Quotulatiousness

July 29, 2020

The Equity, Inclusivity, and Diversity Industrial Complex

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Economics, Education, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Dominion, Ben Woodfinden comments on a Ross Douthat column on the “antiracist” demands of our modern protestariat (the hordes of un- or under-employed university-educated young liberals and socialists):

University College, University of Toronto, 31 July, 2008.
Photo by “SurlyDuff” via Wikimedia Commons.

… the most interesting aspect of this lockdown-induced outpouring of collective rage hasn’t been the protests, or the cancellations, but the woke job creation that is going on. The ideology behind things like “white fragility” is increasingly being transformed into what can be described as an equity-inclusivity-diversity (EID) industrial complex that might end up being the most significant long term structural change that emerges out of the protests.

One of the most common responses in elite institutions as they promise to address systemic racism has been the creation of new jobs and positions that will supposedly help to do so. For instance, the Washington Post created a set of new positions that will be focusing on racial issues. This included hiring a “Managing Editor for Diversity and Inclusion.” At Princeton, the administration announced, like many other elite universities, new courses (which means new teaching opportunities) focused on racial injustice, as well as new projects and funding for research to explore and address racial issues. Stanford has created a new Centre for Racial Justice at its law school.

This direct job creation is just the tip of the iceberg. The real EID industrial complex is in the creation of a vast number of new jobs dedicated to the promotion and advancement of the basic tenets of this ascendant ideology through the expansion of human resource departments to deal with these issues, the creation of new EID bureaucrats and administrators in universities, corporations, government departments, the rise of EID consulting and mandatory courses and workshops for employees, new jobs and potential litigation for lawyers, as well as courses and modules in law schools to teach aspiring lawyers about these things.

In the bestselling Ibram X. Kendi book How To Be An Antiracist, one of Kendi’s central solutions is to pass an anti-racist amendment to the U.S. Constitution and permanently establish and fund a Department of Anti-racism. This department:

    would be comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees. The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.

The radical tendencies of the bourgeois bolsheviks in the streets might make them seem like true revolutionaries, but what this movement seems to actually want to create, with remarkable success, is new employment opportunities for true believers in the new anti-racist creeds. Racism won’t so much be solved by tearing society down, but by massively expanding new professional and managerial jobs that can guarantee full employment for the credentialed class of true believers.

O’Boyle’s thesis is that the revolutions that swept across European cities in 1848 were because a large surplus of resentful and overeducated men felt society was denying to them what they were rightfully owed. O’Boyle looks at Germany, where university education was cheap, and was “emphasized as an avenue to wealth and power.” This ending up producing an excess of ambitious, but resentful and frustrated men who felt society was not allotting them the status and comfort they deserved. The same was true in France. But in Britain, the opportunities produced by industrialization that had yet to fully materialize on the continent kept this excess surplus of overeducated men much smaller, and helped insulate Britain from revolution.

What if the EID industrial complex actually helps to reduce the scarcity of opportunities in elite fields and institutions that will put a lid on the unrest that overproduction breeds? The EID industry is worth billions of dollars, and in a way it might be the solution liberalism offers to both the radical progressivism of this ideology, and to the challenge posed by elite overproduction.

July 24, 2020

Orchestras encouraged to ditch blind auditions for reasons of diversity

Filed under: Business, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tal Bachman responds to a recent New York Times article by Tony Tommasini demanding that musical organizations ignore the relative quality of a potential musician’s play in order to ensure more visible minority players get hired:

The New York Philharmonic Orchestra, detail from a group portrait in 2018.
Photo from the New York Philharmonic Orchestra website.

Tommasini begins his piece, entitled “To Make Orchestras More Diverse, End Blind Auditions”, by decrying the racism and sexism which, he claims, kept the orchestras of yesteryear predominantly white and male. He then pays tribute to the simple practice that helped erase that racism and sexism from orchestra hiring procedures: the blind audition. Starting in the late 1960s, orchestras began ditching traditional face-to-face auditions in favour of auditions that took place behind screens. With orchestra administrators no longer able to see the race or sex of the orchestra applicant, conscious and unconscious bias in hiring choices became impossible. Musical skill became the sole criterion for winning one of those prized professional playing positions.

