I’ve said before that understanding where our modern standard of living comes from, at a basic level, is a responsibility of every citizen in an industrial civilization. Let’s call it “industrial literacy.”
Industrial literacy is understanding…
- That the food you eat is grown using synthetic fertilizers, and that this is needed for agricultural productivity, because all soil loses its fertility naturally over time if it is not deliberately replenished. That before we had modern agriculture, more than half the workforce had to labor on farms, just to feed the other half. That if synthetic fertilizer was suddenly lost, a mass famine would ensue and billions would starve.
- That those same crops would not be able to feed us if they were not also protected from pests, who will ravage entire fields if given a chance. That whole regions used to see seasons where they would lose large swaths of their produce to swarms of insects, such as boll weevils attacking cotton plants in the American South, or the phylloxera devouring grapes in the vineyards of France. That before synthetic pesticides, farmers were forced to rely on much more toxic substances, such as compounds of arsenic.
- That before we had electricity and clean natural gas, people burned unrefined solid fuels in their homes—wood, coal, even dung (!)—to cook their food and to keep from freezing in winter. That these primitive fuels, dirty with contaminants, created toxic smoke: indoor air pollution. That indoor air pollution remains a problem today for 40% of the world population, who still rely on pre-industrial fuels.
- That before twentieth-century appliances, housework was a full-time job, which invariably fell on women. That each household would spend almost 60 hours a week on manual labor: hauling water from the well for drinking and cooking, and then carrying the dirty water outside again; sewing clothes by hand, since store-bought ones were too expensive for most families; laundering clothes in a basin, scrubbing laboriously by hand, then hanging them up to dry; cooking every meal from scratch. That the washing machine, clothes dryer, dishwasher, vacuum cleaner, and microwave are the equivalent of a full-time mechanical servant for every household.
- That plastics are produced in enormous quantities because, for so many purposes—from food containers to electrical wire coatings to children’s toys—we need a material that is cheap, light, flexible, waterproof, and insulating, and that can easily be made in any shape and color (including transparent!) That before plastic, many of these applications used animal parts, such as ivory tusks, tortoise shells, or whale bone. That in such a world, those products were a luxury for a wealthy elite, instead of a commodity for the masses, and the animals that provided them were hunted to near extinction.
- That automobiles are a lifeline to people who live in rural areas (almost 20% in the US alone), and who were deeply isolated in the era before the car and the telephone. That in a world without automobiles, we relied on millions of horses, which in New York City around 1900 dumped a hundred thousand gallons of urine and millions of pounds of manure on the streets daily.
- That half of everyone you know over the age of five is alive today only because of antibiotics, vaccines, and sanitizing chemicals in our water supply. That before these innovations, infant mortality (in the first year of life) was as high as 20%.
When you know these facts of history—which many schools do not teach—you understand what “industrial civilization” is and why it is the benefactor of everyone who is lucky enough to live in it. You understand that the electric generator, the automobile, the chemical plant, the cargo container ship, and the microprocessor are essential to our health and happiness.
This doesn’t require a deep or specialized knowledge. It only requires knowing the basics, the same way every citizen should know the outlines of history and the essentials of how government works.
Industrial literacy means understanding that the components of the global economy are not arbitrary. Each one is there for a reason—often a matter of life and death. The reasons are the immutable facts of what it takes to survive and prosper: the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, and economics that govern our daily existence.
With industrial literacy, you can see the economy as a set of solutions to problems. Then, and only then, are you informed enough to have an opinion on how those solutions might be improved.
A lack of industrial literacy (among other factors) is turning what ought to be economic discussions about how best to improve human health and prosperity into political debates fueled by misinformation and scare tactics. We see this on climate change, plastic recycling, automation and job loss, even vaccines. Without knowing the basics, industrial civilization is one big Chesterton’s Fence to some people: they propose tearing it down, because they don’t see the use of it.
