Posts Tagged ‘barbed wire’
“Wheat feeds the West, rice sustains the East”
Tomas Pueyo on why this is so… and what that has meant for culture and history…
What’s your staple, bread or rice?
This is a momentous fact, for it might have determined politics, culture, and wealth.
How? Well, bread comes from wheat, and rice from… rice…
… Wheat and rice are not harvested in the same places. Rice and bread are the predominant food where rice and wheat are respectively the predominant crops. Here’s another way to look at the same data:
This, in turn, is determined mainly by this:
… But this doesn’t fully explain it since it also rains a lot in Ireland, for example, but nobody grows rice there. You need the heat found closer to the equator: Rice grows in hot, wet, flat, floodable areas, whereas wheat prefers cooler, drier, better drained areas.
Flooding rots wheat but can 3x the yields of rice. That makes wheat well adapted to hills, whereas rice can only survive on hills when they are terraced.
This sounds like just a fun fact, but it ain’t. Because rice generates twice as many calories per unit of area.
This means that rice nourishes families on half the land that wheat requires. Which means population density in rice areas can be twice as high as in wheat areas, or four times with double cropping. A hectare of land can feed 1.5 families with wheat and 6 with rice.
Yet rice paddies also require a lot of work—twice as much as wheat. And that work is almost year-round: preparing paddies, raising seedlings in nurseries, transplanting every single seedling by hand into flooded fields, managing water, pumping it, weeding, harvesting, and threshing—often followed by a second rice crop or a winter crop. These tasks peak during transplanting and harvest, creating critical seasons where a huge amount of work must be done in a short window of time.
Crucially, this labor cannot be delayed—if you miss the planting window or harvest late, the crop is ruined. As a result, rice farmers developed reciprocal labor exchange: neighbors help each other transplant and harvest in time. The timeliness pressure meant rice villages became tightly cooperative communities to ensure everyone’s fields were tended before it was too late.
Wheat farming historically had a more seasonal rhythm with periods of relative quiet. Wheat is typically sown in the fall or spring and then mainly just left to grow with the rain. Aside from episodic weeding or guarding the fields, there was less continuous labor until harvest time. Harvest itself was a crunch period requiring many hands with sickles—European villages would collaborate during harvest, and farmers might hire extra reapers.
These differences made these regions diverge across politics, culture, and economy…
Read on: “How Bread vs Rice Molded History,” from Pueyo’s Uncharted Territories.
* adage
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As we deliberate on our diets and their destinies, we might recall that it was on this date in 1887 that Chester A. Hodge of Beloit, Wisconsin received patent No. 367,398 for ‘spur rowel’ barbed wire (consisting of spur shaped wheels with 8 or 10 points mounted between 2 wires). It was one of many patents for barbed wire (e.g., here), which spread across the American West rapidly (thanks, in no small measure to the guy featured in the alamanc entry here)– and (by protecting farmers from foraging open-range cattle) paved the way for the expansion of wheat (and other kinds of) farming.
“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.”*…
Your correspondent is headed onto the road again; so, with apologies, regular service will be suspended until on or about May 17…
… In the meantime, the remarkable Henry Farrell offers sage advice…
Last Thursday, Combinations (a publication of the RadicalxChange foundation), published a review essay that I wrote on Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance. I’m not going to repeat here what I say there; it’s available for free, so if you want to read it, just click on the link! [and one should read it]. Instead, I want to make the implicit argument explicit.
One of the big problems of American politics – and of politics in plenty of places elsewhere – is that we lack usable and attractive futures. The result is the current battle between the defenders of the present, and an incoherent counter-alliance that brings the cultists of an imaginary past and the evangelists of an impossible future into common cause.