This meritocratic turn, Tommasini argues, proved especially beneficial to female players. Whereas in 1970, women made up only 6% of orchestras, they now make up somewhere between a third and half of an average orchestra.

I add that audiences also benefited from meritocratic hiring processes as orchestras played increasingly brilliant renditions of the classics. Those improved performances also showed greater reverence for the original composers themselves. In short, the blind audition was a big win for all lovers of musical excellence – players, living composers, and fans alike.

So why on earth would anyone now call for their abolition?

Tommasini answers this way:

    Blind auditions changed the face of American orchestras. But not enough. American orchestras remain among the nation’s least racially diverse institutions, especially in regard to black and Latino artists … Ensembles must be able to take proactive steps to address the appalling racial imbalance that remains in their ranks. Blind auditions are no longer tenable.

In other words, the low number of black and Latino classical musicians means orchestras need to re-institute the old-time racial discrimination Tommasini began his article by decrying. Orchestras need to know which applicants are white and Asian precisely so they can refuse to hire them on that basis, no matter how skilled they are. Blind auditions make racial discrimination impossible, so they must be scrapped. American orchestras, writes Tommasini, should stop “passively waiting for representation to emerge from behind the audition screen”. Instead, they must realize that “removing the screen is a crucial step”.

To summarize: For Tommasini, it’s not just that justice requires injustice. It’s that justice is injustice (injustice in the form of racial discrimination). And if that reminds you of the official slogan of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in 1984 – war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength – you’re not alone.

July 8, 2020

QotD: Telecommuting in the post-Wuhan Coronavirus era

Filed under: Business, Economics, Health, Quotations, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

People are being stampeded into telecommuting. The thing is, dear media, once that happens, you can’t put it back in the bottle.

For two decades now, telecommuting and distance learning have been perfectly possible and even, frankly, beneficial. What has held it back is managers afraid they don’t know how to manage at a distance, corporations who think mega cubicle farms are a great way to be “important” and a general sense that only us, ne’er do wells, work in our pajamas on the sofa (I’ll have you know I’m wearing a sweatshirt and yoga pants. Never mind.)

If the panic lasts even two months (and the press will ensure it does before it collapses under its own weight) that reluctance to telecommute is going to be blown to hell. For one, once workers taste of THAT fruit, just anecdotally, 90% of them LOVE it. (The other 10% have very annoying children or spouses.)

And in the wake of the financial panic and wobbles, corporations are going to notice that they spend a lot less money when most of the workers work from home. At some point, they’ll also realize that they need much smaller facilities if they need facilities at all. And hey, money.

This will cause all sorts of other things, which I think will lead within two years to an exodus from the big cities everyone has crammed into because it’s where the jobs are. I think in turn this will lead to a world the social engineers really don’t like.

Sarah Hoyt, “Unintended Consequences”, According to Hoyt, 2020-03-12.

June 19, 2020

The economy isn’t all huge corporations and government

Filed under: Britain, Business, Economics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Paul Sellers reminds us that the economy is far more than just the big names that get mentioned in the financial pages:

An example of the kind of one-man businesses Paul is talking about.

Independents in micro-businesses are few and far between and often hard to discover, despite the internet’s ever-increasing web of enterprises. The backbone of British industry is made up of small, independent people striving to retain a measure of individualism, independence and entrepreneurialism in their lives. Statistics from 2019 show that in Britain there were 5.82 million small businesses responsible for 99.3% of the total business output in the UK.

Small businesses here comprise those with 0-49 employees and digging deeper still into what might at first seem more irrelevant than relevant is that the niche that small businesses fill in the real world of enterprise. Over 76% of businesses are operated by one-man bands; single-person enterprises who operate alone comprise almost 4.5 million men and women. With an additional 1.15 million micro-business (1-9 employees) around 95% of businesses here operate on a strength of under just 10 people. So over 99% of small to medium business enterprises, that’s zero to 249 employees, but only 0.6% have a workforce of 50-249 employees. Less than 4% are small businesses with 10-49 staff members and get this, over 95% operate as micro-businesses with 0-9 employees. What does this tell you about businesses output? What it tells me is how little of this is newsworthy by the mass media manufacturing companies (Like BBC News and ITV, Sky and so on) who constantly tell us about how many this massive company or that massive company is laying off and how little this really affects our economy because the little guys still get out into their little micro-shops and make what cannot work work.

