Posts Tagged ‘development’
“Beans, Beans, the Musical Fruit”*…
Then remarkable Umberto Eco on his candidate for the most important innovation of the last millennium. After considering the stern mounted rudder, the horse shoe, the yoke, the improved plough, crop rotation, gunpowder, and other candidates, he nominates a humble but central development…
… But what I really want to talk about is beans, and not just beans but also peas and lentils. All these fruits of the earth are rich in vegetable proteins, as anyone who goes on a low-meat diet knows, for the nutritionist will be sure to insist that a nice dish of lentils or split peas has the nutritional value of a thick, juicy steak. Now the poor, in those remote Middle Ages, did not eat meat, unless they managed to raise a few chickens or engaged in poaching (the game of the forest was the property of the lords). And as I mentioned earlier, this poor diet begat a population that was ill nourished, thin, sickly, short and incapable of tending the fields. So when, in the 10th century, the cultivation of legumes began to spread, it had a profound effect on Europe. Working people were able to eat more protein; as a result, they became more robust, lived longer, created more children and repopulated a continent.
We believe that the inventions and the discoveries that have changed our lives depend on complex machines. But the fact is, we are still here — I mean we Europeans, but also those descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers and the Spanish conquistadors — because of beans. Without beans, the European population would not have doubled within a few centuries, today we would not number in the hundreds of millions and some of us, including even readers of this article, would not exist. Some philosophers say that this would be better, but I am not sure everyone agrees.
And what about the non-Europeans? I am unfamiliar with the history of beans on other continents, but surely even without European beans, the history of those continents would have been different, just as the commercial history of Europe would have been different without Chinese silk and Indian spices.
Above all, it seems to me that this story of beans is of some significance for us today. In the first place, it tells us that ecological problems must be taken seriously. Secondly, we have all known for a long time that if the West ate unmilled brown rice, husks and all (delicious, by the way), we would consume less food, and better food.
But who thinks of such things? Everyone will say that the greatest invention of the millennium is television or the microchip. But it would be a good thing if we learned to learn something from the Dark Ages too…
What innovation was most instrumental in creating the modern world? “Best Invention: How the Bean Saved Civilization” (gift link) from the April 18, 1999 edition of @nytimes.com.
(Image above: source)
* children’s playground saying
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As we lionize legumes, we might note that today is National Buffet Day, a celebration of an occasion to heap one’s plate with beans (or whatever).
“Government is an art, not a science, and an adventure, not a planned itinerary”*…
And sometimes, suggests Brian Potter, that adventure is more adventurous than others…
I spend a lot of time reading about manufacturing and its evolution, which means I end up repeatedly reading about the times and places where radical changes in manufacturing were taking place: Britain in the late 18th century, the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Japan in the second half of the 20th century, and (to a lesser extent) China today. I’ve been struck by how many parallels there are between modern China (roughly the period from the late 1970s till today) and the Gilded Age/Progressive era U.S. (roughly the period from the late 1860s to the 1920s).
During these periods, unprecedented levels of economic growth combined with large populations were making both the U.S. and China wealthy and powerful. Both countries were urbanizing, building enormous amounts of infrastructure, and becoming by far the largest manufacturers in the world, with industrial operations of unprecedented size. Both were undergoing wrenching social and cultural change as old institutions were replaced by new ones, and the countries began to become “modern.” Both were nations of ambitious strivers, where it seemed like anyone with talent could make themselves into a success by catching the tide of rising opportunity. Despite the many differences between the two countries, the forces of development pulled them along very similar paths…
[Potter reviews the histories of development in the U.S. and in China…]
… Yuen Yuen Ang [here] likewise notes the similarities between modern China and the Gilded Age U.S., stating that “both countries underwent a wrenching structural conversion from rural to urban and closed to global markets, producing once-in-a-generation opportunities for the politically connected and enterprising…to acquire fabulous wealth.”
The most interesting thing about these parallels, to me, is that the U.S. and China in many ways were starting from very different places. Prior to its opening up, China’s economy was entirely state-owned and state-planned, and its economic expansion was coupled with unwinding much of the state enterprise machinery, letting small businesses form and markets bloom.
The U.S., on the other hand, was on the other end of the spectrum. Prior to its economic expansion it had an incredibly weak state, and economy driven by very small enterprises. Its development was accompanied by the creation of large, powerful companies and institutions, and moving away from the “invisible hand” of the market and towards the “visible hand” of exchanges of goods and services mediated within very large organizations.
