Posts Tagged ‘manufacturing’
“Poverty is the worst form of violence”*…
Two economic historians, Peter A. Coclanis and Louis M. Kyriakoudes, on why about 20% of counties in the U.S. South are marked by “persistent poverty”…
For a brief moment in the summer of 2023, the surprise No. 1 song “Rich Men North of Richmond” focused the country’s attention on a region that often gets overlooked in discussions of the U.S. economy. Although the U.S. media sometimes pays attention to the rural South — often concentrating on guns, religion and opioid overdoses — it has too often neglected the broad scope and root causes of the region’s current problems.
As economic historians based in North Carolina and Tennessee, we want a fuller version of the story to be told. Various parts of the rural South are struggling, but here we want to focus on the forlorn areas that the U.S. Department of Agriculture refers to as “rural manufacturing counties” — places where manufacturing is, or traditionally was, the main economic activity.
You can find such counties in every Southern state, although they were historically clustered in Alabama, Georgia, North and South Carolina, and Tennessee. And they are suffering terribly.
First, let’s back up. One might be tempted to ask: Are things really that bad? Hasn’t the Sun Belt been booming? But in fact, by a range of economic indicators — personal income per capita and the proportion of the population living in poverty, for starters – large parts of the South, and particularly the rural South, are struggling.
Gross domestic product per capita in the region has been stuck at about 90% of the national average for decades, with average income even lower in rural areas. About 1 in 5 counties in the South is marked by “persistent poverty” — a poverty rate that has stayed above 20% for three decades running. Indeed, fully 80% of all persistently poor counties in the U.S. are in the South.
Persistent poverty is, of course, linked to a host of other problems. The South’s rural counties are marked by low levels of educational attainment, measured both by high school and college graduation rates. Meanwhile, labor-force participation rates in the South are far lower than in the nation as a whole.
Unsurprisingly, these issues stifle economic growth.
Meanwhile, financial institutions have fled the region: The South as a whole lost 62% of its banks between 1980 and 2020, with the decline sharpest in rural areas. At the same time, local hospitals and medical facilities have been shuttering, while funding for everything from emergency services to wellness programs has been cut.
Relatedly, the rural South is ground zero for poor health in the U.S., with life expectancy far lower than the national average. So-called “deaths of despair” such as suicides and accidental overdoses are common, and rates of obesity, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and stroke are high – much higher than in rural areas in other parts of the U.S. and in the U.S. as a whole…
Although some people think that these areas have forever been in crisis, this isn’t the case. While the South’s agricultural sector had fallen into long-term decline in the decades following the Civil War — essentially collapsing by the Great Depression — the onset of World War II led to an impressive economic growth spurt.
War-related jobs opening up in urban areas pulled labor out of rural areas, leading to a long-delayed push to mechanize agriculture. Workers rendered redundant by such technology came to constitute a large pool of cheap labor that industrialists seized upon to deploy in low-wage processing and assembly operations, generally in rural areas and small towns.
Such operations surged between 1945 and the early 1980s, playing a huge role in the region’s economic rise. However humble they may have been, in the South — as in China since the late 1970s — the shift out of a backward agricultural sector into low-wage, low-skill manufacturing was an opportunity for significant productivity and efficiency gains.
This helped the South steadily catch up to national norms in terms of per-capita income: to 75% by 1950, 80% by the mid-1960s, over 85% by 1970, and to almost 90% by the early 1980s…
By the early 1980s, however, the gains made possible by the shift out of agriculture began to play themselves out. The growth of the rural manufacturing sector slowed, and the South’s convergence upon national per capita income norms stopped, remaining stuck at about 90% from then on.
Two factors were largely responsible: new technologies, which reduced the number of workers needed in manufacturing, and globalization, which greatly increased competition. This latter point became increasingly important, since the South, a low-cost manufacturing region in the U.S., is a high-cost manufacturing region when compared to, say, Mexico.
Like Mike Campbell’s bankruptcy in Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” the rural South’s collapse came gradually, then suddenly: gradually during the 1980s and 1990s, and suddenly after China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in December 2001…
A sobering read: “Poor men south of Richmond? Why much of the rural South is in economic crisis.”
* Mahatma Gandhi
###
As we dive into the dynamics of development, we might recall that it was on this date in 1718 that the famous pirate Edward Teach– better known as Blackbeard– was killed off the coast of North Carolina.