June 8, 2020

Andrew Sullivan can’t write about the riots or he’ll lose his job

Filed under: Business, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’d wondered why he hadn’t directly addressed the biggest news item in the United States over the last week:

What has happened to New York media? Just as the New York Times was experiencing its own Inner Mongolia Moment over the now notorious Sen. Tom Cotton “Send in the Troops” op-ed, the Maoists at New York magazine were going after their best columnist, Andrew Sullivan.

Sullivan revealed on Twitter yesterday that his column wouldn’t be appearing. The reason? His editors are not allowing him to write about the riots.

Presumably Sullivan’s editors are frightened that he might make the radically bourgeois point that looting and violence are wrong.

Cockburn understands that Sullivan is not just forbidden from writing for the New York magazine about the riots; his contract means he cannot write on the topic for another publication. He is therefore legally unable to write anything about the protests without losing his job — at the magazine that, in 1970, published Radical Chic, Tom Wolfe’s brilliant and controversial excoriation of progressive piety. It’s the bonfire of the liberals!

May 30, 2020

David Warren reports from “the High Doganate” (Parkdale, Toronto)

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Health — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I haven’t lived in Toronto for many years now, but as David Warren highlights in his Essays in Idleness posts, things haven’t changed much in all that time:

The Parkdale neighbourhood of Toronto.
Map by Alaney2k via Wikimedia Commons.

We continue to be well-as-can-be-expected, up here in the High Doganate, though stir-crazy, and over-informed about the Batflu (also known as the Kung Flu, or Peking Pox). The housefinches on our balconata persist in their social distancing, and at street level, the dogs continue to walk their masters. The brave, without a dog, may go out, without a mask, if they can stand up to the Virtue Signallers (or as I prefer to call them, the Smugly Foocklings). But that is in the respectable parts of town, at least three miles away, where designer masks are now de rigueur. There are plenty of trolleys, but they travel mostly empty. This is because the transit authorities are “committed to keeping customers and staff safe.” Knowing that most of the public health measures are fraudulent, and/or counter-productive, is not helpful to one’s peace of mind.

These measures would include the vast public doles which our guvmints have been generating, electronically. It could be taken as pay, for those who’d otherwise riot. Eventually, the guvmints hope to electronically rake it back, both from those who were paid and those who were not, in the form of much extended taxes. To understand the Batflu response, is to understand the welcome it gave to bureaucrats and their patrons, wherever the Left won the last election. They do not surrender such powers lightly.

Most of the people I hang out with are their particular targets — from freelance giguers to flea marketeers to those with religious vocations. Such people naturally resist the Kafkaesque arrangements our progressives relish and demand. The Batflu “crisis” put as many as possible of these statistically inconvenient people out of work. (Many are compulsive tax-evaders, after all!) These “little people,” especially those trying to support uncool, old-fashioned, frankly heterosexual families, are the ones for whom I most pray, as they and their children face the “green” future, which will exclude them in the name of “diversity.”

But also I think of the vast slave armies, in the “service economy,” with their idiotizing jobs, from flipping hamburgers to humping boxes in the Amazon warehouse — pinned to their minimum wages until their functions can be mechanized. (When they unionize, this happens faster.)

The “professional classes,” who can work from home, because they do nothing of value, needn’t go months without revenue, while their debts are piling up. They sneer at those who oppose a lockdown, that is perfectly comfortable for the professional classes, who at worst save money by dining in, or must order what they want through Amazon.

May 20, 2020

Bidding farewell to “the dumbest management fad of all time”

Filed under: Business — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jessica Stillman hails one positive likely outcome of the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic … the end of the “open office plan”:

Example of an open plan office
Photo by VeronicaTherese via Wikimedia Commons.

