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Some thoughts on COVID, automation, and peak horse.
1/19
1/19
In the late 1800s, there were so many horses in the US, used for so many purposes, that the accumulation of horse manure in city streets had become a major crisis.
2/19
2/19
“In 1898, delegates from across the globe gathered in New York City for the world’s first international urban planning conference. One topic dominated the discussion...The delegates were driven to desperation by horse manure.”
3/19
https://www.accessmagazine.org/spring-2007/horse-power-horsepower/
3/19
https://www.accessmagazine.org/spring-2007/horse-power-horsepower/
But then something happened that mitigated the problem: the introduction of the car and other combustion-engine driven machines that replaced virtually all of the previous functions of horses.
4/19
4/19
As you can see from the chart in the first post of this thread, the population of horses dropped precipitously after peaking in the ~1920s, solving the manure crisis (while replacing it with a CO2 crisis, but that’s another story).
5/19
5/19
It’s not like people just started slaughtering horses in the street. They simply stopped breeding them and importing them at the same rates, as horses increasingly became used for recreation instead of industry.
6/19
6/19
Automation has similarly been eating away at the number of jobs that humans can do. Have we reached peak human? Are there now more humans than our elites need to keep them in comfort?
7/19
7/19
Consider that American lifespans were declining even before COVID, and mostly due to deaths of despair—opioid overdoses, alcoholism, suicide.
8/19 http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2016/04/08/we-dont-know-why-it-came-to-this/
8/19 http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2016/04/08/we-dont-know-why-it-came-to-this/
Consider these two maps of suicides and opioid deaths side-by-side, and tell me if they suggest some overlap.
9/19
9/19
(Those came, of course, from this brilliant 2016 essay: https://morecrows.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/unnecessariat/)
10/19
10/19
There is almost certainly a causal relationship between deindustrialization and the rise in deaths. People lose their jobs and can’t find new ones, because there are none. They’re not going to learn to code. They’re not going to drive for Uber.
11/19 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/11/23/trade-with-china-literally-kills-americans-economists-say/
11/19 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/11/23/trade-with-china-literally-kills-americans-economists-say/
This is not an anti-“free” trade or an anti-China point, but rather a simple observation: we can produce more, and more cheaply, with fewer people.
12/19
12/19
Anyone who thinks that automation will drive unemployment, which drives lower wages, which makes the displaced employable again at a lower wage, needs to explain why our labor force participation rate has declined and why so many Americans are now “disabled.”
13/19
13/19
Disability has become for white Americans what welfare and incarceration have been for Black Americans for decades: ways the state tries to manage, at a bare minimum expense, an unwanted population excluded from the economy.
14/19
14/19
As with horses, there’s no effort to directly kill off surplus Americans. But there’s also no great effort to save them, either. We’re the richest country that is or ever has been, our life spans are declining, our heights are declining, and our elites...shrug.
15/19
15/19
No, I take that back. There’s definitely an ideological project to legitimize the collapse of entire communities. Consider the way that conservative writers now talk about poor white communities in the same terms they used to talk about poor black communities.
16/19
16/19
They’re doing the elites’ ideological work by recasting all these problems as the fault of the victims themselves, and their insufficient culture.
“The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale [white] communities is that they deserve to die.”
https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/03/donald-trump-white-working-class-dysfunction-real-opportunity-needed-not-trump/
17/19
“The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale [white] communities is that they deserve to die.”
https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/03/donald-trump-white-working-class-dysfunction-real-opportunity-needed-not-trump/
17/19
It’s in this context that tweets like this make the most sense. Our elites aren’t actively trying to murder the surplus population, but they’re utterly unwilling to bear even minor inconveniences to save anyone.
18/19 https://twitter.com/socialistdogmom/status/1316396389946060801
18/19 https://twitter.com/socialistdogmom/status/1316396389946060801
Automation could, of course, be used to liberate us from drudgery. Instead, because it’s owned by a small elite, it’s used to keep those elites in material comfort while the rest of us just...fade away.
19/19
19/19
PS: Since that WaPo article is probably behind a paywall, here’s the original study. https://www.nber.org/papers/w22849