Edward Teach, also known as Blackbeard, is killed off North Carolina’s Outer Banks during a bloody battle with a British navy force sent from Virginia.
Believed to be a native of England, Edward Teach likely began his pirating career in 1713, when he became a crewman aboard a Caribbean sloop commanded by pirate Benjamin Hornigold. In 1717, after Hornigold accepted an offer of general amnesty by the British crown and retired as a pirate, Teach took over a captured 26-gun French merchantman, increased its armament to 40 guns, and renamed it the Queen Anne’s Revenge.
During the next six months, the Queen Anne’s Revenge served as the flagship of a pirate fleet featuring up to four vessels and more than 200 men. Teach became the most infamous pirate of his day, winning the popular name of Blackbeard for his long, dark beard, which he was said to light on fire during battles to intimidate his enemies. Blackbeard’s pirate forces terrorized the Caribbean and the southern coast of North America and were notorious for their cruelty.
In May 1718, the Queen Anne’s Revenge and another vessel were shipwrecked, forcing Blackbeard to desert a third ship and most of his men because of a lack of supplies. With the single remaining ship, Blackbeard sailed to Bath in North Carolina and met with Governor Charles Eden. Eden agreed to pardon Blackbeard in exchange for a share of his sizable booty.
At the request of North Carolina planters, Governor Alexander Spotswood of Virginia dispatched a British naval force under Lieutenant Robert Maynard to North Carolina to deal with Blackbeard. On November 22, Blackbeard’s forces were defeated and he was killed in a bloody battle of Ocracoke Island. Legend has it that Blackbeard, who captured more than 30 ships in his brief pirating career, received five musket-ball wounds and 20 sword lacerations before dying…
Source
“Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten”*…
… Indeed. But, as T. W. Lim writes, palm oil has become so much more in our consumer economy…
My family used to take road trips to Malaysia when I was growing up, and I can clearly remember the first time I noticed the oil palms. They were unlike anything else in the landscape, which up to that point had been a patchwork of jungle, paddies, billboards, and the occasional roadside stand selling steamed sweet corn. The palms were distinctive, their dense crowns dark and heavyset atop sawtooth trunks, but what caught my eye was how these trees, unlike the other trees, had obviously been organized. When I asked my parents what they were, they said, “these are oil palms, which people plant to make money.”
This was the 1980s, and the rapidly developing country was agog at the miraculous versatility of palm oil – and the world’s seemingly endless appetite for this primordial goop, from which a whole new way of life could be coaxed. Looking back, I’m struck by the optimism. I have no way of knowing if conditions on palm oil plantations then were any less brutal and exploitative than they are today, but they were certainly less publicized. Maybe we’d still be optimistic if demand for palm oil hadn’t done a hockey stick.
But even in Singapore, situated between the two largest palm oil producers in the world, we didn’t think much about what problems the plantations might have brought. The first sign of trouble was the haze, which first came in the mid-90s. Smoke from massive forest fires in Indonesia hung over Singapore for days on end. It hung pale gray in the sky, turning sunsets red. The Indonesian government claimed it was due to indigenous tribes practicing slash-and-burn farming, but even the middle schoolers knew it was for oil palm. The haze has since become an annual event, varying only in its severity.
I’ve been thinking about palm oil for the same reason Spencer’s been thinking about rubber. These two agricultural commodities both emerged from the same systems of colonialism and forced labor, and together they shaped much of modern material culture. Much as rubber replaced spices and coffee as the cash crop of choice for the planter-barons of Malaya in the late 19th century, palm oil replaced rubber in the late 20th, capturing in two brushstrokes the transitions into the age of the internal combustion engine and the age of the global consumer. And just as rubber explains car culture and contemporary transportation systems, palm oil explains household consumption – and they both reveal the manufacturing systems, labor relations, and corporate structures that lie beneath.
As troubling as I find the systems that produce it, there’s an undeniable elegance to palm oil. Like fossil fuels, palm oil represents a technological shortcut to a wide variety of highly useful chemical compounds. Palm oil contains more saturated fat (50%) than other common edible vegetable oils, so it can be separated into a large number of fractions, each with different physical properties. An ideal palm oil derivative can be found for nearly any product that requires fat – soaps can be made foamier, hobnobs crisper, and ice creams more luscious. In industrial settings, palm oil derivatives are used in mold-release agents for concrete casting and to replace petroleum products in polymer production. Palm oil became integral to the tinning process almost as soon as tin cans were invented, and people were still filing patents for tinning oils based on palm oil in the 1950s. Palm oil was so plentiful, so cheap, and so well suited to the purpose, that tinned steel became obsolete before we bothered to find a better oil for tinning.