My Inc.com colleague Geoffrey James memorably called open-plan offices “the dumbest management fad of all time.” And with good reason. Not only do many workers loathe the interruption-prone, privacy-free spaces, but science shows they don’t even achieve their stated aim of fostering greater collaboration.

The current pandemic is a heart-breaking tragedy of epic proportions, but according to experts, it might at least have one small silver lining. Maybe, just maybe it will spell the end of the hated open-plan office.

[…]

All this means employers will need to find creative solutions to get work done even though far fewer people can safely fit in the same space. Continued work-from-home arrangements will certainly be part of the answer, but creative reconfiguring of your physical office is likely to be necessary too.

That’s a headache for facilities managers and bosses, but better news for open-plan office haters. In a post-coronavirus world, you will almost certainly have more privacy at work. In trade for that personal space, however, expect to submit to measures like temperature checks, half-empty break rooms, and a whole lot of hand sanitizer.

May 19, 2020

Some changes to the working world … when the world gets back to working

Filed under: Britain, Business, Economics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Sean Gabb has some thoughts on the post-lockdown return so … well, not normal, but as the economy reaches toward a new working equilibrium:

Kensington High Street at the intersection with Kensington Church Street. Kensington, London, England.
Photo by Ghouston via Wikimedia Commons.

The Coronavirus and its aftermath of lingering paranoia are the perfect excuse. Decentralisation and homeworking must be done. They must be done for the duration. They must be continued after that to maintain social distancing. No one will think ill of Barclays and WPP for taking the leap. No one will blame them for taking the leap in a way that involves a few deviations from course and a less than elegant landing. A year from now, these organisations will be making measurably larger profits than they would be otherwise. The mistakes will have been ignored.

And other organisations will follow. Whether the present crash will bring on a depression shaped like a V or an L, there is no doubt that, even if slowly at first, the wheels of commerce will continue turning. But they will be turning on different rails. As with any change of course, there will be winners and losers. I have already discussed how I can expect to be among the winners. I will leave that as said for the other winners — these being anyone who can find a market for doing from home what was previously required by custom and lack of imagination to be done somewhere else. I will instead mention the losers.

Most obvious among these will be anyone involved in commercial property. Landlords will find themselves with many more square feet to fill than prospective tenants want to fill. Rental and freehold values will crumble. Bearing in mind how much debt is carried by commercial landlords, there will be some interesting business failures in the next few years. Then there are the ancillary sectors — property management companies, commercial estate agents, maintenance companies. These employ swarms of architects and surveyors and lawyers and negotiators, of builders, plumbers, electricians, of drivers and cleaners. If the humbler workers will eventually find other markets, many with degrees and professional qualifications can look to a future of straitened circumstances.

The lush residential estates in and about Central London will follow. I think particularly of the aristocratic residential holdings in Kensington. Houses here go for tens of thousands a week to senior bank workers from abroad. If the City and Canary Wharf are emptied out, who needs to live in a place like Kensington? It has poor Underground connections. It is close by places like Grenfell Tower. Its residents keep predators at bay only by heavy investment of their own in security and by suspecting every knock on the door and every sound in the night. Many of the shops and eateries that make its High Street an enjoyable place to be will not reopen. Those that do reopen will be hobbled by continuing formal and informal rules on social distancing.

As a result, restaurants and pubs and coffee bars will begin to disappear. All but a few of these were barely making normal profit before they were closed last month. So few are in liquidation as yet only because so few petitions have been lodged in the courts. Most of them will now be surplus to requirement. The same can be said of hotels. Speaking for myself, I used to visit Cambridge twice a year on examinations business. I was always put up there for a couple of nights. I shall now do from home all that I did in Cambridge. I doubt I am alone. Zoom will destroy business travel. In the same way, bigger televisions plus continued social distancing will finish off the theatres and cinemas — also in decline before last month.

May 16, 2020

QotD: Division of labour in the modern world

Filed under: Business, Economics, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… digital devices slow us down in subtler ways, too. Microsoft Office may be as much a drag on productivity as Candy Crush Saga. To see why, consider Adam Smith’s argument that economic progress was built on a foundation of the division of labour. His most celebrated example was a simple pin factory: “One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points” and 10 men together made nearly 50,000 pins a day.

