You are changing the debate, before you were speaking of “aggregate productivity”:
and yet now you no longer speak in terms of aggregates.
Obviously, slavery brings prosperity to slave-owners at the expense of slaves; but, in a pre-industrial society, it has brought an increase in net productivity.
You assume that the white planters would not have crushed the slave rebellions had the state not.
C’mon Lam, that post had to make you smile a little. [:D]
We slavery-apologists have no time for humor. [:P]
That’s cute, and all. And Lam is entitled to his opinions. But how did someone whose political posts are fairly consistently statist and whose economic positions assert that slavery is net-beneficial become a mod on the Mises Institute forums? Why would he even want to be one?
I seriously hope that comment is tongue-in-cheek.
Consider it a way to demonstrate that this community is non-favoritist and pro free speech. Being a mod requires you to moderate discussions, not have specific views. Unless they’re spewing racist or other hateful and worthless drivel (as some former mods have in the past), I don’t see the problem with it.
My tongue is firmly behind my teeth. I think they’re fair questions.
My friend, I don’t think they are. I disagree with Lam on many things, but he’s not on the staff because everyone likes him or agrees with him. He’s accepted to take on the task of helping manage these forums. It is a thankless job for the most part, we put in extra time to do it, and we do a lot of stuff no one sees.
It’s not fair to conflate his voluntary service with some perceived deficit in his opinion as it relates to the status quo.
LS, I disagree, but out of my tremendous respect for you, I will completely drop the subject.
"From personal experience in an engineering industry I can tell you most employers’ place criteria for employment in the following order.
High - Medium - Low
Experience – Personalitu - Career Certs - Education"
There is a shorthand for the apprenticeship, mentoring and OJT necessary to acquire engineering skills. It’s called an ‘engineering degree.’ Granted there is a lot of practicum that engineers have to learn on the job, but the degree is a filtering mechanism. It’s got the visible hand of government in it, so it’s inefficient and expensive so the free market would design another filtering mechanism: a basic engineering exam that you study a month for. The ones who score in the upper percentiles go into the company’s training/apprenticeship program.
About 7 years ago I met an elderly, almost-retired aerospace engineer who did it the old fashioned way: started on the shop floor after WW2 and over time worked up to assembly, machining, then to drafting, then to running finite element models, and eventually designing aircraft. He came to the US during the Brain Drain (oops–there I go with that artificial construct ‘intelligence’ again).
Now here’s the thing: there were lots of youngsters running errands and sweeping up the shop floor with him, but he was one of a tiny handful who eventually ended up designing airplanes. Why do you think that is?
Do you seriously believe any schlep off the street can grasp engineering concepts and run equations given enough ‘experience?’
This, funnily enough, reminds me of something I read in The Economist the other day, it was talking about public school in the UK and the efforts of private charity in getting educating the members of society who are doing worst at the moment. The spokesperson of the charity was pretty much saying that if we devote more money to the poor and somehow get the best teachers to educate these individuals we’ll get egalitarian results from the education system.
This question is virtually impossible to answer. Of note however is that untill about the Reformation, Western Europe (other than perhaps Italy) was unremarkable compared to the Greco-Muslim world or China. It was probably less liberal than those areas at the time as well, in general. Some things to note that I think are important: The rise of liberalism, the start of the decline of eastern europe/ middle east, and perhaps most importantly the explotation of the printing press to spread information at a phenomonal rate.
I don’t think imperialism neccesarily gave the west a head start as the Ottomon world already had imperialism in play as well as wonderful access to trade routes through sea. Perhaps the West’s form of imperialism was a superior model to previous forms as it was more built around trade and more liberal (by comparison) than anything else, or maybe because they dealt with a less costly form of imperialism, or they had enemies that were easier to subdue as a whole, or they had more stable homelands to be able to focus more on imperialism. Too many variables to give a good guess I think.
But looking at history as a whole there is no reason to have assumed Western Europe should have dominated ,by all accounts it would have looked like the Med region of Europe, The Mid East, Persia, and China should have been the cultural centers. Western Europe is a very new, and I would say suprising, player to being a cultural leader in the world.
I should actually start writing about my experiences with the different ethnicities I’m doing business with.
As for Blacks (I’m mostly dealing with Southern Bantu) they find it very difficult to plan properly and they have propensity to shift responsibility/blame on something else. The Asians seem to plan better, but it seems that they find it difficult to work outside certain patterns and procedures.
Really encouraging reading these types of story’s.
Couldn’t say
Engineering isn’t for everyone, but neither is political science. My point is, people who desire to persue that profession that carry the right aditude can go all the way to the end(easily without a degree), if even on experience. Wether it’s a schlep off the street or some college genius graduate really makes little difference in the long run. 5 years of experience in a desireable field will trump all. It should be noted however that sweeping the floor wouldn’t be experience towards aerospace engineering.