Because palm oil is still predominantly used in consumer packaged goods, especially in processed foods, it can seem like a luxury commodity – something used to make inconsequential things. It’s reasonable to think our civilization is less dependent on hobnobs than on the pneumatic tire. But hobnobs and road transport both embody larger social systems, and whether we choose to change our relationship with palm oil might depend more on social systems than physical ones. Trying to imagine a world without palm oil is almost like trying to imagine a post-consumer society, which is precisely why it’s an interesting subject.
Read on for a fascinating consideration of a seemingly universal ingredient, the first in a series: “A Technological Shortcut,” from @the_prepared.
* Chinua Achebe
###
As we interrogate ingredients, we might recall that it was on this date in 1789 that Baptist minister Elijah Craig distilled the first bourbon whisky from corn (another universal ingredient– gift article). Craig, who is also credited with many other Kentucky firsts (e.g., fulling mill, paper mill, ropewalk) is also said to have been the first to age the product in charred oak casks, a process that gives bourbon its brownish color and distinctive taste.
“Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life”*…
Your correspondent is headed into another period of turbulence– travel, talk, meetings– this one, a little longer than the last; so (Roughly) Daily is about to go into another hiatus. Regular service should resume on or around October 8.
If only it were so easy… There is always a demand for more jobs. But what makes a job good? Tyler Re suggests that Kant has an answer…
Work is no longer working for us. Or, for most of us anyway. Citing lack of pay and promotion, more people are quitting their jobs now than at any time in the past 20 years. This is no surprise, considering that ‘real wages’ – the average hourly rate adjusted for inflation – for non-managers just three years ago was the same as it was in the early 1970s. At the same time, the increasing prominence of gig work has turned work from a steady ‘climb’ of the ladder into a precarious ‘hustle.’
…
The United States Department of Labor identifies a ‘good job’ as one with fair hiring practices, comprehensive benefits, formal equality of opportunity, job security and a culture in which workers are valued. In a similar UK report on the modern labour market called ‘Good Work’ (2017), Matthew Taylor and his colleagues emphasise workplace rights and fair treatment, opportunities for promotion, and ‘good reward schemes’. Finally, the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights has two sections on work. They cite the free choice of employment and organization, fair and equal pay, and sufficient leisure time as rights of workers.
What all three of these accounts have in common is that they focus on features of jobs – the agreement you make with your boss to perform labour – rather than on the labour itself. The fairness of your boss, the length of your contract, the growth of your career – these specify nothing about the quality of the labour you perform. And yet it is the labour itself that we spend all day doing. The most tedious and unpleasant work could still pay a high salary, but we might not want to call such work ‘good’. (Only a brief mention is made in the Taylor report – which totals more than 100 pages – of the idea that workers ought to have some autonomy in how they perform their job, or that work ought not be tedious or repetitive.) This is not to say that the extrinsic aspects of work like pay and benefits are unimportant; of course, a good job is one that pays enough. But what about work’s intrinsic goods? Is there anything about the process of working itself that we ought to include in our list of criteria, or should we all be content with a life of high-paying drudgery?
Philosophers try to answer this question by giving a definition of work. Since definitions tell us what is essential or intrinsic to a thing, a definition of work would tell us whether there is anything intrinsic to work that we want our good jobs to promote. The most common definition of work in Western thought, found in nearly every period with recorded writing on the subject, is that work is inherently disagreeable and instrumentally valuable. It is disagreeable because it is an expenditure of energy (contrast this with leisure), and it is instrumentally valuable because we care only about the products of our labour, not the process of labouring itself. On this view, work has little to recommend it, and we would do better to minimise our time spent doing it. A theory of work based on this definition would probably say that good jobs pay a lot (in exchange for work’s disagreeableness) and are performed for as little time as possible.