In another example — the making of a woollen coat — Smith emphasises that the division of labour allows us to use machines, even “that very simple machine, the shears with which the shepherd clips the wool”.

The shepherd has the perfect tool for a focused task. That tool needs countless other focused specialists: the bricklayer who built the foundry; the collier who mined fuel; the smith who forged the blades. It is a reinforcing spiral: the division of labour lets us build new machines, while machines work best when jobs have been divided into one small task after another.

The rise of the computer complicates this story. Computers can certainly continue the process of specialisation, parcelling out jobs into repetitive chunks, but fundamentally they are general purpose devices, and by running software such as Microsoft Office they are turning many of us into generalists.

In a modern office there are no specialist typists; we all need to be able to pick our way around a keyboard. PowerPoint has made amateur slide designers of everyone. Once a slide would be produced by a professional, because no one else had the necessary equipment or training. Now anyone can have a go — and they do.

Well-paid middle managers with no design skills take far too long to produce ugly slides that nobody wants to look at. They also file their own expenses, book their own travel and, for that matter, do their own shopping in the supermarket. On a bill-by-the-minute basis none of this makes sense.

Why do we behave like this? It is partly a matter of pride: since everyone has the tools to build a website or lay out a book, it feels a little feeble to hand the job over to a professional. And it is partly bad organisational design: sacking the administrative assistants and telling senior staff to do their own expenses can look, superficially, like a cost saving.

Tim Harford, “Why Microsoft Office is a bigger productivity drain than Candy Crush Saga”, The Undercover Economist, 2018-02-02.

May 6, 2020

Essential private sector workers and non-essential government workers

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

A couple of articles at the Foundation for Economic Education look at the arbitrary division of peoples’ jobs into two broad categories:

In a recent TV appearance with Dana Perino on The Daily Briefing, [Mike] Rowe made it clear he’s not a fan of the terms “essential” and “non-essential” worker. The problem with such a view, Rowe said, is that such terms have little actual meaning and the economy makes no such distinction.

“There’s something tricky with the language going on here, because with regard to an economy, I don’t think there is any such thing as a nonessential worker,” Rowe said. “This is basically a quilt … and if you start pulling on jobs and tugging on careers over here and over there, the whole thing will bunch up in a weird way.”

Rowe’s message is precisely what FEE president and economist Zilvinas Silenas was getting at in a recent article published at Townhall.

    Allowing politicians to decide which businesses and products are “essential” is an invitation for disaster. If we continue to deny these businesses the ability to do the one essential thing they are best at — providing goods and services to millions of everyday Americans — we risk more than unemployment or recession of stock price plunge. We deprive ourselves of the best resource — our people — during the time of need.

The truth is, all workers are essential.

Unfortunately, all too often what is deemed “essential” is simply what’s convenient to state leaders making the decisions. Few would suggest that liquor store owners are inherently more essential than pizza parlor owners — except perhaps state revenue collectors. No doubt this is the same reason Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer concluded that lottery tickets are essential, but gardening seeds are not.

Liquor stores and lottery tickets aren’t especially “essential” to Americans, just state budgets. But as one Washington State sheriff noted in April, this seems to be the criteria state leaders often use to determine what is “essential” and “non-essential”: whether it helps the government’s bottom line.

When the state picks winners and losers it’s not only unfair, however. It’s also destructive.

In the other piece, J. Kyle deVries points out that government cannot be immunized from the economic harm the shutdown has and continues to inflict on the private sector:

So far millions in the private sector have lost their jobs or have been furloughed — but not many in government have. Many government employees continue to get salaries and benefits despite not working. Their agencies most certainly will not have as much work to do since major portions of the economy are closing down. Many agencies won’t even be needed any longer, but you better believe they will continue to be funded and probably expanded over time. That is outrageous. As we suffer economically, government should not be exempted.

This phenomenon is truly confounding and unfair. After all, government does not exist without taxes and taxes can only come from people who produce and earn a living — in other words, the private sector. The private sector supports government employees who, on average, receive higher pay, better perquisites and much better retirement plans. That should change. As we restructure our economy in the wake of the coronavirus, government should be restructured as well.

