Capitalism – Page 17 – artdiamondblog.com

500 Kinds of Hammers: Even Marx Knew that Capitalism Produces Variety

The diversity of hammers, part 1. Source of graphic: page 4 of the Basalla book quoted and cited aways down below.

(p. 21 of Bryson) Suddenly, for the first time In history, there was in most people’s lives a lot of everything. Karl Marx, living in London, noted with a tone of wonder, and just a hint of helpless admiration, that it was possible to buy five hundred kinds of hammer In Britain. Everywhere was activity, Modern Londoners live in a great Victorian city; the Victorians lived through It, so to speak. In twelve years eight railway termini opened In London. The scale of disruption–the trenches, the tunnels, the muddy excavations, the congestion of wagons and other vehicles, the smoke, the din, the clutter–that came from filling the city with railways, bridges, sewers, pumping stations, power stations, subway lines, and all the rest meant that Victorian London was not just the biggest city in the world but the noisiest, foulest, muddiest, busiest, most choked and dug-over place the world had ever seen.

The 1851 census also showed that more people in Britain now lived in cities than in the countryside–the first time that this had happened anywhere in the world–and the most visible consequence of this was crowds on a scale never before experienced. People now worked en masse, traveled en masse, were schooled, imprisoned, and hospitalized en masse. When they went out to enjoy themselves, they did that en masse, and nowhere did they go with greater enthusiasm and rapture than to the Crystal Palace.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

On Marx and hammers, Bryson references p. 156 of Petroski:
Petroski, Henry. The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts–from Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers–Came to Be as They Are. New York: A. Knopf, 1992.

Actually, Petroski’s source on Marx on hammers clearly is Basalla who he quotes on pp. 23-24:

(p. 23 of Petroski) George Basalla, in The Evolution of Technology, suggests the great “diversity of things made by human hands” over the past two hundred years by pointing out that five million patents have been issued in America alone. . . . (p. 24) He then introduces the fundamental questions of his study:

The variety of made things is every bit as astonishing as that of living things. Consider the range that extends from stone tools to microchips, from waterwheels to spacecraft, from thumb-tacks to skyscrapers. In 1867 Karl Marx was surprised to learn . . . that five hundred different kinds of hammers were produced in Birmingham, England, each one adapted to a specific function in industry or the crafts. What forces led to the proliferation of so many variations of this ancient and common tool? Or more generally, why are there so many different kinds of things?

Basalla dismisses the “traditional wisdom” that attributes technological diversity to necessity and utility, and looks for other explanations, “especially ones that can incorporate the most general assumptions about the meaning and goals of life.”

(Note: italics in original; first ellipsis added; second ellipsis in original.)

Petroski then again mentions Marx on hammers on the p. 156 that is referenced by Bryson:

(p. 156 of Petroski) In spite of Marx’s astonishment that five hundred different kinds of hammers were made in Birmingham in the 1860s, this was no capitalist plot. Indeed, if there were a plot, it was to not make more. The proliferation of hammer types occurred because there were then, as now, many specialized uses of hammers, and each user wished to possess a tool that was suited as ideally as possible to the tasks he performed perhaps thousands of times each day, but seldom if ever in a formal social context. I have often reflected on the value of special hammers while using the two ordinary ones from my tool chest: a familiar carpenter’s hammer with a claw, and a smaller version that fits in places the larger one does not. The tasks I’ve applied them to have included driving and removing nails, of course, but also opening and closing paint cans, pounding on chisels, tacking down carpets, straightening dented bicycle fenders, breaking bricks, driving wooden stakes, and on and on.

The Basalla book is:
Basalla, George. The Evolution of Technology, Cambridge Studies in the History of Science. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

On p. 2 of Basalla, he writes:

(p. 2 of Basalla) The variety of made things is every bit as astonishing as that of living things. Consider the range that extends from stone tools to microchips, from waterwheels to spacecraft, from thumbtacks to skyscrapers. In 1867 Karl Marx was surprised to learn, as well he might have been, that five hundred different kinds of hammers were produced in Birmingham, England, each one adapted to a specific function in industry or the crafts . . .