China’s success came from finding ways to mobilize its huge number of people and hasn’t necessarily been focused on operating at the frontier of efficiency. The U.S., on the other hand, despite its comparatively large population, had a chronic shortage of labor, and much of its development was focused on developing less labor-intensive manufacturing technologies like the American System. China built its success on the back of inexpensive labor, and it remains a middle-income country. In the U.S., labor has never been cheap; the U.S. had nearly the GDP per capita of Britain as early as the 1820s, and it had the highest GDP per capita in the world by the 1880s. But despite these differences, the logic of development pulled the U.S. and China along very similar paths. Both countries could exploit very large markets (both at home and abroad) and operated their industries at very large scales in order to do so. In both countries, this required a novel set of institutions that was radically different from what came before, and the transformation that created those institutions spawned cultures with many similarities…
“How China Is Like the 19th Century U.S.,” from @_brianpotter (via @ByrneHobart).
One notes that any solution brings its own crop of new problems… another way in which China’s recent history recalls the Gilded Age– and its aftermath.
See also: “The 2024 Nobel Laureates Are Not Only Wrong About China, But Also About the West” from Yuen Yuen Ang, cited above.
Apposite: “The Surprising Resilience of Globalization: An Examination of Claims of Economic Fragmentation” by Brad Setser.
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As we ponder parallels (lest we wonder if progress accrues during these developmental periods), we might recall that it was on this date in 1904 that Harvey Hubbell received a patent for an invention that changed life in the U.S. and beyond.
In 1888, at the age of 31, Hubbell had quit his job as a manager of a manufacturing company and founded Hubbell Incorporated in Bridgeport, Connecticut, a company which is still in business today, still headquartered near Bridgeport. Hubbell began manufacturing consumer products and, by necessity, inventing manufacturing equipment for his factory. Some of the equipment he designed included automatic tapping machines and progressive dies for blanking and stamping. One of his most important industrial inventions, still in use today, is the thread rolling machine. He quickly began selling his newly devised manufacturing equipment alongside his commercial products.
Hubbell received at least 45 patents, most of which were for electric products. For example, he patented the pull-chain electrical light socket in 1896. But his most famous– and impactful patent was the one he received on this date: the U.S. electrical power plug, which allowed the adoption in the U.S. of convenient, portable electrical devices (which Great Britain had enjoyed since the early 1880s). In 1916, Hubbell was also granted a patent for a three-bladed power plug, including a ground prong.
“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 too little.”*…
The always-illuminating Adam Tooze on poverty around the world…
In his speech at the 1973 Annual Meetings, World Bank President Robert McNamara coined the term “absolute poverty,” describing it as “a condition of life so degrading as to insult human dignity and yet a condition of life so common as to be the lot of some 40% of the peoples of the developing countries.” He then posed a difficult question: “And are not we who tolerate such poverty, when it is within our power to reduce the number afflicted by it, failing to fulfill the fundamental obligations accepted by civilized [people] since the beginning of time?” This defining speech solidified the Bank’s new goals at that moment: to accelerate economic growth and to reduce poverty.
That was 1973. Half a century later, what a wave of publications the World Bank tell us is that the fight against absolute poverty faces a new and urgent historic challenge.
From the 1990s onwards economic development brought giant progress towards the goal of ending absolute poverty. But that progress stopped ten years ago.
Since 2015, the push to raise the world’s population out of the direst deprivation, has stagnated. As the World Bank authors acknowledge, we are “facing a lost decade in the fight against global poverty”.
Not only has there been little progress since 2015. But the onset of what the World Bank Poverty, Prosperity and Plant Report dubs the “polycrisis”, is putting further progress even further out of reach. As a blog post amplified:
We are facing a series of overlapping and interconnected crises that are impacting lives and livelihoods almost everywhere. The combined effects of slow economic growth, rising conflict and fragility, persistent inequality, and extreme weather-related events have sent shockwaves across the globe. High-income economies are showing signs of resilience, but the outlook for low-income economies and fragile countries remains deeply troubling.
Just a decade ago, we had cause for more optimism. There was significant progress in sustainable development between 1990 and 2015, with more than a billion people lifted out of extreme poverty. This was a monumental achievement, driven primarily by strong economic growth in China and India, and it brought the wealthiest and least-well off economies closer in income levels. Yet, what seemed like a clear path to complete poverty eradication has since faded… global poverty rates have only now gone back down to pre-pandemic levels, with forecasts indicating a trajectory for the coming years that is dismal at best. Almost half the world’s population—around 3.5 billion people—is living on less than $6.85 a day, the poverty line for upper-middle-income countries. At a more extreme level, almost 700 million people are living on less than $2.15 a day, the poverty line for low-income countries. Extreme poverty has become increasingly concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa or places affected by conflict and fragility…
… Thanks to Asia’s remarkable growth, absolute poverty is no longer a general global condition. It is now concentrated in a belt running across the breadth of West Africa, the Sahel, Central and Eastern Africa and extending up to the Horn of Africa. Across this vast region a rapidly growing population that will soon number more than half a billion, struggle to survive amidst increasingly harsh and unpredictable environmental conditions, more hampered than helped by states that fail to provide even basic infrastructure and services and where as one recent study of Nigeria has shown, inter-communal violence is amplified by environmental shocks.
