Category Archives: history

The American Challenge

The post-industrial societies shall be America, Canada, Japan and Sweden.  That is all.

I’ve been reading an interesting book from 1968 called The American Challenge by Jean Jacques Servan-Schreiber.  In it, the author notes that America and American companies had invested and profited greatly from the economic boom in post-war Europe.  Meanwhile, European companies had for a variety of reasons not reaped the same rewards (in the author’s opinion), and so by 1968 almost all the important multi-national corporations in Europe were either American owned or staffed by Americans rather than Europeans.  The author furthermore predicted that by the end of the (20th) century, American investments will push America to an unprecedented level of wealth and power, above and beyond what most of Europe could achieve.  He claimed that America would become a post-industrial society, one in which industrial revenue would skyrocket, labor productivity would skyrocket, and the coming cybernetic future would be used to build such wealth and power and to be almost unimaginable to the people living in his age.  

What he seemed to be getting at was the idea of a second great divergence.  The first “Great Divergence” was the economic divergence in the 18th and 19th centuries between Europe/North America and the rest of the world (Asia, Africa, and Oceania).  Within a relatively short amount of time, industrial Europe increased its GDP per capita many fold, enabling them to have more food, more goods and better services (things like trains) than any other place on earth.  It was the reason that in the 19th century, middle class Brits could travel all over the world by train or steamship and be warmed during the winter by gas heating piped into their houses.  These would all have been a huge luxury to people living anywhere else on the planet, and been almost unthinkable just a few centuries before.

This “Second Great Divergence” that Servan-Schreiber seems to expect would be similar to the first, in which some parts of the world experience rapid rises in living and technological standards, fueled by an economic system of “post-industrialism” (as he calls it) rather than industrialism. This post-industrial economic system would create a stark contrast with the industrial societies, which would include most of Europe. Post-industrial societies, he claims, will be to industrial societies as industrial societies are to per-industrial societies: richer, more leisure, more health, and able to control and dominate them in a semi-colonial fashion. Like the first Great Divergence, this second Divergence would be concentrated geographically, but unlike the first Divergence, Servan-Schreiber predicts that (most of) Europe will not reap its benefits.  His gloomy prediction in 1968 was thus: “[in 1998] the post-industrial societies will be, in this order: the United States, Japan, Canada, Sweden.  That is all”

Now, this divergence doesn’t seem to have happened, nor does it seem to have occurred that American businesses control all aspects of the European economy (as Servan-Schreiber predicted).  But it’s enlightening to look at the predictions he made half a century ago and see just what it was that made him think this was the future.  For the next week or so I will be going through parts of the book to analyze what he saw as the state of Europe in 1968 and why he thought it would lose so much ground relative to its peers.

Why do people still try to defend cryptocurrency as being “early” technology? This isn’t growing pains, it’s a scam

Bitcoin was launched in January of 2009, making it roughly 13.5 years old by now.  In that time, it has gone from scam to scam to scam and yet time and again the True Believers make excuses for both it and the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem.  “The tech is still early,” “it’s like the early days of the internet” “any day now mass market use will take off” and it NEVER EVER DOES.  Let’s get some context going:

Google was incorporated in 1998, and by 2008 it had 20 billion dollars in revenue.  Not valuation mind you, yearly revenue

Amazon was launched in 1994, and by 2005 they were offering Amazon Prime, which promised unlimited 2-day shipping on over a million in-stock items for a modest yearly fee

Microsoft was founded in 1975 and by 1985 they launched the Windows 1 which sold over half a million units.