Let’s recognize the value of industrial literacy and commit to improving it—starting with ourselves.
Hans Rosling:
Idea for a short story in which everyone has to take such a literacy test and is restricted to a lifestyle of only having the luxuries they understand.
Agricultural practice is my Gell-Mann pet peeve. While it's true that fertilizer and pest control are currently central to large swaths of the commercial ag industry, this is not necessarily a case of pure necessity so much as local maxima— for many crops we could reduce dependence on synthetic fertilizers and pesticides by integrating livestock, multi-cropping land, etc. Some of them are also ecologically unsustainable as practiced and may eventually need to be replaced.
That said, this doesn't actually detract from the central point; I would very much like to live in a world where those questions are actually engaged with by the general populace as opposed to being defined by like, Whole Foods marketing copy and the US corn lobby.
This isn't critiquing the claim, though. Yes, there are alternatives that are available, but those alternatives - multi-cropping, integrating livestock, etc. are more labor intensive, and will produce less over the short term. And I'm very skeptical that the maximum is only local - have you found evidence that you can use land more efficiently, while keeping labor minimal, and produce more? Because if you did, there's a multi-billion dollar market for doing that. Does that make the alternatives useless, or bad ideas? Not at all, and I agree that changes are likely necessary for long-term stability - unless other technological advances obviate the need for them. But we can't pretend that staying at the maximum isn't effectively necessary.
That's fair, and I'm grumbling less as an ag scientist or policy person than as a layperson born and raised in the ag industry. It is my opinion that the commercial ag industry in my country both contains inadequacies and is a system of no free energy, to borrow from Inadequate Equilibria.
To elaborate, I observe the following facts:
- Conventional agriculture using fertilizer and pesticide creates negative externalities, notably by polluting runoff and consuming non-renewable resources (fertilizer is made from potash, a reasonably abundant but not infinite mineral which also creates a carbon footprint to mine).
- Organic agriculture sacrifices considerable output as practiced, and is not actually optimized for minimal environmental impact but rather to maximize appeal to the organic food market, and as such also contains negative externalities which are not currently captured.
- Almost no commercial agriculture in my area, organic or otherwise, incorporates livestock into land rotation cycles. Although I don't have sources at hand, I am under the impression that evidence suggests that grazing animals provide not just replenishment of macronutrients, but also help to maintain a robust and fe
... (read more)A person I shared this article with made the following comments (edited for brevity):
I'm sorry, but some of the themes in your list are not at all like the others;
For the points related to modern medicine, it's true that people should be a lot more informed about its benefits, and the current attitude of mistrust many have toward it is certainly doing a lot of damage.
I could also agree on the agricolture, since people are being systematically misinformed into thinking that some practices, that actually consume more resources, are better for their health and beneficial to the planet.
But for the other subjects, some people, which seem to be pretty few, wanting to tear down civilisation is nowhere near as much of a problem as a lot of people not knowing or caring enough about the harmful side effects of the industrial system.
No nation is even near the point of starting to discuss proposals like banning plastic for every possible usage, forbidding household appliances or outlawing cars for everyone, and people aren't really adopting these politics for themselves, save for the occasional environmentalist.
What instead it's happening is that people living in the first world are consuming a ridiculous pro-capita amount of resources, producing a terrifying amoun... (read more)
That's not really true. Most of the public who's interested in the topic ignores the involved in the claims that the IPCC makes.
The enviromentalist factions also worked to increase carbon emissions by shutting down nuclear power plants that are currently the only technology that can provide 24/7-all-year electricity for an economical price (relying completely on solar and wind means outages).
Ehn. Nobody really understands anything, we're just doing the best we can with various models of different complexity. Adam Smith's pin factory description in the 18th century has only gotten more representative of the actual complexity in the world and the impossibility of fully understanding all the tradeoffs involved in anything. Note also that anytime you frame something as "responsibility of every citizen", you're well into the political realm.
