The Industrial Revolution still cannot be considered an unqualified success, for all the comfort and convenience enjoyed by a minority of people in t… - James Howard Kunstler
" "The Industrial Revolution still cannot be considered an unqualified success, for all the comfort and convenience enjoyed by a minority of people in the world. Where we stand now is the brink of unprecedented damage to the ecology of the only habitable planet in the only universe we know of, and I refer not just to climate change—which may or may not be caused by human activity —but to all the other insults and injuries we’ve done to the biosphere. While industrialism led to the formation of a prosperous middle class, it also plunged millions of people into the grimmest kind of regimented quasi-slavery in conditions that were arguably no improvement over their grandparents’ lives as agricultural peasants (or their distant ancestors as hunter-gatherers).
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About James Howard Kunstler
James Howard Kunstler (born October 19, 1948, New York City, New York) is an American author, social critic, public speaker, and blogger.
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The idea of comparative advantage works when there is a complex local economy intact in the background of each trading partner’s specialized item of production, with a variety of social roles and occupational niches to support the long-term project of [the] community. But a locality geared to doing only one thing for export is… a slave system based on the extractive economics of mining. […] One group had all the cheap labor, and another group had all the capital, and for a while, one group made all the things that the other group “consumed.” Thus, comparative advantage became, for a time, a con game strictly for the benefit of large corporations, which ended up enjoying all the advantages while the localities sucked up the costs.
One final thing worth noting on the subject of rail: From 1890 to about 1920, American localities managed to construct hundreds of local and interurban streetcar lines that added up to a magnificent national system (independent of the national heavy rail system). Except for two twenty-mile gaps in New York state, one could ride the trolley lines from New England clear out to Wisconsin. The story of the conspiracy by General Motors and other companies to destroy the U.S. interurban system is well documented. The salient point, however, is how rapidly the system was created in the first place, and how marvelously well it served the public in the period before the automobile became established.
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It was obvious there would be no return to [what we used to call] "normality." The [resource-intensive] economy wouldn't be coming back. Globalism was over. The politicians and generals were failing to pull things together at the center. We would not be returning to Boston. The computer industry, in which so many hopes had been vested, was fading into history.
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