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by czr80
4437 days ago
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So the thesis is that technological progress relies on us incentivizing people with the hope of extreme wealth? Seems unlikely - for one counter-example, a large part of progress in society rests on investment in basic research, and most of the scientists engaged in that work have no real expectation that they will get rich. |
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The real Henry Ford was modestly ... nuts. But in a good way... well, mostly a good way... the Rouge Plant is the Neuschwanstein Castle of American industry...
But who gets identified with a machine that is as iconic as a horse? Perhaps you have to have know someone who used a 40-horse Ford in anger for decades - there were a handful of my paternal grandfather's brothers, who I knew, who did ( guys who were fully adults at the onset of the Depression) . As a suburban brat raised by somebody who was not going back to the farm, they were like priests of the Old Religion.
In order for a narrative to make any sense, we have to have a two-legged archetype. The truth is closer to "we (collectively) stumbled into using tractors and Haber-Bosch* process related fertilizers to make Malthusian scarcity/crises go away as a potential force of history."
*yes, that's James Burke's "Connections" voice you hear there.
Of course, the equal but opposite counter to that is these things also made way for machine guns and tanks. Might some extra CO2 outta it; we're not 100% sure...
Even modest wealth has a lot of fantasy tied up in it.
The whole point of markets is to enslave Vast quantities of inscrutable information. When we make up stories about this information, we should expect to fail.
I don't think it's been said better than by Talking Heads - "You may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile You may find yourself in a beautiful house with a beautiful wife You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here? "
If anything, what hubris it is to think we can shape that to order.