On topic: Those famous 6 Killer Apps

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know. Niall Ferguson and all that. He's immensely popular, very eloquent, and he can destroy any opponent in an instant. I get it. But does it mean he's right about these 6 Killer Apps?

http://documentaryheaven.com/civilization-is-the-west-history/

"Niall Ferguson asks why it was that Western civilization, from inauspicious roots in the 15th century, came to dominate the rest of the world; and if the West is about to be overtaken by the rest.

Ferguson reveals the killer apps of the West’s success – competition, science, the property owning democracy, modern medicine, the consumer society and the Protestant work ethic – the real explanation of how, for five centuries, a clear minority of mankind managed to secure the lion’s share of the earth’s resources."

The Killer Apps: Competition / Science / Property / Medicine / Consumerism / Work.

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And now a few questions. What knowledge can we get by using these 6 apps and applying them to our world? Does such an approach risk automatically passing judgment on previous events and societies and applying knowledge post-factum? If we assume his theory is right, how would these 6 apps help us comprehend the current economic problems in the West?

Has competition deteriorated due to the big banks and financial institutions limiting the flow of money? Are property rights under threat today, since more homeowner's associations have taken over homes, and the use of eminent domain has increased exponentially, and since a multitude of foreclosures have been pushed by banks who take over homes that they don't hold mortgages on?

Does the sum of the influence of modern medicine increasing the life expectancy overall + the increased affinity to leisure time rather than hard work, create an unsustainable situation where more people retire than those who work hard?

Does the deterioration of work ethic have any place in this scheme, and is it a fact at all? Also the deteriorating levels of critical thinking on part of large chunks of the populace, due to cliched, backward, and inadequate education and the focusing on regurgitating old talking points and concepts that are learned by heart, as opposed to being understood and critically examined - am I just imagining things, or is it a factor that Ferguson hasn't... "factored in"? Does it have a role in the way society is shaped today? In other words, are people generally losing their ability to come up with new fresh ideas due to complacency, and are they instead preferably resorting to old schemes? And even if not so, would it pose a big risk for society in the long-term?

And lastly, has the consumer society reached a point of ultimate gluttony (or there's still room to dig even further down), with such nice manifestations of it like rampant obesity (think Wall-E), laziness (both physical and intellectual), and the neglect of personal savings at the expense of living on credit, way beyond our means? I.e., has our society at large passed the critical point of unsustainability? If not yet - when/if? If yes - is there a way back?

And how about Ferguson's mention of China and Libya... Is it even possible to have a democracy without comprehensive property rights? Is such a society sustainable in the long run?

Sorry that I don't have answers to all these. Perhaps I'll come up with some myself, in the course of the discussion. But I'd be more willing to hear some opinions for the time being.

Comments

[rasilio.livejournal.com]

"Has competition deteriorated due to the big banks and financial institutions limiting the flow of money?"

Yes, More specifically with the growth of the regulatory state in the West Political rent seeking has become more profitable than market competition and as a result competition is being strangled out to where it is no longer the core of the economy but only exists at the fringes. Note this is not an anti regulation polemic, some level of regulation is always necessary if for no other reason than to establish predictable rules. However more regulations ALWAYS works to eliminate smaller players to the benefit of larger players in the market.

"Are property rights under threat today, since more homeowner's associations have taken over homes, and the use of eminent domain has increased exponentially, and since a multitude of foreclosures have been pushed by banks who take over homes that they don't hold mortgages on?"

Yes, Yes, and probably not. While the 3rd has happened the frequency of it is so small that in the grand scheme of things it is just background noise. Far more damaging was Obama's unquestioned circumvention of bankruptcy law in taking over GM and Chrysler.

"Does the sum of the influence of modern medicine increasing the life expectancy overall + the increased affinity to leisure time rather than hard work, create an unsustainable situation where more people retire than those who work hard?'

Sort of. I'm not sure it is unsustainable because productivity gains means we can support large non productive classes but it is a problem to be sure.

"Does the deterioration of work ethic have any place in this scheme, and is it a fact at all?"

Yes absolutely the work ethic in the west has deteriorated and yes it is a problem. The level of deterioration is different in different countries Southern Europe is the worst, and that is why those countries are such basket cases economically. The US and UK are probably next, then comes the countries which seem to have for whatever reason managed to maintain a culture that still values the work ethic more, primarily in the North, both Europe and Canada.


" Also the deteriorating levels of critical thinking on part of large chunks of the populace, due to cliched, backward, and inadequate education and the focusing on regurgitating old talking points and concepts that are learned by heart, as opposed to being understood and critically examined - am I just imagining things, or is it a factor that Ferguson hasn't... "factored in"?"

Well I do think critical thinking skills are on the decline, however I am not sure of the cause for this. I do know that the structure of the educational establishment used pretty much everywhere (the Prussian model) is at least partly to blame but there are also cultural elements to it because the decline does not seem to be as severe everywhere. That said I am not so certain that this makes people any more suceptable to propaganda as the have always been, rather it just makes them more concerned with who Snooki is sleeping with than what the government is doing.