Businesses have no guarantee they will remain in business — they must provide their customers with a quality product or service at a competitive price or they will go bust. But government agencies remain in place for life, even if they continue to provide lousy services at outrageous expense. Government needs to show us they are with us during this fight. Part of doing so is to take a hard look at various agencies and departments to see if they can be improved or if they need to be eliminated. Before you say that would be difficult, let’s look at some obvious choices.

April 16, 2020

Canada’s temporary foreign workers

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Economics, Government, Health — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley points out some of the weirdness of Canada’s claimed dependence on temporary foreign workers because “Canadians still need to eat.”:

Temporary foreign workers picking fruit in a Canadian orchard.
Image from http://www.yorkfeed.com/apple-picking-urgently-canada/

If all goes as it should at Canada’s airports, temporary foreign workers will be informed of their responsibilities. They should be made aware of their employers’ responsibilities as well. And there’s no particular epidemiological reason to worry about them more than anyone else landing on a Canadian runway from abroad — or domestically, for that matter. The vast majority of temporary foreign workers are from Mexico, Jamaica or Guatemala, which have reported 39, 25 and nine COVID-19 cases per million residents. Canada’s tally works out to 713 per million.

But the official advice to employers provides little comfort. It doesn’t prohibit putting people up in shared accommodations; it merely says residents must be able to keep two metres from each other at all times. We know the limitations of such measures from experience in seniors’ homes and homeless shelters. It’s not necessarily “the state’s duty” to quarantine arriving temporary foreign workers, as Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet argued this week. But the state could certainly do far more than it is.

For one thing, the cities in which workers typically first arrive are much better suited to proper self-isolation — i.e., in a hotel or motel room — compared to the farm country they are eventually headed for. Sourcing 45,000 hotel rooms is a huge job even in cities — that’s roughly how many rooms there are in the entire Greater Toronto Area — but it will never be easier than right now. It would prevent any bad-actor employers from breaking the rules. It would be much more reassuring than a government cheque for what works out to less than $80 per worker per day of isolation.

The whole situation is completely bizarre, though — one of several longstanding, bizarre and sometimes embarrassing Canadian situations that COVID-19 has highlighted. Economically speaking, the idea of temporary foreign workers essentially amounts to cheating. It reaches peak absurdity when businesses like Tim Hortons outlets claim to need them — that is, when they’re being brought in to do work that Canadians are demonstrably willing to do. It’s just a skeevy way to artificially depress wages and the price of fast food. People seemed to sense that back in 2014, when the government tightened the rules.

In agriculture, however, the idea seems thoroughly entrenched. Perhaps it’s a case of out of sight, out of mind. But it’s the same absurdity: If you can identify a group of 45,000 people without whose labour we literally wouldn’t be able to feed ourselves — or so we are told — then on what possible grounds are we denying them a path to Canadian citizenship? In 2017, the Toronto Star profiled a 66-year-old Saint Lucian man who had busted his hump on Canadian farms for 37 years in a row, with his paycheques deducted for income tax, EI and CPP, but who had no claim to stay. The highly skilled and educated immigrants we compete to attract bring many important things to Canada’s table; they don’t bring anything more important than food. And food is something COVID-19 has very much taught us not to take for granted. Who would have thought supermarket checkout clerks would achieve hero status?

April 15, 2020

The Industrial Revolution and the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce

Filed under: Britain, Economics, History, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the latest from Anton Howes’ Age of Invention newsletter, we are introduced to the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce:

The London Sweep (from a Daguerreotype by BEARD).
Image from London labour and the London poor : a cyclopaedia of the condition and earnings of those that will work, those that cannot work, and those that will not work, 1851, via the Wellcome Collection.

When we think of the British Industrial Revolution, the image that springs to mind tends to be of soot-belching factories and foundries, of child labour and squalid cities. The inventors who spring to mind tend to be James Watt and his steam engines, or Richard Arkwright and his cotton-spinning machines. But what people tend to forget is that the Industrial Revolution was unleashed by a much broader tide of accelerating innovation — as I never tire of repeating, it touched everything from agriculture to watchmaking, and everything inbetween. Just as some inventors pioneered the use of factories, other inventors sought solutions to industrialisation’s social ills.