You can see the economy as a set of solutions to some problems, but you also need to see it as exacerbation of other problems. Chesterton's Fence is a good heuristic for tearing down fences, where it's probably OK to let it stand for awhile while you think about it. It's a crappy way to decide whether you should get off the tracks before you understand the motivation of the railroad company.
I suspect that if people really understood the cost to future people of the contortions we go through to support this many simultaneous humans in this level of luxury, we'd have to admit that we don't actually care about them very much. I sympathize with those who are saying "go back to the good old days" in terms of cutting the population back to a sustainable level (1850 was about 1.2B, and it's not clear even that was sparse/spartan enough to last more than a few millennia).
My master thesis treated the impacts of climate change, here are the sources I used for these claims:
Desertification: https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/76618/2/SRCCL-Full-Report-Compiled-191128.pdf If you'd rather know precisely where to look for my claims, since it's a 874 pages long report, I'd suggest the Summary for Policy Maker part, from page 5 to 9, Chapter 1.2.1, from page 88 to page 91, and chapter 5 executive summary, pages 439-440.
The report also states that the way land and water are used for agriculture is part of the problem, it interacts with climate change making both issues worse.
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/3/2019/11/03_SROCC_SPM_FINAL.pdf For this I suggest reading the Summary for Policy Makers B, from page 17 to 28. B7 is the most relevant point for desertification, B8 for fish losing most of it's biomass and putting at risk food security.
These two:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/4/2/024007/pdf
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337888219_Impacts_of_ocean_deoxygenation_on_fisheries_In_%27Laffoley_D_Baxter_JM_eds_2019_Ocean_deoxygenation_Everyone%27s_problem_-_Causes_impacts_conseque... (read more)
Viticulturists beat phylloxera by grafting grapes to naturally resistant rootstock taken from American vine species that co-evolved with phylloxera. The phylloxera epidemic actually serves as an example of a case where pesticides are not effective, and the effective solution, now implemented in vineyards all over the world, is both inspired by ecological dynamics and more environmentally sustainable than pesticide use.
A general counterargument would be that besides the need for X, there's a need for X containment.
So that can be our second lecture!
Promoted to curated: I think this post is creating a pointer to a good concept, and makes a good case for it's importance.
I do think it can work, but if it works it looks more like economics, or something like that. Like, we can definitely identify some broad sociological phenomena that allow us to reliably make good predictions, but it's definitely not easy, and there are lots of traps along the way that are full of arguments that are rhetorically compelling, but not actually very useful for figuring out the truth, much more so than in other domains of inquiry.
This claim doesn't make sense. If it were true, plants would not have survived to the present day.
Steelmanning (which I would say OP doesn't do a good job of...), I'll interpret this as: "we are technologically reliant on synthetic fertilizers to grow enough food to feed the current population". But in any case, there are harmful environm... (read more)
If infant mortality was higher that'd be terrible, but I assume people would have more kids to compensate. Automobiles other than trucks don't help much; they enable rural settlements, but not many live there and they are disproportionally expensive. I bet they'd be a lot less populated w/o all the subsidy. Cars also may not last long with a carbon tax. And cars actively harm cities substantially.
Professionals in these fields don't know some of these either. And why should everyone else? I'd go the other way: Untangle policy from the masses.
Interesting, I appreciate you taking the time to formulate a coherent and respectful response, and I'll do my best to do the same.
- Rural Economy
- Farmers raise corn and soybeans. Beans mainly go to feed livestock. Corn is split between livestock and making ethanol. Ethanol is sold to fuel cars. So, our main exports are soybeans, meat, and ethanol.
- A lot of people have jobs supporting the local population or for local companies. The rest either drive 45 minutes to the nearest city or work at the door factory that's in a nearby town.
- We all call it the city, but I guess it's not that big by your standards. Sioux City has 82,000 people. It feels huge to us.