(Note: ellipsis added.)

In Basalla’s notes to this chapter, the only Marx he mentions is the first volume of Capital. Searching volume one of Capital in Google Books for “hammer,” one discovers the relevant passage on p. 375:

(p. 374 of Marx) Manufacture is characterized by the differentiation of (p. 375) the instruments of labour–a differentiation whereby implements of a given sort acquire fixed shapes, adapted to each particular application, and by the specialisation (sic) of those instruments, giving to each special instrument its full play only in the hands of a specific detail labourer. In Birmingham alone 500 varieties of hammers are produced, and not only is each adapted to one particular process, but several varieties often serve exclusively for the different operations in one and the same process. The manufacturing period simplifies, improves, and multiplies the implements of labour, by adapting them to the exclusively special functions of each detail labourer.

The Marx book is:
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1. New York: Modern Library, 1906 [first German edition in 1867].

The diversity of hammers, part 2. Source of graphic: page 5 of the Basalla book quoted and cited somewhere above.

Crushed Under Eurostar in a Desparate Dash to a Better Life

(p. 280) In recent years, police have practically barricaded the marshalling yard in Calais, France,where the elegant Eurostar train must slow down before it enters the Channel Tunnel to England. Today the Calais marshalling yard for the Channel Tunnel looks like what the military might erect around a flying-saucer wreckage–barbed wire, electric fences, armed guards, and police dogs everywhere. Yet each night as darkness falls desperate men from the developing world, Africans and Pakistanis and Afghans and others, hide throughout the marshalling yard, sprint toward the Eurostar as it slows for the tunnel, and try to cling to its side as it accelerates again. They hope to survive until the train bears (p. 281) them into the United Kingdom, for French law treats illegal immigrants harshly, while England is more liberal. Numerous indigent developing-world men have been killed when they have slipped off the sides or the couplers of Eurostar, then fallen beneath its wheels; the stylish passengers aboard the train may feel a slight bump. Yet the men keep trying, though most must know there is hardly anything on this aerodynamically sleek train to grab hold of. Many are arrested as they dash toward the train and the favored life it represents. If released, they return to dash again. If deported, they try to sneak back into the country and dash again.

Source:
Easterbrook, Gregg. The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. Paperback ed. New York: Random House, 2004.

Garbage Landfill Is Home to 80,000 in Payatas

(p. 281) Perhaps you’ve heard of Smoky Mountain, the town-sized garbage landfill in Payatas, outside Manila in the Philippines, that is home to an estimated eighty thousand desperately poor Filipinos who eke out a miserable existence scavenging what others throw away. Eighty thousand people is more than the population of Utica, New York. Entire families have been born at the Smoky Mountain landfill and lived their lives there, amidst squalor, stench, and constant smoke of smoldering trash. In July 2000, about two hundred residents of the Payatas landfill died when a large hill of trash collapsed, burying them under a garbage avalanche.

Source:
Easterbrook, Gregg. The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. Paperback ed. New York: Random House, 2004.

“The Frozen Body of Someone Desperate to Enter the United States”

(p. 279) In August 2001, as an American Airlines 777 jetliner arriving from overseas descended toward John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and lowered its landing gear, the frozen body of a man fell into a marsh beneath the field’s approach lanes. The body, believed to be that of a young Nigerian, was buried in a plain wooden casket in City Cemetery, the resting place of New York indigents popularly known as Potter’s Field. No one will ever know for certain, but it appears the young man, who carried no identification, had hidden in the wheel well of the jet, hoping to steal into the United States. If, as police speculated, he was from an African village, he might not have known that the air outside a jetliner at cruise altitude may be minus-80 degrees Fahrenheit, and that wheel wells are unheated; they are also not pressurized, rendering breathing almost impossible at a jetliner’s cruise altitude. Or the victim might have known these things and climbed into the wheel well anyway because he was desperate. The unknown man’s death (p. 280) marked the third time since 1997 that the frozen body of someone desperate to enter the United States had fallen from the wheel wells as a jetliner from overseas lowered its landing gear on descent toward JFK. In the man’s pockets were a few minor personal effects and a street-vendor’s map of Manhattan.