[rasilio.livejournal.com]

"And lastly, has the consumer society reached a point of ultimate gluttony (or there's still room to dig even further down), with such nice manifestations of it like rampant obesity (think Wall-E), laziness (both physical and intellectual), and the neglect of personal savings at the expense of living on credit, way beyond our means? I.e., has our society at large passed the critical point of unsustainability? If not yet - when/if? If yes - is there a way back?"

Oh I think it could go a lot further down, however a lot of these problems are fostered by the very government institutions trying to solve these problems. For example, saving is a suckers bet today because right now inflation is running just about equal to the best rates of return I could hope to get safely and with government policy creating economic bubbles all over the place it is not even like I could find a safe vehicle to invest in to begin with.However the Fed could not afford to allow that situation to change because if Americans (or Europeans) ever switched from living on credit to deleveraging and then later on saving you'd be looking at a 10 - 15 year recession as consumer demand collapsed and never does quite recover to the same levels it is at today. Sure 40 years from now we'd all be far better off but what politician cares about more than 4 years out?

"And how about Ferguson's mention of China and Libya... Is it even possible to have a democracy without comprehensive property rights? Is such a society sustainable in the long run?"

Is it possible to have a democracy without comprehensive property rights? Maybe but no it would not be stable in the long run. However it is possible to have a long term stable society that lacked both but honestly it is not a place I would want to live in.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Ferguson's history is filled with factual inaccuracies, gross oversimplifications, and fundamental falsehoods. It should be attributed less to history than to garbage. The actual explanation for the rise of the West is that if there was one it was a very short-lived period indeed, lasting part of the 19th and 20th Centuries. I doubt his idiocy about democracy and the Protestant Work Ethic would explain the rise of *any* of the New World states. Nor in truth does it explain either Australia or New Zealand. What happened there was the locals either died from plague or were simply worked to death, and what replaced them were autocratic slave societies. Even the USA is only a partial exception to this rule. His idea that the existence of Western-style property rights is a prerequisite for success leaves the major gaping hole of how Russia took over a sixth of the world and went from Great Power to superpower deliberately defying his usual analyses. Likewise Petrostates and other monocrop economies violate most of his rules, as does the example of pre-Solano Lopez Paraguay and the Porofiriato of dictatorships that bring progress and modernization.

Then again we're discussing a German fanboy and historical troll whose primary difference from David Irving is fapping to the Kaiser, not the Fuhrer.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

It's also worth noting that the progression of Western political development to 1789 was not any path to democracy, but rather the re-appearance of true autocracy from its early phases in Kievan Rus and the Carolingian Empires. The Western system, if there is such a thing, owed its origins not to democratic Greece, but to the tradition of autocracy in Persia, in Israel-Judah, in Sumer, and most especially in the great Roman Empire from the Julio-Claudians to the Theodosians. The rise of Western military power was concurrent with the rise of absolutism, and there was a very direct connection: large armies smashed the nobilities that resisted them not out of a vision of liberty but as a threat to their monopoly on power.

Democracy re-appeared very, very late, was very embattled, and survived chiefly because the rival authoritarian systems either tore each other apart or discredited themselves absent democracy's influence. The spirit behind the Conquest of the New World, as John Marshall's decisions in the case of the Cherokee Nation showed, was anything but democratic or respecting rule of law over rule of men. The Western world's modern traditions began not with competition but protectionism, expulsion, massacre, and religious savagery. Magdeburg and St. Bartholomew's Day are fitting examples of what people would expect of the Aztecs, not Europeans of that time. Mercantilism built the prosperity of the West capitalism expanded, and Mercantilism was not, by a strict standard, modern economic freedom so much as we loot, they pay us, we get rich.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Oh, and those that claim Protestantism promoted any kind of meaningful change in how people viewed equality: Google "Martin Luther" and "On the hordes of thieving, murdering peasants." The Protestants were many things. Advocates of equality for all or most under the law was none of those things.

[vehemencet-t.livejournal.com]

Thank you. Now I don't have to say it. :D

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

Oh, I thought it was the systematic subjugation of native peoples and their natural property that made us so prosperous.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

But yes, he is right, slaves do tend to have that good Godly Protestant work ethic.

[vehemencet-t.livejournal.com]

Yes it's amazing what you can get people to do if you threaten to whip, starve, or do worse to them, isn't it?

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

The work ethic of a slave is closer to that of a Catholic serf than that of a Protestant miser.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

"Natural" property is a myth. Natives were just as industrious about property acquisition as their more domineering brethren from Europe.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Not in the same way, however. Their concept of land ownership paralleled the Russian mir more than the Western European manorial system.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

No it isn't. It's quite a useful concept for any given scenario.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

Calling those things killer apps makes me want to punch him in his trendy buzzword head.

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

He's quite the parvenu, isn't he?

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Economists have had computer envy ever since the invention of the spreadsheet.