Conflict, violence and political instability make either public or private action to escape poverty impossible. As the World Bank comments:
The importance of stability for future poverty reduction can be seen from the graph below, prepared for Western and Central Africa. Countries that managed to avoid fragility (Benin, Cabo Verde, Gabon, Ghana, Equatorial Guinea and Senegal) managed to steadily reduce poverty. Relative to countries that are presently fragile, or that moved in and out of fragility, stable countries reduced poverty by an additional 15 to 20 percentage points. Stability, by the way, goes beyond an ability to maintain peace. Macro-fiscal and debt sustainability are equally critical, as Ghana which recently defaulted on its external debt unfortunately shows. Poverty (at $ 2.15) increased from 25% in 2020 to 33% in 2023.
The implication is clear. Future poverty reduction will increasingly be premised on the ability to ensure stability, as stability is a precondition for economic growth and poverty reduction. In a world in which conflict and instability are on the rise, and debt distress is rising, this is a sobering realization and bad news for the global community’s ability to eradicate poverty anytime soon.
It is a long way from the civilizational language espoused by McNamara half a century ago…
Addressing poverty in turbulent times: “Africa & absolute poverty in an era of polycrisis,” from @adam_tooze.
Apposite: “How China Defeated Poverty” (possible paywall)
(Image above: source)
* Franklin D. Roosevelt
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As we seek stability, we might recall that it was (tradition holds) on this date in 1517– All Hallows (All Saints) Eve– that Martin Luther, a priest and scholar in Wittenberg, Germany, upset by what he saw as the excesses and corruption of the Roman Catholic Church (especially the papal practice of taking payments– “indulgences”– for the forgiveness of sins), posted his 95 Theses on the door of Castle Church. Thus began the Protestant Reformation.
(source)
“The purpose of a system is what it does”*…
Via Patrick Tanguay and his wonderful newsletter, Sentiers. Tanguay observes, “diagnosing what’s going on in society right now, how our multiple systems function and the issues that emerge from that, is not an easy task. It’s probably unfair then to also expect solutions from one article, but that’s what I was hoping for by the end of this one,” by Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier…
Technology was once simply a tool—and a small one at that—used to amplify human intent and capacity. That was the story of the industrial revolution: we could control nature and build large, complex human societies, and the more we employed and mastered technology, the better things got. We don’t live in that world anymore. Not only has technology become entangled with the structure of society, but we also can no longer see the world around us without it. The separation is gone, and the control we thought we once had has revealed itself as a mirage. We’re in a transitional period of history right now.
We tell ourselves stories about technology and society every day. Those stories shape how we use and develop new technologies as well as the new stories and uses that will come with it. They determine who’s in charge, who benefits, who’s to blame, and what it all means.
Some people are excited about the emerging technologies poised to remake society. Others are hoping for us to see this as folly and adopt simpler, less tech-centric ways of living. And many feel that they have little understanding of what is happening and even less say in the matter.
But we never had total control of technology in the first place, nor is there a pretechnological golden age to which we can return. The truth is that our data-centric way of seeing the world isn’t serving us well. We need to tease out a third option. To do so, we first need to understand how we got here.
When we describe something as being abstract, we mean it is removed from reality: conceptual and not material, distant and not close-up. What happens when we live in a world built entirely of the abstract? A world in which we no longer care for the messy, contingent, nebulous, raw, and ambiguous reality that has defined humanity for most of our species’ existence? We are about to find out, as we begin to see the world through the lens of data structures.
Two decades ago, in his book Seeing Like a State, anthropologist James C. Scott explored what happens when governments, or those with authority, attempt and fail to “improve the human condition.” Scott found that to understand societies and ecosystems, government functionaries and their private sector equivalents reduced messy reality to idealized, abstracted, and quantified simplifications that made the mess more “legible” to them. With this legibility came the ability to assess and then impose new social, economic, and ecological arrangements from the top down: communities of people became taxable citizens, a tangled and primeval forest became a monoculture timber operation, and a convoluted premodern town became a regimented industrial city.
This kind of abstraction was seemingly necessary to create the world around us today. It is difficult to manage a large organization, let alone an interconnected global society of eight billion people, without some sort of structure and means to abstract away details. Facility with abstraction, and abstract reasoning, has enabled all sorts of advancements in science, technology, engineering, and math—the very fields we are constantly being told are in highest demand.