Contemplating this tragedy I thought, first, of the horror the man must have experienced as the plane’s mindless hydraulic mechanisms drew the landing struts and wheels up to crush him. Somehow he avoided being crushed–only to realize as the air craft ascended that it was getting very cold and the air was getting very thin, and he was going to die gasping and shaking. Then I contemplated what the man’s final thoughts might have been. Fear, of course; regret. Perhaps, at the last, dread that his own death might consign the rest of his family in his village to a life of suffering: for the desperation of many trying to reach the West from the developing world is motivated by their desire to work extremely hard and to live on the edge here, sending part of their incomes back home to those even worse off.

Source:
Easterbrook, Gregg. The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. Paperback ed. New York: Random House, 2004.

Limits to “Sprawl” Add to House Prices Which Benefits the “Already Entrenched”

(p. 130) If 50 percent more Americans are on the way that means there must be 50 percent more suburban subdivisions, 50 percent more malls, 50 percent more of everything–unless anyone thinks it is fair to deny to newcomers the physical space and comfort that current Americans enjoy.

Sprawl may he managed well or poorly, and “smart growth” is better than dumb growth. But when people object to development per se, what they almost always mean is that they have achieved a nice lifestyle and now wish to pull up the ladders against others–and, not coincidentally, to make their own properties more valuable by artificially limiting supply. California real estate prices in particular have shot up in the last decade because slow-growth ordinances and no-growth judicial rulings have artificially restricted housing supply. Opposing sprawl can be a financial boon to anyone who’s already entrenched.
Anything that runs up housing prices is of particular concern to educational equality, since today, in many parts of the United States, the housing market in effect regulates access to the best public schools. Buyers pay significant premiums for homes in the districts of high-quality public schools; in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, a home in the excellent Fairfax County or Montgomery County school systems may sell for $200,000 more than an identical dwelling from which children would attend the troubled schools of Prince George’s County or Arlington County. In turn, SAT scores rise in tandem with family income–each $10,000 increment of increase in family income adds twenty to thirty points to a child’s total SAT scores, studies show. Why does family income raise SAT scores? Partly because a high income enables parents to give children extra advantages, partly because low income parents or parents in broken families may shirk their responsibility for helping children succeed in school, but mostly (p. 131) because the higher a family’s income the better a school district it can buy into, via the housing market. Since education is closely linked to success in later life, the nation has an interest in preventing exclusionary housing prices. That means there must be more sprawl and more growth to increase the housing supply and thereby reduce prices.

Source:
Easterbrook, Gregg. The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. Paperback ed. New York: Random House, 2004.

“Elites Like Bad News”

(p. 101) Many elites love writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, who viewed all human action as meaningless, or Thomas Pynchon, whose novels, such as Gravity’s Rainbow purport to present hard-science arguments that ours is a pointless universe doomed to meaningless demise. Pynchon’s grasp of physics is debatable; what matters is that when he claimed to have found scientific proof the universe is pointless, many of a certain ilk were eager to believe him. Eighty years ago, elites of the United Stares and Europe gushed in praise over the social historian Oswald Spen-(p. 102)gler’s work The Decline of the West, which argued not only that American and European civilization “one day will lie in fragments, forgotten” but that the downfall of Western civilization was imminently at hand. Similarly, William Butler Yeats in the early twentieth century was praised by Western intellectuals for predicting pending social disintegration through his famed phrase, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” Spengler even maintained that the collapse of Western civilization would be a beneficial development, because America and Europe were contemptible. Eight decades later, the West is far stronger, richer, more secure, more diverse, and more free than when Spengler declared it a decaying relic about to vanish. Nevertheless, his work and similar predictions of impending Western collapse are still spoken of reverentially among intellectual elites, a portion of whom delight to hear anything American and European called bad.

