inspected my freshly machined parts, but these stories were one-offs. What I wanted was a tale of industrial precision from start to finish. Years later, I found it.
The story of precision, as told by Simon Winchester, is captured in The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World. Published in 2018, Winchester's overview stretches as far back to the Antikythera mechanism and brings us to present day silicon wafer manufacturing. Of course, this isn't a chronology of all-things made precisely. Instead, it's a romp through engineering highlights that hallmark either a certain level of precision manufacturing or a particular way of thinking with repercussions for the future.
Structurally, every chapter follows an increasing order of magnitude in tolerance, what was built, and the implications. I'll confess that the book only loosely follows this organizational structure. While the first part of the book sticks to the formula pretty closely when discussing tolerances for mechanical components, the later chapters seek out tighter numbers by deviating into precision manufacturing of jet engines, lenses, time-keeping devices, and silicon wafers.
Something I'm particularly fond of is how Winchester manages to tie his history of precision into the everyday engineer's understanding of the subject. I'm sure plenty of our readers will have heard about James Watt, creator of the steam engine. But I'd bet that most of us probably _don 't _know about John "Iron-Mad" Wilkinson, the machinist who could hold a tight enough tolerance machining iron to bore pistons for Wat] that could actually form an airtight seal. And while plenty of folks will know Thomas Jefferson as a former United States president, they might not know that it was his Francophilia that brought the French creation of interchangeable parts to the United States. The book does this over and over, either shedding light on unfamiliar figures, like Henry Royce and Carl Johansson, shedding new light on familiar figures, like Eli Whitney, or tying the history of machinists together to show how one directly influenced the other.
For capturing a historical piece of non-fiction on what might seem like a dry topic, Winchester does a fantastic job of putting you right back into the moment when history was being made. You'll can feel the anxiety of a middle-aged Joseph Whitworth, as he prepares to watch Queen Victoria fire his Whitworth Rifle at a target 400 yards away to inaugurate Great Britain's first National Rifle Association meeting. You'll be ready to shed a tear at the first successful test flight of early jet-engine powered aircraft. (Unsurprisingly, war plays a big role in making things precisely.) I'll also mention that this book captures an outstanding retelling of the launch, failure, repair, and eventual success of the Hubble Space Telescope-all while highlighting the precision instrument that failed and dictated such an extravagant repair in the first place. (I mean, who doesn't appreciate a good hotfix story-in space?)
If you're curious for some bed-time stories of machinists, scientists, and engineers making things to higher-and-higher standards, you're in for a treat.
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