The map is not the territory [quoth Alfred Korzybski], and no amount of intellectualization will make it so. Creating abstract representations by necessity leaves out important detail and context. Inevitably, as Scott cataloged, the use of large-scale abstractions fails, leaving leadership bewildered at the failure and ordinary people worse off.
But our desire to abstract never went away, and technology, as always, serves to amplify intent and capacity. Now, we manifest this abstraction with software. Computing supercharges the creative and practical use of abstraction. This is what life is like when we see the world the way a data structure sees the world. These are the same tricks Scott documented. What has changed is their speed and their ubiquity…
… Data structures dominate our world and are a byproduct of the rational, modern era, but they are ushering in an age of chaos. We need to embrace and tame, but not extinguish, this chaos for a better world…
…
As [Lewis] Mumford wrote in his classic history of technology, “The essential distinction between a machine and a tool lies in the degree of independence in the operation from the skill and motive power of the operator.” A tool is controlled by a human user, whereas a machine does what its designer wanted. As technologists, we can build tools, rather than machines, that flexibly allow people to make partial, contextual sense of the online and physical world around them. As citizens, we can create meaningful organizations that span our communities but without the permanence (and thus overhead) of old-school organizations.
Seeing like a data structure has been both a blessing and a curse. Increasingly, it feels like it is an avalanche, an out-of-control force that will reshape everything in its path. But it’s also a choice, and there is a different path we can take. The job of enabling a new society, one that accepts the complexity and messiness of our current world without being overwhelmed by it, is one all of us can take part it. There is a different future we can build, together…
A fascinating and important piece: “Seeing Like a Data Structure,” @schneierblog @BelferCenter. Eminently worth reading in full.
See also: “Empty Innovation“
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As we reframe, we might send free birthday greetings to Matthias Ettrich; he was born on this date in 1972. A computer scientist interested in Linux and open source software, he Ettrich founded KDE in 1996 to create (as he put it on Usenet) “consistent, nice looking free desktop environment” for Unix-like systems using Qt as its widget toolkit– to which end, he has developed LyX. A German, operating in Berlin, Ettrich was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit for his contributions to free software.
“Start with something simple and small, then expand over time. If people call it a ‘toy’ you’re definitely onto something.”*…
From the always-illuminating Ernie Smith, a survey of 10 portable electronic toys—some well-known, some obscure—that highlighted how creative toy-makers were when the canvas was completely open.
For a moment, consider the evolutionary space between the original Game Boy and the iPad. Both defined the way kids would experience computers in a portable format, but were so defining that they kind of set the template for everyone else. But it was clear that the Game Boy was a mere plateau of technological advancement, which allowed some technological wiggle room. Meanwhile, the iPad was considered such a technological ideal that many companies just copied its basic design, killing off true evolution until, say, the Nintendo Switch. That leaves a gap of about 22 years in which handheld gadgets for kids were really freaking experimental and interesting…
[Ernie reviews ten toys, each of which pushed the envelope; several of which inspired features/interfaces we use use today…]
… Admittedly, most devices on this list highlight the potential positive effects of technology on how we approach life, while others are clearly designed to work against the tension technology was creating.
Your kid may want a laptop, but a laptop is expensive, so get them a VTech device instead. They want a cell phone, but cell phones come with risks and data plans. So, it’s better to give them a walkie-talkie that carries itself like a cell phone, rather than expose them to the real thing, right?
There’s also something to be said about the fact that many of these devices have practical limits. You’re not talking to the open internet with most of these gadgets, and most are designed to only work with a handful of people around you. That limits the addiction factor of these gadgets for the most part.
But these designs are ultimately designed to be outgrown. If you really get into a Barbie digital camera, eventually you’re going to want a real one. And if a kid gets into a PDA-style device or creativity tool, they’re going to pick up a computer and figure out that they can do way more.
Electronic toys still abound, but one gets the feeling that convergence cost us some of the more fascinating ideas on this list. I mean, there’s only so much an iPad can do, right?…
Looking back at a bunch of toy electronics that may have latently inspired the tech that we use today… take the tour: “Digital Training Wheels,” from @ernie@writing.exchange (on Mastodon).
* Aaron Levie (co-founder and CEO of Box) @levie
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As we hook ’em young, we might recall that it was on this date in 1931 that the state legislature in Nevada legalized casino gambling in the state. In fact, gambling had been legal in Nevada until 1909 (by which time it was the only state with legal gambling), when an earlier instantiation of the legislature outlawed it.
Casino revenues– gambling, hospitality, and entertainment– in the U.S. generated nearly $329 billion in economic activity in 2022.
(Coincidentally, it was on this date in 1942 that Alfred G. Vanderbilt and a number of horse racing luminaries established the Thoroughbred Racing Associations of North America.)
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