Re: Which book sounds most compelling?
- From: Ric Locke <warrick.locke@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 17 Apr 2009 17:10:59 -0600
On Fri, 17 Apr 2009 14:14:51 -0600, barf-bear wrote:
Will in New Haven <bill.reich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Apr 17, 4:40 pm, Ric Locke <warrick.lo...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Fri, 17 Apr 2009 10:19:12 -0700, David Friedman wrote:
In article <1rm3i0zrj343o$.18el5wdo2iqp4$....@xxxxxxxxxx>,
Ric Locke <warrick.lo...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Color -- what they then called "race" -- had little to do with
historical slavery, but everything to do with American slavery, and the
assembly line as it is usually credited to Henry Ford is a direct
adaptation of the "gang" system. The latter was not exclusively employed
using slaves, but that was the usual thing.
My understanding is that, after the Civil War, southern landowners
attempted to use the gang labor system with hired black labor but were
unable to make it work--they couldn't get workers to do it at a wage at
which it was still profitable.
Correct.
Ford's innovation was paying a high wage to make the conditions somewhat
palatable -- a starting wage of twice the going rate for manual labor.
He could do that because he was making a high-value item (cars).
He also claimed that paying his workers that much made it more likely
that they could/would buy his cars.
I think the cost of a place to live has been a factor for a long time,
it certainly is today. Landlords today aren't content to have help
paying for the property they are purchasing, they want it fully paid
for them, and they want an income stream beyond that.
WHAT!?!
That's what being a landlord has been all about since the concept was
invented. Which is why David and his fellow economists describe an
attempt to gain a continuous return with little or no further effort or
expenditure as "rent-seeking behavior" (he is mostly against it, AIUI).
I don't know how things were just after the Civil War. I have looked
at photos of the architecture in Europe, cathedrals and so forth, and
been amazed at the amount of handwork involved, intricate carvings
etc., and I've wondered how that worked economically.
It's probably easy enough to gloss over that kind of detail in a
novel, but understanding how it worked in Europe, for example, could
make it more believable.
It has to do with the size of the economy and overall productivity. If
productivity and gross societal product are low -- as they were in the
days before modern farming methods and industrialization -- somebody has
to get less than their "fair share" if /anybody/ is to have the leisure
to create, e.g., the Sistine Chapel (the whole thing, not just the
paintings). Craftsmen and laborers got shafted; the nobility and trade
classes got incomes that allowed leisure and a consumer lifestyle, which
is unjust as all Hell, but if it hadn't happened that way there would
have been nobody with time off from labor to dream up physics,
Republican forms of Government, egalitarianism, and all the other things
that make our lives easy and enjoyable compared to, for instance, the
Fourteenth Century. Slavery is the extreme of that.
Regards,
Ric
.
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