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"Interchangeability of parts breaks the coupling between scaling and manufacturing capacity by substituting supply-chain limits for manufacturing limits. For a rifle, you can build up a stockpile of spare parts in peace time, and deliver an uninterrupted supply of parts to match the breakdown rate. There is no need to predict which part might break down in order to meaningfully anticipate and prepare. You can also distribute production optimally (close to raw material sources or low-cost talent for instance), since there is no need to locate craftsmen near the point-of-use.
So when interchangeability was finally achieved and had diffused through the economy as standard practice (a process that took about 65 years), demand-management complexity moved to the supply chain, and most problems could be solved by distributing inventories appropriately."
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Both Moore’s Law and Hall’s Law in the speculative form that I have proposed, are exponential trajectories. These trajectories generally emerge when some sort of runaway positive-feedback process is unleashed, through the breaking of some boundary constraint (the term break boundary is due to Marshall McLuhan).
The positive-feedback part is critical (if you know some math, you can guess why: a “doubling” law in a difference/differential equation form has to be at least a first-order process; something like compound interest, if you don’t know what the math terms mean).
Loosely speaking, this implies a technological process that can be applied to itself, improving it. Better machines with interchangeable parts also means better machine tools that are themselves made with interchangeable parts and therefore can run continuously at higher speeds, with low downtime. Computers can be used to design more complex computers. This is not true of all technological processes. Better plastics do not improve your ability to make new plastics, for instance, since they do not play much of a role in their own manufacturing processes.
This is the inner, technological positive-feedback loop (think of an entire technology sector engaging in a sort of 10,000 hours of deliberate practice; a major sign is that the most talented people turn to tool-building: Blanchard and Hall for Hall’s Law, people like the late Dennis Ritchie and Linus Torvalds for Moore’s Law).
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But the technological positive-feedback loop requires an outer financial positive-feedback loop around it to fuel it. You need conditions where the second million is easier to make than the first million.
This means tycoons who spot some vast new opportunity and play land-grabbing games on a massive scale.
Both Hall’s Law and Moore’s Law led to wholesale management and financial innovation by precisely such new tycoons.
For Hall’s Law, the process started with Cornelius Vanderbilt, the hero of A. J. Stiles’ excellent The First Tycoon, who figured out how to tame the strange new beast, the post-East-India-Company corporation and in the process sidelined old money.
It is revealing that Vanderbilt was blooded in business through a major legal battle for steamboat water rights: Gibbons vs. Ogden (1824) that helped define the relationship of corporations to the rest of society. From there, he went from strength to strength, inventing new business and financial thinking along the way. Only in his old age did he finally meet his match: Jay Gould, who would go on to become the archetypal Robber Baron, taking over most of Vanderbilt’s empire from his not-so-talented children.
Vanderbilt was something of a transition figure. He straddled both management and finance, and old and new economies: he was a cross between an old-economy merchant-pirate in the Robert Clive mold (he ran a small war in Nicaragua for instance) and a new-economy corporate tycoon. He transcended the categories that he helped solidify, which helped define the next generation of tycoons.
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"Let me put the point this way. There are two kinds of philosophical historians: derivative and original. While the derivative follow the standard curriculum, the original have the powers to reform and create a new curriculum. It is the ideal and obligation of every genuine philosophical historian to be original, to get beyond the standard curriculum, to resist the pressure of pedagogical interests and intellectual fashions, so that he can give an accurate account of the depth and breadth of an historical period. No period of the philosophical past stands in more need of an original historian than nineteenth century philosophy. The standard tropes and figures do no justice to its depths, riches and powers. The ultimate purpose of this review is to give the reader some indication of how we must strive to get beyond them."
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Behind the editors' theme of "revolutionary responses to the existing order" there lies an old myth, one that the editors have scarcely articulated yet tacitly adopted: namely, that the important philosophy of the nineteenth century came not from "academic philosophers" but from the radical individual thinkers outside the university, viz., from such solitary thinkers as Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This myth was very much advocated by these thinkers themselves, who declared that they, unlike their academic counterparts, were not in thrall to the governments who employed them, and who claimed that they alone were free-thinkers ready to challenge the moral, religious and social status quo. Since the academic philosophers only defended that status quo, so the story goes, they have little to say to anyone today, for whom the moral, religious and social values of the nineteenth century have lost all credibility. It is indeed largely because of this myth that the standard curriculum has become what it is today, and that it continues to prescribe our conception of nineteenth century philosophy.
One mystery haunts White throughout his book: how clever but not very talented men were able in nineteenth-century America to amass large fortunes and power even as their capitalist enterprises failed and engulfed large numbers of Americans in economic crisis. After reading White’s book, I am haunted by a different mystery: why the popular resistance that took shape during the First Gilded Age has been so absent from the Second. To the extent to which populist fury has surfaced in our own time, it is concentrated on the right, in the Tea Party and allied organizations. The disastrous 2010 BP oil spill generated no lasting anti-corporate sentiment, not even in Louisiana, once the dominion of “Share the Wealth” populist Huey Long. No new Debs or William Jennings Bryan has emerged even now, more than twenty-five years into this Gilded Age. The aversion of historians to reckoning with capitalism turns out to be the ruling idea of our age. No one, it seems, has escaped capitalism’s influence. Perhaps the labor stirrings in Wisconsin, and White’s remarkable attempt to resurrect the spirit of the First Gilded Age, are signs that something new is afoot.
