"Instead of making governments almighty, global communications speeded the effective breakup of societies into self-determining coalitions of all kinds, ethnic, economic, religious, professional, cultural, even sexual." (p. 51)
This sentence clearly applies to the current period but it is not happening like that, is it? Of course governments, however much power they wield, cannot be almighty. Dictatorships are overthrown although not on any predictable basis. Instant communications and social media have a fragmenting effect. But society is not splitting into self-determining coalitions with all those "kinds," ethnic etc, carrying equal weight. Economic competition and accumulation remains the dominating factor and governments retain the material ability to wage devastating wars far beyond the destructive capacity of any other coalition.
This future history diverges from our timeline when:
"...what rehabilitated an Earth devastated by overpopulation and overexploitation was a new set of technologies and the economic incentives and disincentives they brought about." (ibid.)
As yet, any new technologies are subordinated to existing economic priorities.
11 comments:
Technology determines the choices which humans can make.
Eg., until historically quite recently, most people were going to be in agriculture because it took 4 families growing food to support 1 that wasn't.
Human institutions had to work around that because they couldn't change it. Until they could, of course.
This took a while to sink into our collective consciousness.
Eg., as late as the 1910's, people were writing poetry about the 'eternal' sight of a man walking behind horses guiding a plow; the one I'm thinking of was written by someone taking a train from London to Southhampton just before WW1.
It also constrains quite powerful people.
Eg. the third, there was a famous joke that you could buy a Model T Ford -- the first really mass-consumption motor vehicle -- "in any color you wanted, as long as it was black".
That's not because Henry Ford liked cars painted black, it was because that was the cheapest/fastest, and Ford was obsessed with driving down the cost of his cars.
The prices went:
1909 $850
1910 $950
1911 $780
1912 $690
1913 $600
1914 $490
1915 $440
1916 $360
1917 $525
1918 $525
1919 $575
1920 $415
1921 $355
1922 $348
1923 $395
1924 $295
1925 $290
1926 $380
1927 $380
-- note that there was a general price rise following 1914, so the lower prices are an underestimate; by 1927 the dollar (according to the CPI) was worth about 30% less than in 1914, so the drop from $490 to $380 was actually much bigger.
Ford made them all black because it reduced costs, and his aim was to make his profits off volume, not unit pricing. He wanted the cars cheap so he could sell a lot of them.
Something of the same strategy was behind his unilateral raise in his worker's pay from $2.50 to $5.00 per day, for a 40-hour week. That meant $25 a week, equivalent to well over $1,000 a week today.
He'd been having bad turnover problems, which added substantially to costs.
That eliminated the turnover problem at a stroke: $5 a day was skilled-labor wages, about what a locomotive driver made, for jobs that could mostly be learned in a week or less by an immigrant right off the boat who didn't even speak English.
If you examine the internal communications in Ford Motor, Henry used the $5-a-day target because a rule-of-thumb calculation indicated that at that wage one of the assembly-line workers could afford to buy a Model T.
BTW, Ford's strategy worked like a charm -- he doubled his labor force's wages in 1914 (which is when the $5 a day minimum went into effect) and between 1914 and 1916, Ford Motor Company profits went from around $20 million to $60 million annually.
Also BTW, the communications changes Poul notes in GENESIS are also matters of cost.
There used to be a joke that freedom of the press meant freedom for those who owned a printing press.
Modern communications have, effectively, drastically reduced the cost of a printing press, hence eliminating a lot the "bottlenecks" and "gatekeeping" that restricted access to mass communications.
It effectively reduced the economies of scale.
Kaor, Stirling!
Fascinating, despite me knowing of Henry Ford's obsession with economies of scale. Too many, alas, seem unable to grasp that profits RISE if costs/prices are lower.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: doesn't apply to everything. You're not going to get the diamond-and-emerald equivalent of Model T's.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
True, by their very natures, some goods and services are always going to be high priced/costly.
Ad astra! Seam
"You're not going to get the diamond-and-emerald equivalent of Model T's."
Mostly because diamonds & emeralds are not fit for the purpose of being structural elements of an automobile. Making artificial diamond or emerald is getting cheaper as time goes on.
Kaor, Jim!
True, but Stirling and I were being a bit droll! Also, some goods are valued so highly they command higher prices than others.
Ad astra! Sean
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