[prog-expat.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the Spanish and Portuguese and French empires owe their success to that Protestant work ethic.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Technically, that is true. Were it not for competition from Protestant countries, the Spanish and Portuguese would have stayed home and rested content with their serfs. Nor would the French have sought an outlet for the export of their Huguenot labor.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure about the rest, but in my opinion strong property rights are an integeral part of what we consider "moral" and the success of "Western Civilization".

In fact I would argue that what we commonly think of as "human rights" can be boiled down to "ownership of one's self". Your life, and the fruits of your labor are yours to be spent as you see fit.

It is no coincidence that movements advocating the subordination of individuals to the state (Fascism), or some nebulous greater good (Communism), have a nasty tendency to commit genocide and mass murder.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

Well it's a good thing fascism and communism are Western inventions then.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Except that fascism arose out of the Western industrialized slaughter of WWI, intending to perpetuate this forever as in the grim darkness of fascist ideology there is only war. While Communism was a German utopian concept. Hmm......is there anything modern and evil that didn't come from Germany in some way?

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

That is one of the nice thing about "market" forces: when people die prematurely, it can be chalked up to "natural" causes. We will look the other way at the plight of native populations as the "market" forces them out of their territory and into a wage slave subsistence leading to a reduced life span.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

I do not see any virtue in a minority population practicing hegemonic control over the resources of the planet. That comes across as primitive chest beating to me. When the West finally achieves a modicum of civility, it will discontinue these domineering practices.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Ferguson conflated some issues and confused others to come up with a catchy list and get invited to TED.

His App #3, Property Rights, needs to extend beyond mere real and personal property to intellectual property. This allows coupling the first two of his apps, Competition and Science, to economics, a coupling which incrementally increases the complexity of technology first by giving inventors domain over their inventions, and later by allowing improvements to those inventions either when the patent rights have expired or through licensing agreements. Author William Rosen called the patent system The Most Powerful Idea in the World, and traced its Western roots to the reign of Elizabeth I.

Ferguson mentions Smith, but Rosen goes one step farther and points out what Smith missed:

Smith's theorems did a spectacular job of explaining the self-regulating character of a free market, in which prices and profits are forced by competition to the lowest possible level. . . .

What they didn't do was explain how wealth, profit, and competition can all grow over time. In short, it didn't explain the two centuries of growth that were beginning just as Wealth of Nations was being published. It is in no way a criticism of the book to state that it covered everything except the reason the author's own nation was about to get wealthier than any other nation in the history of mankind. The failure is pretty much explained by what is not in the book. Despite living in the middle of the biggest explosion of inventive activity ever recorded, and even though his illustration of the advantages of specialization was a factory for making pins, Smith's book hardly mentions the role of the new machines then transforming his world. Next to nothing about waterpower, to say nothing of steam; nothing about the forging of iron, and his few paragraphs about the textile revolution are mostly an argument for restricting the export of spinning machines. His pin factory, it turns out, was only a metaphor; he never set foot inside one. . . .

The efficiencies of specialization are real, and the self-regulating "invisible hand" powerful, but it was the machines, and nothing else, that allowed Britain, and then the world, to finally produce food (or the wealth with which to buy food) faster than it produced mouths to consume it.

(William Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention, Random House, 2010, pp. 250-251, I emphasized.)

Bottom line: While the development of engines was an offshoot of science, it took a formal recognition of patent rights to prod an inventor's desire to move creations beyond the laboratory and to invest enough in research to make these inventions economically viable.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

I should address your questions, though. They're good.

Has competition deteriorated due to the big banks and financial institutions limiting the flow of money?

I don't think, not directly. Sadly, the cost of innovation has increased. Gone are the days when lone inventors could come up with scientific breakthroughs like Franklin and Darwin, and later Westinghouse and Edison. In 1931, for the first time the number of patents awarded to corporations exceeded the number awarded to individuals. The cost of research and development has increased, with a decrease in the impact each discovery has.

In an interview (#31 of The Extraenvironmentalist (http://www.extraenvironmentalist.com/)), Dr. Joseph Tainter mentions the increasing cost of innovation and the diminishing returns on this research better than I could.

Does the deterioration of work ethic have any place in this scheme, and is it a fact at all?

Nope. I don't believe there has been any deterioration. What we are seeing is more likely the dawning realization that the harder people work, the harder they will work. Rewards go to those with their hands in the cookie jar, after all, who will get bailed out by the government if they screw up. Why work harder at work, when you can work harder at home, maybe by putting in a garden, going super couponing or building a new deck from scraps?

I think your questions about consumers is a bit off. We are large because we have access to cheap food of questionable nutritional value. If we spent more, we could be both thinner and poorer. The University of Washington did a revealing study, showing that an individual's chance at being obese closely correlated with that individual's ZIP code. The more affluent the neighborhood, the thinner the resident on average.

Joseph Tainter also had a better way to address questions of "sustainability" which I encourage you to examine. We sustain what we value.