But this is not the only definition at our disposal. Tucked away in two inconspicuous paragraphs of his book about beauty, the Critique of Judgment (1790), is Immanuel Kant’s definition of work. In a section called ‘On Art in General’, Kant gives a definition of art (Kunst in German) as a subset of our more general capacity for ‘skill’ or ‘craft’ (note that Kant’s definition should not be limited to the fine arts like poetry or painting, which is schöne Künste in German, which he addresses in the following section of the book). In other words, Kant defines art as a particular kind of skilled labour. Kant’s definition of art as skilled labour will direct us to the intrinsic features of work that we ought to include in our conception of good jobs…
Read on: “Freedom at Work,” in @aeonmag.
* Mark Twain
###
As we center satisfaction, we might recall that on this date in 1908, at the at the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit, “Model T 001”– the first production Model T– rolled off the line. Generally regarded as the first mass-produced/mass-affordable automobile, it made car travel available to middle-class Americans– and became the avatar of assembly-line production and the type of jobs that it produces.
(On May 26, 1927, Henry Ford watched the 15 millionth Model T Ford roll off the assembly line at his factory in Highland Park, Michigan.)
“Without reflection, we go blindly on our way”*…
… or at least sociopathic. Indeed, Evgeny Morozov suggests, we may be well on our way. There may be versions of A.G.I. (Artificial General Intelligence) that will be a boon to society; but, he argues, the current approaches aren’t likely to yield them…
… The mounting anxiety about A.I. isn’t because of the boring but reliable technologies that autocomplete our text messages or direct robot vacuums to dodge obstacles in our living rooms. It is the rise of artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., that worries the experts.
A.G.I. doesn’t exist yet, but some believe that the rapidly growing capabilities of OpenAI’s ChatGPT suggest its emergence is near. Sam Altman, a co-founder of OpenAI, has described it as “systems that are generally smarter than humans.” Building such systems remains a daunting — some say impossible — task. But the benefits appear truly tantalizing.
Imagine Roombas, no longer condemned to vacuuming the floors, that evolve into all-purpose robots, happy to brew morning coffee or fold laundry — without ever being programmed to do these things.Sounds appealing. But should these A.G.I. Roombas get too powerful, their mission to create a spotless utopia might get messy for their dust-spreading human masters. At least we’ve had a good run.Discussions of A.G.I. are rife with such apocalyptic scenarios. Yet a nascent A.G.I. lobby of academics, investors and entrepreneurs counter that, once made safe, A.G.I. would be a boon to civilization. Mr. Altman, the face of this campaign, embarked on a global tour to charm lawmakers. Earlier this year he wrote that A.G.I. might even turbocharge the economy, boost scientific knowledge and “elevate humanity by increasing abundance.”
This is why, for all the hand-wringing, so many smart people in the tech industry are toiling to build this controversial technology: not using it to save the world seems immoral. They are beholden to an ideology that views this new technology as inevitable and, in a safe version, as universally beneficial. Its proponents can think of no better alternatives for fixing humanity and expanding its intelligence.But this ideology — call it A.G.I.-ism — is mistaken. The real risks of A.G.I. are political and won’t be fixed by taming rebellious robots. The safest of A.G.I.s would not deliver the progressive panacea promised by its lobby. And in presenting its emergence as all but inevitable, A.G.I.-ism distracts from finding better ways to augment intelligence.
Unbeknown to its proponents, A.G.I.-ism is just a bastard child of a much grander ideology, one preaching that, as Margaret Thatcher memorably put it, there is no alternative, not to the market.
Rather than breaking capitalism, as Mr. Altman has hinted it could do, A.G.I. — or at least the rush to build it — is more likely to create a powerful (and much hipper) ally for capitalism’s most destructive creed: neoliberalism.
Fascinated with privatization, competition and free trade, the architects of neoliberalism wanted to dynamize and transform a stagnant and labor-friendly economy through markets and deregulation…
… the Biden administration has distanced itself from the ideology, acknowledging that markets sometimes get it wrong. Foundations, think tanks and academics have even dared to imagine a post-neoliberal future.Yet neoliberalism is far from dead. Worse, it has found an ally in A.G.I.-ism, which stands to reinforce and replicate its main biases: that private actors outperform public ones (the market bias), that adapting to reality beats transforming it (the adaptation bias) and that efficiency trumps social concerns (the efficiency bias).These biases turn the alluring promise behind A.G.I. on its head: Instead of saving the world, the quest to build it will make things only worse. Here is how…
[There follows a bracing run-down…]
… Margaret Thatcher’s other famous neoliberal dictum was that “there is no such thing as society.”The A.G.I. lobby unwittingly shares this grim view. For them, the kind of intelligence worth replicating is a function of what happens in individuals’ heads rather than in society at large.