Because I am weird, I think that the most immediately useful aspect of Klein and Thompson’s book is not its specific argument about how to get to the future. It is that the book has the promise to reorient the presentists around the prospect of an attractive future, and the different paths you might take to get there. On the one hand, as Dan Davies says (riffing on post-punk philosophizing), if you don’t have a dream then how’re ya gonna have a dream come true? On the other, no single dream is capable of foretelling the One True Path To Abundance (or, for that matter, any other desirable goal) so you want to have useful arguments between people with different dreams, and different plausible paths…
[Farrell discusses the book and its reception– the myriad reactions it has occasioned– puts the debate into an intellectualy historical context, then pivots to his advice…]
… One terrifying prospect for the U.S. is that the Trump faction wins again in 2028. Another is that the Democrats regain power – but that like Keir Starmer’s government, they trap themselves in a vicious cycle where universal expectations of less generate factionalism and political stasis, which further deepen those universal expectations.
That is why I think that abundance is important as a goal. We need to aim towards some version of abundance to escape the trap we’re in. That too, is why I think that disagreement about how to reach that goal over the next couple of years is valuable in two ways.
First, no faction on the left or right has any monopoly on the wisdom about how to get there. It is only through argument – and experimentation in those bits of the federal system and local politics where experimentation is possible – that we can figure out what to do when we can do it. Second, if we can get to a place where the major argument is about how to get towards abundance, not just between center left and centrists, but across the political spectrum, we – for a very broad value of we – will be halfway towards winning the fight we need to win. Far more is politically possible when we are disagreeing over how to get to an attractive future, than when we are struggling to ensure that we are as close to the top of the pile as possible in a horrible one.
We need usable futures that can orient current politics in fruitful ways. Abundance – in the broadest sense of that term – is the closest thing to a common denominator across such futures that I know of…
Abundance not as an agenda but a goal: “We need usable futures,” from @himself.bsky.social.
For contrast, pair with: “Trump’s futurism: Elon’s rockets and fewer dolls for ‘baby girl’” (and Part 2) from @adamtooze.bsky.social.
* Franklin D. Roosevelt
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As we opt for optimism, we might send cautious birthday greetings to an example of what less-inclusive abundance can yield: John Warne “Bet-a-Million” Gates; he was born on this date in 1855. A Gilded Age industrialist and gambler, Gates was among the first salesmen of barbed wire. He parlayed his success into the manufacture of of the fencing; and success at that, into the manufacture fo steel. (He was instrumental in changing the steel industry’s production methods from the Bessemer process to the open hearth process.) He was the president of Republic Steel and later, of the Texas Company (an oil concern later known as Texaco) and of the Kansas City, Pittsburgh and Gulf Railroad.
Gates developed a taste– and a talent– for gambling at a young age. In his prime, he was known to host raucous, days-long poker games in his permanent suite at the Waldorf-Astoria. His nickname derived from a 1900 horserace in England on which he wagered $70,000 and was widely-reported to have won $1,000,000 (though it seems likely he won “only” $600,000).
“We are saved by making the future present to ourselves”*…
Recently, Steven Johnson (and here) received the Pioneer Award in Positive Psychology from UPenn’s Positive Psychology Center. Presented by his friend and mentor Marty Seligman, it honored Johnson’s “work over the years advancing the cause of human flourishing.”
From his acceptance speech…
… I’ve always been drawn to… long-term perspectives, where you position yourself… in the larger context of hundreds or thousands of years of human suffering and progress. Some of my California friends even built an entire organization to celebrate that long-term view: the Long Now Foundation, which is dedicated to thinking on the scale of centuries or millennia, encouraging us to get out of the 24-hour news cycle that dominates so much of our lives today. A technologically advanced culture cannot flourish without getting better at anticipating the future. That’s why science fiction matters. That’s why scenario planning matters. That’s why complex software simulations that enable us to forecast things like climate change on the scale of decades matter.
And here I want to bring us back to another idea that Marty Seligman has been an advocate for. Almost ten years ago, he edited a collection of essays called Homo Prospectus which had a huge influence on my thinking about the world. The core idea behind that book was that a defining superpower of human beings is our ability to mentally time-travel to possible future states, and think about how we might organize our activities to arrive at those imagined future outcomes.
“What best distinguishes our species,” he wrote in the introduction to that book, “is an ability that scientists are just beginning to appreciate: We contemplate the future. Our singular foresight created civilization and sustains society. A more apt name for our species would be Homo prospectus, because we thrive by considering our prospects. The power of prospection is what makes us wise. Looking into the future, consciously and unconsciously, is a central function of our large brain.”
