"Twentieth-century technology," writes economic historian
Joel Mokyr in the Manhattan Institute's excellent City Journal, "was
primarily about 'large' things."Large in physical size, that is. Mokyr's examples include the diesel engine and the gas turbine, shipping containers, communications satellites launched by giant rockets, oil-drilling platforms, massive power stations, giant steel mills and huge airplanes.
Most are familiar sights today, but if we try to see them with the eyes of someone in 1914, they are awe-inspiring. This summer, I drove past the ruins of Henry Ford's Highland Park plant, the largest manufacturing plant in the world when it opened in 1910. There, Ford set up the first auto assembly line and in 1914, the same year Europe went to war, started paying his workers $5 a day.
Three years later, the year the United States entered what was called the Great War, Ford started building the even larger Rouge plant in Dearborn, covering 960 acres -- one-and-a-half square miles -- with 100 miles of internal railroad track. More than 100,000 men worked there daily at its peak. A drive around the perimeter of the Rouge plant puts five miles on your odometer.
To the men and women of 1914, these plants, like the giant steel factories along Cleveland's Cuyahoga River and Pittsburgh's Monongahela, must have been breathtaking. Most people then grew up on farms where the highest structure around was a church steeple.
Breathtaking too was the audacity of the entrepreneurs and capitalists who raised the money and designed these behemoths and many others.
Consider what immigrants, many on ocean liners among the largest ever built, saw as they entered New York Harbor in 1914. Giant ships sailing past the Statue of Liberty toward the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan, the offices of John D. Rockefeller at 26 Broadway and J.P. Morgan at 23 Wall Street, and behind them the gleaming new 60-story Gothic Woolworth Building, the tallest building in the world when it was completed in 1913 and until the Chrysler Building rose in 1930.
"Large" technology tended to encourage large bureaucracies and large government. You needed bureaucratic organization and centralized control to manage those 100,000 workers at the Rouge and, eventually, big unions as well. In 1913 and 1914 Congress created the Federal Reserve and the Federal Trade Commission and passed the Clayton Antitrust Act. It seemed natural when so much wealth was so visibly accumulated that government and labor unions should have some countervailing power.
Large technology also meant large armies -- and enormous casualties in war. Some 116,000 Americans died in World War I, far more than the less than 10,000 in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Other nations' (approximate) death tolls were much higher: 800,000 British, 1.3 million French, 1.8 million Germans, 1.3 million Austro-Hungarians and 2 million Russians. On July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 19,000 British soldiers died and 41,000 were wounded.
These figures are orders of magnitude larger than the death tolls in recent wars. And so are the sizes of militaries. Military historian Robert Scales recently noted how General George Patton's mechanized war doctrine, waged with enormous forces, culminated in the march to Baghdad in 2003.
Enemies adapted, however, and Patton's mass armies have been replaced by special operations forces, pioneered by General Stanley McChrystal -- "small units of superbly selected, educated, led and bonded soldiers."
Civilian technology, Joel Mokyr notes, has also gone "small" -- nanotechnology, genetic engineering, custom-engineered materials, "mass customization" through 3-D printing. If the Rouge plant looming over Dearborn was the iconic symbol of the industrial age, the iconic symbol of our information age is the smartphone in your pocket.
"Large" technology requires the standardization of masses of people, centralized command-and-control, conformity to social norms. Massive work forces and massive armies cannot operate optimally otherwise.
"Small" technology enables individuals to make personal choices, fashion their world to their own dimensions, deploy their own talents and pursue their interests in ways of their own choosing. Standardization yields to customization.
President Obama doesn't seem to get this. He sees history as a story of progress from minimal government to ever-larger government. He's only sorry that he hasn't taken us farther on that track.
But history doesn't proceed in a straight line; it moves around. "Large" technology made big government seem necessary in 1914. "Small" technology requires something different, something more adaptive today.
What is happening is we are undergoing change! The enemy is constantly changing the battlefield from what we traditionally call the battlefield. From what I recently read, I would not be surprised if the future warriors might be robots. When you visit McDonald’s, the one that serves you in the future might be a machine. That brings up the point once robots replace all human endeavors what is left for humans to do? I hate to be a Luddite, but we are being replaced with robots.
ReplyDeleteA society in which robots do all the functions of the society related to work seems desirable on the one hand, but I think it could have detrimental effects as well. Look at how fast the black community devolved without a work ethic. Without a role model at home, black people have become the bane of society! They are loathed not only by other groups, but they loathe themselves as well. This is caused by a lack of self worth which only hard work can correct.
The liberal media tries to give a faux picture of their community by showing blacks in leading roles in TV and movies, but observant people see through the absurdity the media portrays. The reality is that blacks are shunned by all other groups. Their entrance into a community in any numbers equals an abrupt end to prosperity. This is not racism but fact!
Likewise, as we see the decline of the black community, we may see declines in other communities as well as the government, or robots, take over the role of thinking for us. They will do all the work for us which will leave us with nothing to do but cause mischief (at least that is the case in the black community.) Automation and lack of responsibility will cause some groups such as blacks more harm than perhaps whites or Asians because of their limited cerebral capacity. They simply don’t know what to do with the extra time other that rape, rob, and commit mayhem. Automation might help the more enlightened groups such as whites and Asians (but not in all cases!)
I find it amazing that with all these articles and things written nobody (but me) seems to have an opinion about anything. That is the trouble with the tea party people: no fire at all! They see Rome burning, but do nothing to put out the fire. They just stand on the hill and point to the fire and note that Rome is indeed on fire. What a waste of words from Diane on this worthless lot! No wonder we are losing America!