Last time, I mentioned the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, set up in 1754 in a London coffee house (the Society of Arts for short). What’s so fascinating about the organisation — which still exists today, now called “Royal” — is that it was closely involved with many of the more socially-oriented innovations of the period. By this, I mean the kinds of inventions that were rarely immediately profitable, but which aimed to save lives, to alleviate suffering, or to remedy some other social ill. The Society advertised premiums — cash prizes or honorary medals — for solutions to the problems that its members identified. And it offered similar rewards, which they called bounties, for unsolicited inventions.

It awarded a bounty of fifty guineas and a gold medal to Henry Greathead, for example, one of the claimants for the invention of the lifeboat. It gave another fifty guineas to a sergeant of the Royal Artillery, John Bell, for a method of firing a rope and grapple by mortar from a ship to the shore, to save people on board from shipwreck during storms. (Some years later, it even gave a gold medal to another inventor for a device that did the opposite, firing from shore to ship.) The Society awarded a medal to a Sheffield schoolmaster, John Hessey Abraham, for a magnetic apparatus that would prevent metal dust getting into the eyes and lungs of workers employed in grinding the points of needles. And in 1767 it awarded a bounty to a clockmaker, Christopher Pinchbeck, for a safer crane — cranes at the time were like gigantic hamster wheels, but for humans. When lines snapped, the results could be fatal, so Pinchbeck added a pneumatic braking mechanism.

The list goes on — in all, over the course of about a century, the Society of Arts awarded over two thousand premiums and bounties for inventions. But there is one that really stands out: a premium for the invention of a mechanical means of cleaning chimneys. With such an invention, the Society hoped to abolish the employment of children, sometimes as young as 4, who were forced to climb up inside chimneys in order to clean them. These children were sometimes abducted by the master chimney sweeps, and frequently perished in horrific accidents or of soot-induced cancers. Strikingly, the use of climbing boys was thought to be unique to Britain — the “peculiar disgrace of England” as the campaigners put it (though I don’t think this was quite true). The Society’s idea was that if a technological replacement could be found, then the case for outright abolition could be made — they wanted to create a machine to take the children’s jobs.

The Society of Arts played its role with the offer of a premium, but it acted alongside another campaign run by a few of its members, who ran the snappily titled “Society for Superseding the Necessity of Climbing Boys, by Encouraging a New Method of Sweeping Chimnies, and for Improving the Condition of Children and Others Employed by Chimney Sweepers”, founded in 1803 at the London Coffee-House on Ludgate Hill. Let’s call it the SSNCB for short. There had been earlier campaigns to abolish the use of climbing boys, one of the most prominent being run by Jonas Hanway (a prominent philanthropist, also a member of the Society of Arts, whose various claims to fame include being the first man in London to sport an umbrella). But the 1803 campaign was to prove the most successful, drawing on wider political support. The SSNCB’s key members included William Wilberforce, who later became famous for his zeal in abolishing the slave trade.

April 5, 2020

QotD: The fear of “becoming” your job

Filed under: Education, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In fact, “losing ourselves in the part” used to be our big worry. Maybe I am just a customer service rep …? The office, the commute, my neckties all laid out for me at the start of each week … is that really all there is to life? What happens when the long nights start taking their toll — as they must — and I have to give up the bar band? What happens when the kids grow up?

You could see this worry everywhere in our culture, our art. Watch Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Judge Reinhold’s character is wrestling with this type of question, and he’s in high school, fer chrissakes. See what I mean about that movie being made on Mars? Remember that; it’ll be on the final.

There’s a certain type of person, though, who just couldn’t grok those worries, because the very notion of social roles was incomprehensible. We didn’t know about the autism spectrum back then, but that’s what that type of person effectively is: A high-functioning autistic. For the autistic, what’s now is forever. Bob’s nametag says “customer service representative.” Therefore, Bob is a customer service representative, and only a customer service representative, now and forever. Bob the family man, Bob the stamp collector, Bob the bar-band strummer … all those fry the autistic’s circuits. It says “customer service representative,” damn it! The train is fine.