"Guy Aldred is an obscure but important figure in the history of socialist thought. He sometimes crops up in histories of British socialism, syndicalist and labour organisation, but rarely in discussions of socialist theory. "
"The hazardous character of technology—the word, the concept—is a consequence of the history just outlined. As I have argued, the generality of the word—its lack of specificity, the very aspect which evidently enabled it to supplant its more explicit and substantial precursors—also made it peculiarly susceptible to reification. Reification, as the philosopher George Lukacs famously explained, is what occurs when we endow a human activity with the characteristics of a thing or things. It thereby acquires, as he put it, “a ‘phantom-objectivity,’ an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people.”27 In contemporary discourse, private and public, technologies are habitually represented by “things”—by their most conspicuous artifactual embodiments: transportation technology by automobiles, airplanes, and railroads; nuclear technology by reactors, power plants, and bombs; information technology by computers, mobile telephones, and television; and so on. By consigning technologies to the realm of things, this well-established iconography distracts attention from the human—socioeconomic and political—relations which largely determine who uses them and for what purposes. Because most technologies in our corporate capitalist system have the legal status of private property, vital decisions about their use are made by the individual businessmen who own them or by the corporate managers and government officials who exercise the virtual rights of ownership. The complexity and obscurity of the legal relations governing the use of our technologies, abetted by the reification that assigns them to the realm of things—all of these help to create the aura of “phantom objectivity” that envelops them."
In 1863, Union and Confederate forces fought for control of Chattanooga, known as the "Gateway to the Deep South." The Confederates were victorious at nearby Chickamauga in September. However, renewed fighting in Chattanooga that November provided Union troops victory and control of the city.
The Heavens on Earth explores the place of the observatory in nineteenth-century science and culture. Astronomy was a core pursuit for observatories, but usually not the only one. It belonged to a larger group of “observatory sciences” that also included geodesy, meteorology, geomagnetism, and even parts of physics and statistics. These pursuits coexisted in the nineteenth-century observatory; this collection surveys them as a coherent whole. Broadening the focus beyond the solitary astronomer at his telescope, it illuminates the observatory’s importance to technological, military, political, and colonial undertakings, as well as in advancing and popularizing the mathematical, physical, and cosmological sciences.
"In nineteenth‐century America, there was no such person as a “professional scientist.” There were professionals and there were scientists, but they were very different. Professionals were men of science who engaged in commercial relations with private enterprises and took fees for their services. Scientists were men of science who rejected such commercial work and feared the corrupting influences of cash and capitalism. Professionals portrayed themselves as active and useful members of an entrepreneurial polity, while scientists styled themselves as crusading reformers, promoters of a purer science and a more research‐oriented university. It was this new ideology, embodied in these new institutions, that spurred these reformers to adopt a special name for themselves—“scientists.” One object of this essay, then, is to explain the peculiar Gilded Age, American origins of that ubiquitous term. A larger goal is to explore the different social roles of the professional and the scientist. By attending to the particular vocabulary employed at the time, this essay tries to make clear why a “professional scientist” would have been a contradiction in terms for both the professional and the scientist in nineteenth‐century America. "
"The Zodiac of Paris tells the story of this incredible archeological find and its unlikely role in the fierce disputes over science and faith in Napoleonic and Restoration France.
The book unfolds against the turbulence of the French Revolution, Napoleon's breathtaking rise and fall, and the restoration of the Bourbons to the throne. Drawing on newspapers, journals, diaries, pamphlets, and other documentary evidence, Jed Buchwald and Diane Greco Josefowicz show how scientists and intellectuals seized upon the zodiac to discredit Christianity, and how this drew furious responses from conservatives and sparked debates about the merits of scientific calculation as a source of knowledge about the past. "
in list: Books Noted
What the fight against anarchism tells us about the fight against radical Islam. Review of The World that Never Was: a true story of dreamers, schemers, anarchists, and secret agents by Alex Butterworth.
What assumptions underlie Marx's analysis of the political behavior of class? I would say that his theory comes down to three elements: a theory of individual means-end rationality, a theory of ideology, and a theory of class consciousness.
The capitalist industrial revolution would simply have not happened on a scale anywhere approaching the levels it achieved unless the industrializing nations had not conquered huge tracts of land and, through the use of force, either heavily exploited, or entirely cleared out, the native populations. The capitalist industrial revolution, and the worst economic devolution ever experienced by the peoples of Africa and Asia, are two sides of the same coin.
Common-place is a common place for exploring and exchanging ideas about early American history and culture. A bit friendlier than a scholarly journal, a bit more scholarly than a popular magazine, Common-place speaks--and listens--to scholars, museum curators, teachers, hobbyists, and just about anyone interested in American history before 1900.
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