It is unclear whether nonhuman animals have any real concept of the future at all. Some organisms display behavior that has long-term consequences, like a squirrel’s burying a nut for winter, but those behaviors are all instinctive. The latest studies of animal cognition suggest that some primates and birds may carry out deliberate preparations for events that will occur in the near future. But making decisions based on future prospects on the scale of months or years — even something as simple as planning a gathering of the tribe a week from now — would be unimaginable even to our closest primate relatives. If the Homo prospectus theory is correct, those limited time-traveling skills explain an important piece of the technological gap that separates humans from all other species on the planet. It’s a lot easier to invent a new tool if you can imagine a future where that tool might be useful. What gave flight to the human mind and all its inventiveness may not have been the usual culprits of our opposable thumbs or our gift for language. It may, instead, have been freeing our minds from the tyranny of the present.
The problem now is that the future is getting increasingly hard to predict, in large part because of what has started to happen with artificial intelligence over the past few years. I’ve spent a lot of my career looking at transformative changes in technology, and I’ve come to believe that what we’re experiencing right now is going to be the most seismic, the most far-reaching transformation of my lifetime, bigger than the personal computer, bigger than the Internet and the Web. And while there is much to debate about what the impact of this revolution is going to be for the job market, for politics, and just about any other field, there is growing consensus that it is going to provide an enormous lift to medicine and human health. The Nobel Prize for chemistry going to the AlphaFold team last week was arguably the most dramatic illustration of the promise here. Earliest this month, Dario Amodei—the founder of the AI lab Anthropic, makers of Claude–published a 13,000 word piece on where he thought we were headed with what he calls “powerful AI” in the next decade or two. The line that really struck me in the piece was this:
My basic prediction is that AI-enabled biology and medicine will allow us to compress the progress that human biologists would have achieved over the next 50-100 years into 5-10 years… a compressed 21st century.
Whether or not something that dramatic does come to pass—and I think we have to take the possibility of it seriously—it seems clear that given the kind of biological and medical advances that AI will likely unlock, there is significant headroom left in the story of extended human lifespan, perhaps even a sea change in how we age. That is, on one level, incredibly hopeful news. But it is also the kind of change that will inevitably have enormous secondary effects. To understand just how momentous those changes could be, take a look at this chart:
That’s the 6,000 year history of human population growth. You might notice, if you really squint your eyes, that something interesting appears to happen about 150 years ago. After millennia of slow and steady growth, human population growth went exponential. And that’s not the result of people having more babies—the human birth rate was declining rapidly during much of that period. That’s the impact of people not dying. And while that is on one level incredibly good news, it is also in a very real sense one of the two most important drivers of climate change. If we had transferred to a fossil-fuel-based economy but kept our population at 1850 levels, we would have no climate change issues whatsoever—there simply wouldn’t be enough carbon-emitting lifestyles to make a measurable difference in the atmosphere.
The key idea here is that no change this momentous is entirely positive in its downstream effects. Trying to anticipate those effects, and mitigate the negative ones, is going to take all of our powers of prospection.
When I was putting together my thoughts for this talk, my mind went back to the one time I spoke with Marty, about five years ago, when I was writing about cognitive time travel for the Times Magazine. As usual, I was incredibly behind in actually doing the reporting for the piece, and I’d called Marty desperate for a few quotes on a tight deadline. He very generously found time for me, but he had to do the call from an animal hospital, because as it happens he and his family were in the middle of putting their dog down. So our very first moments in conversation with each other plunged right into the depths of loss and grieving and the strange bonds that form between animals and humans. There was no small talk.