- Cars
- People in small towns are generally more poor than people in cities (I think, I have no experience with cities), and what people drive is generally what they can afford. I think you'd have a tough time convincing all of the mothers that their minivans can all be replaced with motorcycles and sleek electric vehicles. (also, you need significant clearance for gravel roads)
- As for replacing semi trucks with trains, I'm sorry, but that could never work. I'll explain why, don't worry. Here's how corn and beans are moved, at least at my par
... (read more)That's really not clear to you?
Don't you think it matters to the parents? And, for that matter, to the older siblings? To the child's friends—if they live long enough to make friends?
Do you actually think an infant or young child is just… replaceable?
Losing a child is one of the worst things that can happen to a person, in terms of long-term well-being. See, for example, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352827319302204, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2910450/, and https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-015-9624-x
Yes, in the modern world, where babies are seen as precious, that is true. It clearly wasn't as big a deal when infant mortality was very high.
I’d love to see a graph of the LD50 of the most commonly used pesticides by year over time.
HAZARD WARNING: Horribly rough napkin math follows. Handle with care. Dispose of properly in an approved napkin-math disposal facility.
... (read more)Interesting. I like this post. You've certainly got the right audience for a good reception. Everyone likes to think about how much more they know than anyone else, myself included. It's tough to think about what will actually make the world a better place.
If you took a person and taught them all about modern medicine, agriculture, technology, and everything else except how it's put together, how would they think the world works? What would be different in that person's mind from the way the world is now?
In other words, what do you notice that you're confused by in the world today?
I think that's where we'll find the lies.
To many of the commentators here, I suggest a quick read: "Numbers Don't Lie" by Vaclav Smil (in addition to all of hisn other more extensive books on the specific topic of energy).
The fridge / the freezer!
A good piece, there are few journo that could write such content. The UK has always had a problem with industry, preferring the arts most times. You could see that with the climate change act 2008, which annihilated heavy industry, exported companies, good jobs and it's CO2 elsewhere. The industrial revolution has had a bad press in the uk but it was the period that eventually liberated people, generated wealth and allowed the growth of the welfare state.
Unfortunately, that's something our modern day luddites don't really understand... Especially the housework part, as it's often people living in comfortable, furnished housing who think this.
Sure, there IS an issue with plastic pollution and the massive reliance of humanity on cars, but abolishing their use to be "like in the good old days" would be catastrophic; instead, we should focus on finding industrial, modern solutions to these problems, like expanding recycling programs and infrastructure, and developing public transportation networks in cities and between villages and towns in the countryside.
If anyone feels like humoring me, I would actually take a bit of a response as to how washing machines are better than a basket in a river, other than river-rationing-issues (aqueducts? Pipes??)
By coincidence, my hot water heat recently broke. I expected the cold showers to be the worst part, but it was actually the difficulty cleaning dishes: grease, oil, and fat just wouldn't come off the dishes (or the scrubby doodle, for that matter), despite ample application of soap. Since most of my meals involve those things, I eventually resorted to cleaning what could be cleaned with running cold tap water & soap, and setting an electric kettle to boil to do a second pass to try to melt off the remnants.
It did take longer.
That list seems right. I've had discussions with people that the last few decades have been better than any other time and they disagree. And yet, when I asked them whether they would live in the past or now, they said "now". Go figure. I definitely want people to understand their world a bit better. As you say, educating people would reduce the chance of mobs overthrowing good systems. The other thing to notice is that good systems tend to reduce government influence, and thus the influence of uninformed voters. There's large parts of society where it's n... (read more)
While this was an informative post, I do not think that most people are totally unaware of the main thrust of the argument here. Most people understand we need electricity to live. I think the issue here is that there is not a recognition of the limitations and cons of industrial society. And they are many. While undoubtedly industrial civilization has produced great material benefit, it is debatable whether human beings are actually happier today than they were a century or a millennium ago.
Let's take one point, for example. Industrial civilization ... (read more)