Universe wants us to be poor
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:date: 2024-08-06T07:30:00
:category: research
:tags: politics, institution, economics, poverty

While listening to `the new episode of EconTalk`_ on the normalcy
of poverty and how MAGA is just a pure opium of the masses
[#]_ I was enjoying a reminder of the Common Sense reality
and gave me some strength to oppose prevalent fantasies of
the current media. One thing you haven’t mentioned, which
I see as very relevant for the establishing of industrial
modernity, is the institutional framework required for it. The
agricultural lifestyle was horrible in many aspects, but one
thing which it brought to the table (and why it survived and
survives so well) was to some extent independence on others (to
some extent, I know). When you make your own food, clothes,
etc., you can sustain your existence without relying much on
others. However, the moment, you suggest, that some citizen
of the city should give up all their existence and just clean
the shit from streets for living, you have to offer them some
reliability of income. Will be there this job around in the next
year, next ten years? Am I not giving up my only source of income
for fantasy, which will go away with the next administration
coming to power? Will this job survive the next plague or a
wave of famine? Unless there is some institutional certainty,
it is very difficult to start on some division of labour to the
extent you can get some industrial modernity. Yes, I know this
is to a large extent what New Institutional Economists, Douglas
North (and Hernando de Soto) were saying, but it needs to be
emphasized.

Yes, there were technological reasons (you cannot make a steam
engine until you can make airtight machines, which requires
exact machining unavailable until the eighteenth century, etc.),
but I think there were mostly problems of lack of institutional
framework, which could guarantee a peace required for the
division of labour.

.. [#] And here apparently I agree with J. D. Vance, who
    apparently_ called Trump “cultural heroin” and “an opioid of the
    masses.”

.. _`the new episode of EconTalk`:
    https://www.econtalk.org/the-ever-present-challenge-of-escaping-poverty-with-noah-smith/
.. _apparently:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_of_the_people#Modern_comparisons