Each of these modern tech giants started small, but had reached mass market appeal in less than a decade.  What does Bitcoin have?  Where is the mass market adoption of Bitcoin as a unit of currency?  Where are the merchants and vendors who take Bitcoin instead of Visa or Mastercard?  Time and again minor partnerships area announced where some sucker claims to accept Bitcoin, Bitcoiners exclaim that this is the beginning of mass adoption, and then Bitcoin is quietly removed from the available payment methods or ends up being the smallest method used by a large amount.  Bitcoin doesn’t compete with PayPal, or Apple Pay or any credit card or payment processor because it sucks and always has sucked.  And mass adoption isn’t right around the corner, we aren’t in the early days of Bitcoin we’re over a decade in and it is still useful for nothing more than scams and ponzi schemes.  Every now and then new stories pop up that *this* time it will be different, *this* will definitely be the start of mass adoption.  And of course every time it’s wrong.  I could go through every year from 2010 to today and find someone claiming that this would be the start of mass adoption too.  It’s always been nothing more than scams and hype.

Post 7

I’d like to start with a chat about stories.

Say I told you a story and it started out like this: “there once was a great man called America.  He had 13 sons and together they fought against tyranny.”  Obviously this is an anthropomorphic mythology of the American Revolution, right?  The nation of America and its 13 colonies/states become actual people in a dramatic tale.  Now here’s a different story: “there was a great man called America, and with his 50 children he settled the length and breadth of this land.”  Well this is an anthropomorphic mythology of a more *modern* America.  There’s 50 states instead of 13, and they don’t need to fight the British anymore.  But how about this one: “America and his 24 children quarreled frequently among themselves.”  What is “24” in relation to?  Well in 1821 Missouri became the 24th state, and it wasn’t until 1836 that Arkansas became the 25th.  Us modern folk don’t really think about America as having 24 states, but for 15 years in the 19th century that was the case.

If you lived in 1830 and were going to write an anthropomorphic mythology of the United States, it might make sense for you to give America 24 children.  You would probably characterize America and the states in an 1830s way.  New York and Pennsylvania, the richest and by far the largest states, might be America’s two eldest sons, with large and wealthy families.  An unpopulated state like Illinois would be one of America’s youngest children, who lives far away on the very edges of the frontier.  This kind of arrangement seems strange to a modern, but makes perfect sense when you consider that that was the reality of the 1830 world.

Now this story is kind of pointless but it illustrates how many stories in the bible appear to work.  Too often I see a simplistic dichotomy of how people see the bible: either it is literal truth (though some may acquiesce to saying it is embellished) or it is a book full of lies with zero academic or historical value.  I don’t think the bible is literally true, and I do know that many of its narratives are historically false, but in saying that there is a lot that can be learned historically by the stories written in the bible *even the stories that are false*.  

The story of Jacob and his son Joseph is the best example of this.  The story itself is impossible and archeologically unfounded, however it gives us important historical clues not towards any “real” Jacob and Joseph, but into the worldview of the story’s writers.  To refresh your memory, Jacob (aka Israel) is a shepherd with 12 sons: Judah, Levi, Benjamin, Joseph, etc.  Joseph is his favorite/best son who can do all manner of awesome things to save himself and his family.  An observant reader can page ahead to later parts of the Old Testament and see that the names of Jacob’s children are the names of the 12 tribes of Israel.  So “Levi” is the ancestor of the tribe of Levites, “Judah” is the ancestor of the tribe of Judah and so on.

You can see the connections with the America story from above.  A father (America/Israel) and his sons (13 states, 12 tribes) can be used as mythological antecedents for the political realities of the day.  And it seems that the Jacob story was in fact used to “explain” some of the historical realities of the day.  On Jacob’s deathbed, he praises Judah over all the other brothers, hinting at how the tribe of Judah would gain supremacy during the monarchic period.  It seems clear that the author(s) of the Jacob/Joseph story seemed to be using it to explain or justify the author’s “modern” time period.  The 12 tribes of Israel should all be united because they were originally the 12 sons of Jacob.  And the wisdom of Joseph and Judah are used to justify the ruling families of the northern and southern kingdoms of Israel and Judah, who claimed descendence from these two.

Now I use this example mostly because I think it’s neat but also because it’s something I look out for when reading works set in an author’s past.  How the author thinks of the past is usually colored by their own present in ways that may not be obvious.  I’d love to hear if anyone else has examples of this.