We must challenge the idea that action for the public good needs to be ‘balanced’ against the economy.…

We must challenge the idea that action for the public good needs to be ‘balanced’ against the economy. History will tell you that’s a total misunderstanding. Too many years of dreary sociological and political theory has miscast that revolution as one of greed. /1 https://t.co/cK4oDSKXiI

For sure terrible things happened too in those ‘dark satanic mills’. Kids labouring. Terrible or absent WHS. Massive profits for a handful while many still lived in poverty. Etc. But there’s a much deeper story here that gets forgotten. /2 https://t.co/VDapzFS7fl

The reason this revolution happened at all was centuries of barely subsistence living, by pretty much everybody. While some today sentimentalise subsistence living, the amount of drudgery, death, injustice, starvation, child mortality etc. was not fun. /3 https://t.co/xr92YniBoe

We’ve had material abundance for most of our lives, and I think struggle to really understand what living without that is like. We can again sentimentalise it, from within that abundance, by living ‘off the grid’. But we know the grid is there. It’s fake. /4

To suddenly have things in abundance that previously you either didn’t have at all, or you had to work every hour of the day to have even small amounts of, must have been a type of liberation that again we can’t even imagine. /5

To have mass-produced beautiful textiles and yarns, that didn’t require you to find time to do your own spinning and weaving. Electric lighting, sewers, roads. We’ve lost touch with how extraordinary these things would have been. How much easier they made peoples’ lives. /6

Suddenly there were ‘department stores’, much larger retail outlets to cater for the explosion in consumer goods. We can’t even imagine the wonder that would have been, for people who had suffered centuries of privation. And yes, there were also still many in poverty. /7 https://t.co/IgNEVR4rbL

As Hans Rosling laboured to point out, this revolution had profound impacts on trends in poverty too. After centuries of feudal serfdom where the poor barely budged, suddenly massive shifts occurred in relative prosperity. And yes, the rich still got richer. /8 https://t.co/Uxxcd8mBI6

But there’s no way you could say the poor today are living lives that peasants and serfs lived. The rising tide really did lift all boats, profoundly. This is part of what I tweet about, the engineering basis of civilisation. Left to themselves, humans will just squabble. /9

They’ll play the social status games of the schoolyard, their entire lives. But inject engineering into society, along with natural disasters, wars and plagues, and that social gameplay does shift. Very often the engineering is the *response* to disaster. /10 https://t.co/kVcr3KDcop

So the point of this thread is this. The famous Industrial Revolution emerged as a response to real social needs, spanning centuries. Driven by men who wanted to be rich. But they got rich by addressing those needs. The idea of ‘balancing’ their work against the public good? /11

It would have seemed absolute nonsense to them. Their work was targeted AT the public good. That’s the only reason they were doing it, and why they got rich. People flocked to consume the output, freer at last from centuries of drudgery and death. So fast forward to today. /12

Many existential emergencies face humans, again. Climate change and Covid, just two of the most prominent. This is exactly the situation that was facing the Victorian engineers. That’s what drove the Industrial Revolution. Public suffering and need. /13

That created an explosion in ‘the economy’ that was unprecedented in history. It created what we call the economy, itself. The response to basic human needs caused that. Right now, we’re at another of those historical inflection points. /14 https://t.co/sHWTVcSf4l

We need another industrial revolution, to address our current social problems. It will drive ‘economic growth’ off the scale, this is the nonsense of talking about ‘balance’. It’s not two things here. It’s one thing. Human wellbeing IS what makes economies thrive. /15

We’re so obsessed with human-human interactions, with the social games of the schoolyard, dressed up as elections and ‘politics’ for adults, that we miss the tectonic plates underlying our societies. The engineering, to address human need. /16

Schoolyard culture will constantly appropriate this material wellbeing for select groups. But material wellbeing isn’t the problem, not ‘capitalism’ (which doesn’t even exist). The problem is the culture that beat up the nerds at school who went on to become the engineers. /17 https://t.co/E6A2X2skS8

Social media is the worst technology for this point in history, it entrenches schoolyard culture at every stage of life. All of our problems have known, objectively-solvable solutions. We can’t even get to the starting line through the fog of popularity schoolyard politics. /18

The ‘economy’ would boom if we got that tedious daily squabbling and jostling for status out of the way. The boring business-suited blokes in politics droning on and on about the economy don’t understand a thing about it. They’re parasites on the last industrial revolution. /19

They hoarded the wealth that revolution produced, and now don’t want it taken away by the next revolution. They’re dragons sitting on their gold. For the sake of the economy, we need to fight climate change and Covid, now. Brutally. /end