As I said earlier, death is, in the most basic sense, the termination point of human flourishing. But it’s also the shadow that hovers over us while we are still alive. We have done so much to minimize that shadow over the past century or two, going from a world where it was the norm for a third of your children to die before adulthood to a world where less than one percent do. But what does it mean for human flourishing if that runaway life expectancy curve that we’ve been riding for the past century keeps ascending? What does it mean if AI starts out-performing us at complex cognitive tasks? How do we flourish in that brave new world? Do we take on a new responsibility—not just ensuring the path of human flourishing, but also the flourishing of our AI companions? These are all difficult questions precisely because of time. The rate of change is so extreme right now we don’t have as much time to learn, and adapt. The doubling of human life expectancy was a process that really unfolded over two hundred years, and we’re still dealing with its unintended consequences. What happens if that magnitude of change gets compressed down to a decade?
I don’t know the answers to those questions yet, I’m sorry to report. But maybe spelling them out together helps explain something about what I’ve tried to do with my career, which I think from afar can sometimes seem a bit random, bouncing back and forth between writing about long-term decision making or exploring the history of human life expectancy and building software with language models. This award is called the Pioneer Award, and while I’m deeply honored to receive it, I don’t think of myself so much as a pioneer in any of these fields, but rather as someone who has consistently tried to find a place to work that was adjacent to the most important trends in human flourishing, so that I could help shine light on them, explain them to a wider audience, and in the case of my work with AI, nudge them in a positive direction to the best of my ability. That you all have recognized me for this work—pioneer or not—means an enormous amount to me. You can be sure I will do my best to savor it…
On progress, the “compressed 21st century,” and the importance of foresight: “Ways of Flourishing,” from @stevenbjohnson in his newsletter Adjacent Possible. Eminently worth reading in full.
(Image above: source)
* George Eliot
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As we take the long view, we might recall that it was on this date in 1873 that Illinois farmer Joseph F. Glidden applied for a patent on barbed wire. It became the first commercially-feasible barbed wire in 1874 (an earlier, less successful patent preceded his)– a product that would transform the West. Before his innovation, settlers on the treeless plains had no easy way to fence livestock away from cropland, and ranchers had no way to prevent their herds from roaming far and wide. Glidden’s barbed wire opened the plains to large-scale farming, and closed the open range, bringing the era of the cowboy and the round-up to an end. With his partner, Isaac L. Ellwood, Glidden formed the Barb Fence Company of De Kalb, Illinois, and quickly became one of the wealthiest men in the nation.
“The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes”*…
For some, the prospect of further advances in AI and related tech (robotics, connectivity, et al.) conjures a future of existential risk, a Terminator-like dystopian future in which humans fight with “machines” for primacy. For others (among whom your correspondent numbers himself), AI (better understood as “augmented” than “artificial” intelligence) has real promise– but also dangers of a different (and very human) sort. Those technologies, dependent as they are on capital and specific/rare expertise, could fuel further concentration of wealth and power, could usher in an era of even greater inequality. Noah Smith is here to argue that my fears may be misplaced, that augmentation may narrow the skills gap and help reduce economic polarization…
On the app formerly known as Twitter, I’m known for occasionally going on rants about how it’s good to be normal and average and middle-class. To some degree this is because I believe that the only successful society is an egalitarian one where people don’t have to be exceptional in order to live good and comfortable and fulfilling lives. But some of it is also a reaction against the messages I was inundated with growing up. It seemed like every movie and book and TV show was telling me that nerds like me were special — that because we could do physics or program computers or even just play video games, we were destined to be exceptional. In the late 80s and 90s, it felt like we were on the cusp of a great shift, where the back-slapping jocks who had dominated American society in earlier times were on the verge of losing power and status to the bespectacled freaks and geeks. The Revenge of the Nerds was coming.
It wasn’t just fantasy, either. Over the next thirty years, the nerds really did win the economic competition. The U.S. shifted from manufacturing to knowledge industries like IT, finance, bio, and so on, effectively going from the world’s workshop to the world’s research park. This meant that simply being able to cut deals and manage large workforces were no longer the only important skills you needed to succeed at the highest levels of business. Bespectacled programmers and math nerds became our richest men. From the early 80s to the 2000s, the college earnings premium rose relentlessly, and a degree went from optional to almost mandatory for financial success.
The age of human capital was in full swing, and the general consensus was that “Average Is Over”. And with increased earnings came increased social status and personal confidence; by the time I moved out to San Francisco in 2016, tech people were clearly the masters of the Universe.