Many people now days rack up 30 years of dept with a 4 year bachelor of scienc degree, say in software engineering. Only to end up as a cash register at an office depot. It’s not that they are intillectually incapable of persuing that line of work, it’s that their present preferences of attention was outside of the work they were currently persuing.
Many people are content with doing the bottom line, easy 9-5 do as little as possible as their TV show, video game, book waiting for them at home is more important at the time and focusing on expanding their career is less important.
For people who have those kinds of motivation issues I tend to recommend them reading Fountain head than Atlas Shrugged.
Yeah, that’s why I asked! [:P]
But unified-field theory is virtually impossible to figure out too–doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try or research it.
Despite excellent technical skills, these people might lack certain “people skills” to advance in the job. On the other hand they just might not enjoy backstabbing office “politics” and prefer to stay out of it. It seems as if the motto goes. It’s not about what you can contribute (in terms of value generation) it’s about the skills that enable you to extract.
What does that have to do with what I posted? I am always interested to learn more but your reply has no relevance to what I said.
I think it nearly strikes the nail on its head.
While I don’t dispute christianities contributions towards Western Civilization, I think the myth of the “Germanic Barbarian” is also thoroughly debunked by the historical evidence at hand. Barbarian was a label the Romans assigned to all nations that were outside their political sphere of influence. Of course some of them were pretty primitive, while others were more advanced. The statist Romans performed very well on fields of civil engineering, something the ancient Germans (a more libertarian culture) were possibly capable of, but without large scale slavery and a protectionist state the effort and risk of doing something like was to high. On the other hand ancient Germans already performed well on certain fields of mechanical and metallurgical technology. This can be shown by artefacts and even linguistic evidence (wagon, iron, eisen, sword, smith etc. there are many mechanical terms in German that are very old and not borrowed from other languages) as well as from their mythology.
Ironically it was Roman Tacitus through whose writings we know about many features of ancient German culture.
Read “Guns, Germs, and Steel”. Amazing book that will explain everything.
Obviously enough the answer is economic freedom. Industrial revolution for example was a consequence of Classical Liberalism. Greater economic freedom makes you more prosperous, and the newly arisen wealth discrepancy then gives you the resources to do all sort of naughty things like a.) build a colonialist empire b.) imagine yourself biologically superior to the less prosperous (which in turn justifies you having a colonialist empire having taken on the white burden). Wherever aspects of economic liberalism (not to be confused with the 1990s legalized plunder in formerly communist Europe) was introduced economy made great gains in a very short time (the Asian tigers and the like).
The real question is really why it was that Western Europe emerged as the most economically free part of the world? I think one important factor was a coincidence of geography. It is surrounded by sea on three sides thus far less likely to be invaded by some menacing aliens. Less invasions in turn mean less destruction of wealth but more importantly less wars of necessity, thus the state is given less of a lifeline to expand and to maintain itself.
Historically freedoms are not expanded by enlightened rulers as gifts to the populace, but are wrestled from them by discontent subjects. For example it was the weakness of the king of England that resulted in the Magna Carta and the growing restlessness of the serfs that led to abolition of serfdom in the Habsburg Empire just after the failed Liberal revolution of 1848. (A sort of theme on the motto that freedom is when the government is afraid of the people.)
But for the rulers to be weak enough to ever contemplate lessening their power, there has to be behind the discontent and somewhere along the line a credible threat of an armed revolt. The threat of internal revolt tended to be fairly credible in Western Europe because it was secure from external threats (the likes of the Arabs, Mongols, Turks and Tartars). Western Europe fought its share of wars but they tended to be wars of choice, fought to resolve limited dynastic disputes. As such while they brought a great amount of wealth destruction they could not readily be used to ensure the growth of the state at the expense of liberties. The populace was less willing to stand for it since it very rarely saw themselves as having a stake in the war (except in wars of religion). Thus the threat of the populace revolting always remained credible to a certain degree.
In other places more exposed to invasion (not the least by Western Europeans themselves) you had more closing in of the ranks thus the threat of a domestic revolt was more distant for their rulers. For example a Hungarian contemplating a revolt against the Habsburgs always had to take into account the possibility of the Turks taking advantage of the turmoil and him ending up under sharia. In essence it was a situation similar to what you have nowadays in Iran, where no reform can be expected as long as the regime can draws legitimacy from simply standing up to foreign threats.
Ultimately it is anything but a coincidence that the weakest state in all of Europe was traditionally England - an island. As an island it was secure from external threats thus the populace did not have to take into account any foreign powers preying on a moment of weakness thus they were significantly more likely to show discontent openly.