Two sides of the same coin. Normal people were worried that they were becoming their jobs. The autistics couldn’t grasp that anyone could be anything else.

The autistics all went into the ivory tower, which gave us identity politics. “Identity politics” only makes sense to the autistic — that is, to people who can’t process change. Normal people have such a hard time with it because we can’t see the logical connection between, say, being gay and being pro-abortion. I mean, if you’re gay it’s a moot point, right? Nor is there any logical connection between being gay and favoring redistributive economics, or worrying about global warming, or whatever. Maybe you do believe in redistributive economics and are worried about global warming, but those are just individual opinions, right? I’m not obliged to vote Republican because I dig blondes. It’s a non sequitur.

Not to the autistic, it isn’t. They’re told that this — pro-abortion, being “green,” the whole Liberal schmear — just is gayness, and they go with it, because that’s the only way the world makes sense to them. Just how “gay” came to mean all that is above my pay grade, but we all know it’s true. More importantly, we all know they believe it, with all their hearts and souls.

That’s the situation in which we find ourselves, my young friends, here in the Current Year. Most of us would like to be team players, but we have no role models. Because the autistics control the culture, we’ve internalized their worries. If I’m a member of the team, we instinctively feel, then somehow I am the team, and only the team, now and forever. It’s a stark choice: Either I give up my individuality completely to advance the team’s goals, or I take my ball and go home.

But it’s a false choice, kameraden, one that could only be beaten into us by very long, very expensive training — i.e. the American “education” system, K-thru-PhD.

Severian, “Advice to Young Dissidents”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-04-01.

April 1, 2020

QotD: Government spending in theory and practice

Filed under: Economics, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Modern economics explains to governments how they and their crony capitalist mates can steal from you while pretending they are doing you good. And before we go any farther, here is something you should know before you listen to another word from anyone in government: Government spending never creates a net increase in employment. Government spending only creates jobs in one place at the expense of jobs somewhere else, and does it by giving money to the government’s best friends to run projects no firm, based on profit and loss, would ever undertake. And if the project is loss making, which government projects almost invariably are, it has taken the economy backwards — that is, people in general invariably become less well off than they otherwise would have been had these projects not gone ahead — even if those to whom the government has paid money are better off, which they almost invariably are. Government spending, unless there is a genuine and calculated return above the cost, is a ripoff, and it is you who are being ripped off. They pick your pockets and pretend they are doing you good.

Steven Kates, “Classical economic theory and the American recovery”, Catallaxy Files, 2018-01-15.

March 19, 2020

The undifferentiated “labour lump” fallacy in Keynesian grand schemes

Filed under: Economics, Government, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At the Continental Telegraph, Tim Worstall explains why old fashioned “shovel ready” infrastructure projects are no longer a viable way to address large scale employment needs:

Top left: The Tennessee Valley Authority, part of the New Deal, being signed into law in 1933.
Top right: FDR (President Franklin Delano Roosevelt) was responsible for the New Deal.
Bottom: A public mural from one of the artists employed by the New Deal’s WPA program.
Wikimedia Commons.

We still get some slavering at the thought that in economic hard times we just get everyone off digging ditches. We get to hear Woody Guthrie singing again or something. The mass ranks of peasants dying at the Belomors Canal. Or maybe the navvies building the railways, it’s always difficult to know which historical episode they’ve got in mind.

Any economic down turn is always met with cries of “go build something” and they always do envision some mass mobilisation of labour to do it. The current one seems to be “insulate every house in the country and create jobs in every constituency”. The bit that is always missed being that most people haven’t a clue about how to do such work. The division of labour and specialisation have seen to that.

[…]

Having the diversity advisers – and this is a lovely thought even so – navvie the railways into being is going to be about as effective as having the navvies – and this is a lovely thought even so – doing the diversity advising. Division and specialisation of labor means the one is not a substitute for the other.

It’s only in GuardianWorld that labour is such a lump that can be allocated as the Commissars wish. Which presumably means their economics pages are written by the sports desk which does, to be fair, explain a lot about that output.

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