The widening gap in the performance of the nerds versus everyone else wasn’t the only cause of the rise in inequality in the U.S. — financialization, globalization, tax changes, the decline of unions, and other factors all probably played a role. But the increasing premium on human capital was impossible to ignore.
That trend lasted so long that most Americans can no longer remember anything else. We’ve become used to the idea that technology brings inequality, by delivering outsized benefits to the 20% of society who are smart and educated enough to take full advantage of it. It’s gotten to the point where we tacitly assume that this is just what technology does, period, so that when a new technology like generative AI comes along, people leap to predict that economic inequality will widen as a result of a new digital divide.
And it’s possible that will happen. I can’t rule it out. But I also have a more optimistic take here — I think it’s possible that the wave of new technologies now arriving in our economy will decrease much of the skills gap that opened up in the decades since 1980…
An optimistic take on technology and inequality: “Is it time for the Revenge of the Normies?” from @Noahpinion. Eminently worth reading in full.
* Aristotle
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As we contemplate consequences, we might spare a thought for Joseph Glidden; he died on this date in 1906. An Illinois farmer, he developed and patented the design of the first commercially-feasible barbed wire in 1874 (an earlier, less successful patent preceded his)– a product that would transform the West. Before his innovation, settlers on the treeless plains had no easy way to fence livestock away from cropland, and ranchers had no way to prevent their herds from roaming far and wide. Glidden’s barbed wire opened the plains to large-scale farming, and closed the open range, bringing the era of the cowboy and the round-up to an end. With his partner, Isaac L. Ellwood, Glidden formed the Barb Fence Company of De Kalb, Illinois, and quickly became one of the wealthiest men in the nation.
“Everyday, it’s a-gettin’ closer / Goin’ faster than a roller coaster “*…
The American economy is reopening. In Alabama, gyms are back in business. In Georgia, restaurants are seating customers again. In Texas, the bars are packed. And in Vermont, the stay-at-home order has been lifted. People are still frightened. Americans are still dying. But the next, queasy phase of the coronavirus pandemic is upon us. And it seems likely that the financial nadir, the point at which the economy stops collapsing and begins growing again, has passed.
What will the recovery look like? At this fraught moment, no one knows enough about consumer sentiment and government ordinances and business failures and stimulus packages and the spread of the disease to make solid predictions about the future. The Trump administration and some bullish financial forecasters are arguing that we will end up with a strong, V-shaped rebound, with economic activity surging right back to where it was in no time. Others are betting on a longer, slower, U-shaped turnaround, with the pain extending for a year or three. Still others are sketching out a kind of flaccid check mark, its long tail sagging torpid into the future.
At least four major factors are terrifying economists and weighing on the recovery: the household fiscal cliff, the great business die-off, the state and local budget shortfall, and the lingering health crisis…
Annie Lowrey (@AnnieLowrey) unpacks a painfully-plausible worst-case scenario featuring the four horsemen of what could be an economic apocalypse– the four major forces at work today that are terrifying economists and weighing on the recovery: “The Second Great Depression.”
For more on the fourth and most terrifying force Lowrey cites, see here (and the research that underlies it).
* Buddy Holly
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As we take necessary steps, we might recall that it was on this date in 1867 that Lucien B. Smith patented barbed wire (U.S. No. 66,182). Eventually competitors produced more than 1,500 different types of barbed wire; but Smith’s patent gave him pride of invention. His simple idea that was an artificial “thorn hedge” consisting of wire with short metal spikes twisted on by hand at regular intervals. For prairie farmers and cattlemen natural fencing materials were scarce, so the invention gave them an accessible way keep their cattle safely away from crops. It also created tensions between farmers and ranchers: inexpensive barbed wire allowed farmers to fence in their fields, preventing ranchers’ livestock from feeding off of the farmers’ fields, and making it more difficult for cattle drives to cross farmers’ lands. Ultimately ranchers too recognized the benefits of fencing their herds… and the days of the open range came to an end.
Copy of Lucien B. Smith’s wire fence improvement (barbed wire) Patent, 66,182, dated June 25, 1867 (source)
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