If elites like bad news, then the eagerness of intellectuals, artists, and tastemakers to embrace claims of ecological doomsday, population crash, coming global plagues, economic down fall, cultural wars, or the end of this or that become, at least, comprehensible.

Source:
Easterbrook, Gregg. The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. Paperback ed. New York: Random House, 2004.
(Note: italics in original.)

U.S. Citizens Choose Cars for 99% of Trips

(p. 92) America is a car culture and has been for almost a century, the phrase “traffic jam” dating to 1910, meaning we’re stuck with car culture for the time being. In the United States, the number of trips taken on public transportation has since 1998 been rising more rapidly than trips taken in cars. But public transportation nevertheless cannot be a cure-all for traffic congestion, since only a total of 1 percent of all U.S. trips occur on public transit. Double the share, which would require notable effort and capital expense, and it’s still only 2 percent. A car culture with a rising population and rising prosperity has little choice but to keep investing in roads and parking.

Source:
Easterbrook, Gregg. The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. Paperback ed. New York: Random House, 2004.

For Rand Money Was a Reward and a Noble Means, But Her Vision Was the End

Source of book image:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ZnmbvrcWaFQ/TQDZppbZS6I/AAAAAAAAAoM/CjtOtOuGYAM/s1600/ayn-rand-and-the-world-she-made.jpg

For Rand, adopting the dollar sign as a symbol was an ironic gesture–an elegant and graceful way of thumbing her nose at those who attacked the innovation and creativity of capitalism. They criticized a caricatured version of capitalism, and she threw the caricature back at them.
But at her most serious, money was never an end-in-itself for her, but rather a reward for achieving creative innovation, and a means for accomplishing even more ambitious creative innovation.
Remember that in Rand’s pure and lyrical Anthem, the hero is willing to give his invention away, and even be killed, as long as the Council agrees to allow the light he invented to keep shining.
In that wonderful moment with Bennett Cerf, Ayn Rand lived up to the hero she had created:

(p. 8) When Bennett Cerf, a head of Random House, begged her to cut Galt’s speech, Rand replied with what Heller calls “a comment that became publishing legend”: “Would you cut the Bible?” One can imagine what Cerf thought — he had already told Rand plainly, “I find your political philosophy abhorrent” — but the strange thing is that Rand’s grandiosity turned out to be perfectly justified.

In fact, any editor certainly would cut the Bible, if an agent submitted it as a new work of fiction. But Cerf offered Rand an alternative: if she gave up 7 cents per copy in royalties, she could have the extra paper needed to print Galt’s oration. That she agreed is a sign of the great contradiction that haunts her writing and especially her life.
. . .
Yet while Rand took to wearing a dollar-sign pin to advertise her love of capitalism, Heller makes clear that the author had no real affection for dollars themselves. Giving up her royalties to preserve her vision is something that no genuine capitalist, and few popular novelists, would have done.

For the full review, see:
ADAM KIRSCH. “Capitalist With a $.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., November 1, 2009): 1 & 8.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review is dated October 29, 2009 and has the title “Ayn Rand’s Revenge.”)

Book reviewed:
Heller, Anne C. Ayn Rand and the World She Made. New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2009.

Here is what the hero says in the key passage of Anthem:

“Our brothers! Your are right. Let the will of the Council be done upon our body. We do not care. But the light? What will you do with the light?” (p. 72)

Source:
Rand, Ayn. Anthem. Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers, Ltd., 1946.

