“In the world I see, you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.” – Fight Club
I had to stop working in the granite industry: it was counter productive.
Grug want break rock. Grug grab other rock, smash rock. Rock eventually breaks. Grug happy.
Another example: Grug want break rock. Grug create iron ore mine. Grug create coal mine. Grug find tree. Grug mix use coal and iron to make steel hammer. Grug smash rock. Grug happy, much faster.
Yet another example: Grug want to break rock. Grug create iron ore mine, coal mine, chemical factory. Grug find trees, sulfur. Grug make hammer, drill, and dynamite. Grug break rock real fast. Grug very happy because Grug like blow stuff up.
I stole this example from Grugwig von Mises, the Austrian economist who thought about these things a lot. The indirect way to do something is generally more efficient. It’s most direct to break a rock with a rock, but it’s much, much faster to blow the rock into gravel and you can do a lot at one time. And it’s really cool.
What sound does a piano make when it falls down an ore well? A-flat miner.
The catch, of course, is that to do things indirectly, there have to be multiple industries and infrastructure supporting the indirect method. And, if any of them fail, the method becomes more difficult, if not impossible.
One big example of indirect work in our economy is the impact of the computer and the Internet. Paul Krugman, (who is always wrong) said that the Internet would have no more economic impact than the fax machine. Of course, since Krugman is always wrong, he was wrong this time, too.
The Internet is a vast communication web, moving data about everything, everywhere, all at once. It is now pervasive, and has been for decades.
Decades?
Krugman? More like Grugman.
Yes. Back when I lived in Alaska, one of the two fiberoptic cables to Fairbanks was cut by a backhoe operator, thankfully mostly cutting Fairbanks off from Paul Krugman’s stupid ideas. What was the backhoe guy digging for?
I have no idea. Everyone in Alaska has a backhoe, a skidsteer, and a dump truck. And they were always digging. I think they might be part mole. Maybe they were digging for this:
Meme as-found.
The result of this one fiber being cut, though, was apparent very quickly: couldn’t buy gas. At all. Even with cash. Credit card usage? Nope. And I think prescriptions were similarly impacted.
Now, at work and home, I still had Internet – it was like nothing had happened since my employer must have gotten Internet from the other fiber. But it was unusual to see so much dependency – I hadn’t realized how much infrastructure was hooked up and required the Internet. In Alaska. In 2005.
The reason is that the Internet allows information to move freely. Information used to be hard to move. Now, information moves at near lightspeed in many places. It used to be the way to get information from one place to another was the most direct – mouth to ear. Then writing, probably to let someone know the sad facts about very fat their mother was, was invented, and is probably carved under half the pyramid blocks.
When I got arrested for graffiti, I tried to deny it, but the writing was on the wall.
Then, books preserved information about many fat mothers through centuries and made it much easier to share from Rome to ancient China. Finally, we have Internet pages and ebooks that share stories about maternal adiposity around the globe in an instant.
But, one funny thing – the more direct methods such as carving in stone and the ancient legends of huge hulking mothers whose buttocks block out the sky remain. But books burn. The ephemeral website? It may reach 90% of the planet yet be gone in an afternoon. Think of the deprivation of the future world of all those unsung stories of mothers whose gravitational pull could disrupt the very alignment of the planets.
What brought this to mind was that a big chunk of the Internet disappeared today. I think it’s back, but I don’t go on FaceGram™ or InstaTok©, but I think those are both back.
To be clear, those cannibal tribes in the Amazon (the river basin, not the company) didn’t even notice. Why would they? Their methods, their lives are the most direct. They don’t depend on getting ammunition for their bow from Cabela’s®, rather if they need a new arrow, they make one out of the stuff that’s lying around.
I hear Dwayne Johnson is going to star as a time traveler who has to go back to ancient Rome to steal a document from Augustus. It’s called Rock, Paper, Caesar.
The upside of this communication is that I can see first person video of drone attacks in the Ukraine within hours of a strike. The downside is that by knowing, people feel a philosophical burden – they have information about something yet are (mostly) powerless to do anything about it. Think about Michael Collins, orbiting above the Moon. He had a contingency plan if the landing had failed and Armstrong and Aldrin were lost.
“I’d go home.”
Why? There would have been nothing at all that Collins could have done. He knew that, and so did Neil and Buzz. Many things are like that, best not to obsess about them.
Our modern economy has created a great deal of leverage using cheap information combined with cheap information processing – efficient supply chains and people working in far-flung areas.
These systems, just like the chemical factories that Grug made to make his Grug dynamite to break his rock are inherently more fragile than the direct. How fragile? Back in 2017 or so, a congressional report came out that predicted that up to 90% of Americans would die in the event of an EMP taking out the power grid.
I have to remember that the rhythm is to “Staying Alive” when I do CPR, and not “For Whom The Bell Tolls”.
Knowing congress, they’ve done nothing to make the systems better, with the potential exception of trying to make EMP proof margarita machines.
I’m in hopes that the looming competency crisis, where complex systems become unreliable due to being put in the hands of the unqualified while the competent people are shuffled aside, won’t bring the take down those same systems, and with it, our society.
We’ll leave that to your mom. I hear that, though, she’s old enough that when she was a kid with Grug, there was no history class.
(Irony – I lost all Internet at my house while writing this one.)
