[roenxi]

The quashing of dissent isn't what is propelling them forward though - it is probably holding them back more than anything else. Allowing dissent and maybe even adjusting to it generally leads to better results in the long term.

I was mulling on my commute today as I dodged several homeless people. I can't speak to the US experience, but in Australia if I'd offered those people jobs at the wages and conditions of Chinese workers in the 90s, with the expectation of achieving the same civilisation progress as China ... I would expect to be fined and told off. If I persisted in running a business that way, eventually I'd probably be arrested.

Quashing dissent is illegal in the West, but that isn't the thing that needs to be changed to get industrial results. We need to legalise the industry part. Pollution has to be acceptable, mistakes decriminalised and it needs to be easy to employ people productively. All these Western countries are going a good way to banning mining, restricting cheap energy, blocking industrial processes as environmentally unsound and over-regulating how business is done. All on purpose and largely due to consensus opinions that too much industrial progress is bad for people. The result is much to most of the capital investment for the last few decades seeming to have happened in Asia where they were happy to let the world improve around them. It has nothing to do with division. If anything we don't have enough division, the people who want progress are hamstrung because they are forced to conform to the whims of timid environmentalists.

(and I endorse bcrosby95's reading of my comment).

[rayiner]

> The quashing of dissent isn't what is propelling them forward though - it is probably holding them back more than anything else.

OP’s reading above was that quashing of dissent was what helped everyone pull in the same direction in world war ii.

[roenxi]

And my counter-reading is that that cannot be all that important. If pulling together was what mattered in a clash between industrial powers, most societies would win most wars [0] because it isn't that hard to squash dissent if the generals want to.

The hammer gets bought down on dissenters, true enough. Happens in every big war, I count myself lucky that HN is remote and anonymous from some of the people I've talked to or I'm sure I'd have some nasty injuries from my views on the Ukraine war. But industrial production never has and never will be determined by how hard people wish for things and hold hands. Industrial production is a function of resource availability and capital investment. There is no strong need to get many people on side for either of those things and the people who handle capital investments tend to be a class that thinks alike so if a few are convinced then all of them will go along happily.

The pulling together is important insofar as bodies are required for the meat grinder and if you want to deploy literally everything in a war effort then work will be found for idle hands. But if we're talking about wartime manufacturing; it really isn't the major factor. The US is not industrially limited by its cohesion, it is limited by legislation written by people who are in the majority and enjoy a societal consensus which they are using to diminish industry.

[0] Which is logically impossible given that minimum of half the sides in wars must lose.