But human intelligence is as much a product of policies and institutions as it is of genes and individual aptitudes. It’s easier to be smart on a fellowship in the Library of Congress than while working several jobs in a place without a bookstore or even decent Wi-Fi.
It doesn’t seem all that controversial to suggest that more scholarships and public libraries will do wonders for boosting human intelligence. But for the solutionist crowd in Silicon Valley, augmenting intelligence is primarily a technological problem — hence the excitement about A.G.I.
However, if A.G.I.-ism really is neoliberalism by other means, then we should be ready to see fewer — not more — intelligence-enabling institutions. After all, they are the remnants of that dreaded “society” that, for neoliberals, doesn’t really exist. A.G.I.’s grand project of amplifying intelligence may end up shrinking it.
Because of such solutionist bias, even seemingly innovative policy ideas around A.G.I. fail to excite. Take the recent proposal for a “Manhattan Project for A.I. Safety.” This is premised on the false idea that there’s no alternative to A.G.I.But wouldn’t our quest for augmenting intelligence be far more effective if the government funded a Manhattan Project for culture and education and the institutions that nurture them instead?
Without such efforts, the vast cultural resources of our existing public institutions risk becoming mere training data sets for A.G.I. start-ups, reinforcing the falsehood that society doesn’t exist…
If it’s true that we shape our tools, then our tools shape us, then it behooves us to be very careful as to how we shape them… Eminently worth reading in full: “The True Threat of Artificial Intelligence” (gift link) from @evgenymorozov in @nytimes.
Apposite: on the A. I. we currently have: “The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con,” from @baldurbjarnason.
[Image above: source]
* Margaret J. Wheatley
###
As we set aside solutionism, we might we might send thoroughly-organized birthday greetings to Josiah Wedgwood; he was born on this date in 1730. An English potter, businessman (he founded the Wedgwood company), and inventor (he designed the company’s process machinery and high-temperature beehive-shaped kilns), he is credited, via his technique of “division of labor,” with the industrialization of the manufacture of pottery– and via his example, much of British (and thus American) manufacturing. Wedgwood was a member of the Lunar Society, the Royal Society, and was an ardent abolitionist. His daughter, Susannah, was the mother of Charles Darwin.
“Inflation is when you pay fifteen dollars for the ten-dollar haircut you used to get for five dollars when you had hair”*…
Mike Konczal unpacks happens when one takes the AEI graphic of items that have had high and low inflation, but extend it to all categories…
This graphic is in the news again:
Its creator is Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute, who last posted an update to it in July 2022. He’s been doing a version since at least 2016, and if you read enough economics blogs or content you’ve probably seen some iteration of it.
People are talking about it again after Marc Andreessen posted it under the headline “Why AI Won’t Cause Unemployment.” Andreessen describes what people generally take away from it – blue line capitalism and dynamic, red line government regulations and stagnant…
Matt Yglesias noted on twitter that he’s “come to think it’s misleading — by being very selective in which categories of labor-intensive services it chooses to chart, it’s generated a narrative that relative price shifts are just about government regulation.”
That seems correct to me; these categories are pretty loaded. Let’s see if we can do better by including every possible category… let’s download all of the current Consumer Price Index (CPI) data off the BLS download site…
Since the BLS is constantly changing categories, we have to select the items that exist in both January 2000 and February 2023 to duplicate the chart. That leaves us with 62 categories. Doing a quick glance (and seeing in Perry’s own chart) the year-by-year evolution over time doesn’t really tell us much, so we can go with a simple bar chart for overall change. Let’s chart that here in full:
There are a few key takeaways looking at it this way:
In our version of the AEI chart the number one item isn’t health care but ‘delivery services,’ which is “fees for delivery of items such as letters, documents, and packages at non-US Postal Services facilities.”Think UPS or FedEx. This is pretty far from a government monopoly, indeed it’s the private sector alternative to a government program. But it is services and it is labor intensive.
The biggest thing, to me, isn’t “regulations” but whether it’s a service or a good…
More on how and why that matters in “A Better AEI Graphic of Inflation Over the Past 20 Years.”
* Sam Ewing
###
As we ruminate in the rise, we might recall that it was on this date in 2006 that Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey sent the first tweet.
You must be logged in to post a comment.