Cars Increase Our “Personal Area”

(p. 89) Cars are the primary reason for the ever increasing “personal area” of Western life. As Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University has shown, “personal area”–the volume of territory through which someone moves in a typical day–has risen tenfold in the West since 1950, mainly because “personal speed” has tripled. Before general ownership of cars, most people were limited on most days to destinations to which the could walk, or that were close to bus or streetcar lines. Now most people head to whatever destination they wish, so long as traffic jams don’t intervene. Ausubel has found that the “personal speed” of typical Americans has been rising at about 2.7 percent per annum for a generation; at that rate, the “personal area” the typical individual covers per day doubles every twenty-five years. Racing around from one destination to the next–job, school, stores, gym, restaurant, church–may be stressful. But the fact that people are increasingly able to choose where they want to be, and choose when they want to be there, ¡s an addition to personal (p. 90) freedom. Cars are what make “personal speed” and “personal area” possible, and we wouldn’t love them so much were they not so damn convenient in this regard.

Aspects of car culture are unsettling, however. Speed and convenience in transit, for example, don’t necessarily translate into a more pleasing life. “The mobility of the private car has the paradoxical effect of lengthening how far people go rather than saving them time,” Alan Durning has written.

Source:
Easterbrook, Gregg. The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. Paperback ed. New York: Random House, 2004.

“Would You Exchange Places with a Typical Person Living in Any Year Before Your Birth?”

(p. 80) Consider a thought experiment. If the means existed, would you exchange places with a typical person living in any year before your birth? Exchange places permanently–not, say observe the Battle of Hastings and then rematerialize in the present. You could pick the year and place in the past, but could not specify trading places with someone specific like Catherine the Great or Leonardo da Vinci, and you could not specify that you would he a lord or lady or hold some similar advantage. In this deal you’d he transported back to the year and society of your choosing to live out the rest of your life as an ordinary person.

A good guess is that hardly anyone in the United States or the European Union today would accept a one-way ticket to the everyday life of the past. The physical beauty of the world would be greater then, before the mixed blessing of development. And most moments in the past would be quieter than ours, though not necessarily less stressful–the lives of pioneer farmers for whom a crop loss meant destitution, or of seamstresses working fourteen-hour days in early industrial-era sweatshops and unable to afford more than tea and bread, were hardly (p. 81) serene. Nor was the quiet, small-town atmosphere of the past, which many today idealize, necessarily ideal. Everyone knew your name, but everyone also knew your secrets; men and especially women enjoyed much less personal freedom in small-town life of the past than is typical today.
For essentially all of human history until the last few generations, the typical person’s lot has been unceasing toil, meager living circumstances, uncertainty about food, rudimentary health care, limited education, little travel or entertainment; all followed by early death. (Keep in mind these remain the conditions under which more than a billion people live in the developing world today.) Even if you could somehow carry the benefits of modern medicine with you into the past–health care alone would make almost everyone decline the one-way ticket backward–the toil, low living standards, and isolated lives of past generations would seem awful to us compared to the sorts of things we complain about today.

Source:
Easterbrook, Gregg. The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. Paperback ed. New York: Random House, 2004.

Affluence Has Made America More Libertarian

Source of book image: http://images.bookbyte.com/isbn.aspx?isbn=9780060747664

(p. 16) Various scolds and worrywarts have exclaimed, with Wordsworth, that “getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” To such Jeremiahs, Lindsey provides an essentially cheerful, although not altogether so, counterpoint: affluence has made America a more libertarian, and hence a nicer, place.

First came material improvement. Until very recently, he notes, when people prayed for their daily bread, they often were praying for just that. Not so long ago, many ordinary lives of quiet desperation ended especially dismally: about 10 percent of burials in New York City in 1889 were in potter’s fields. In 1900, 1.75 million children between the ages of 10 and 15 — almost one-fifth of all children in that age cohort — were in the work force. Children provided one-fourth to one-third of the incomes for working-class families, which spent more than 90 percent of their household earnings on food, shelter and clothing. In 1900, Americans spent nearly twice as much on funerals as on medicine, and less than 2 percent of Americans took vacations.
. . .
Affluence, Lindsey writes, has provided “a mad proliferation of choices — and what, in the end, is freedom but the ability to choose?”

For the full review, see:
GEORGE F. WILL. “Land of Plenty.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., June 10, 2007): 16-17.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Book reviewed:
Lindsey, Brink. The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture. New York: HarperCollins, 2007.