This post is the next in a series that dates back several years. In fact, it has been going on so long that, as of this year, it would be more accurate to call it "60 Years of Science". But I am going to stick with the old title for the sake of continuity. And, as the title indicates, this is the fourteenth post in the series. You can go to http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2017/04/50-years-of-science-links.html for a post that contains links to all the entries in the series. I will update that post to include a link to this entry as soon as I have posted it.
I take Isaac Asimov's book "The Intelligent Man's Guide to the Physical Sciences" as my baseline for the state of science when he wrote the book (1959 - 60). In these posts I am reviewing what he reported and noting what's changed since. For this post I am starting with the section he titled "New Particles". I will then move on to the section he titled "Particle Accelerators". Both are from the chapter he titled "The Particles".
A lot has changed in the intervening period. At the time Asimov was writing the situation could best be described as confusing. This is more clearly reflected in what Asimov wrote in later sections. But you can see hints in the sections I will be reviewing.
Asimov wraps up the previous section by talking about Alpha Particles. We now know that these are just Helium nucleuses. They are big, heavy, and charged. That makes them easy to detect. It took a while to figure out that there was literally no difference between an Alpha particle and a Helium nucleus. That is well known now but they are still referred to by nuclear Physicists as Alpha particles out of habit. "Alpha particle" is also easier to say than "Helium nucleus".
The fact that Alpha particles are just Helium nucleuses was one of the early lines of evidence that convinced Nuclear Physicists that what was going on in certain situations was Nuclear Fission. The nucleus of the atom was literally being broken into pieces. Why this would so often result in two Protons being ejected as a single unit (and, as was later learned, one or two Neutrons too) was a mystery at the time. And an understanding of Nuclear fission led directly to the development of the Atomic Bomb. But that's getting ahead of where Asimov was in the story.
In 1930 the Neutron was detected. This was hard to do because it had no electrical charge. As a result it didn't show up in a Wilson Cloud Chamber. See Part 13 for details but suffice it to say that the Chamber was the main tool for studying the atom's nucleus and what was to be found there. An indirect chain of logic had to be used where it was noted that the mass of the target atom changed and that the new particle was heavy enough to knock things around.
The discovery of the Neutron solved a number of problems. An atom consisting of the right number of Protons and Neutrons weighed roughly the right amount (the mass of the Neutron was only slightly different than that of the Proton) to get the "Mass Number" of the various elements to come out right. Things got better with the development of the concept of the Isotope.
What if there were different flavors of the same element. They would all have the same number of Protons. But what if all atoms of element "X" had the same number of Protons but some had a certain number of Neutrons and other atoms had a different number. If the standard composition of, say Oxygen, consisted of a certain percentage of Oxygen-16 (8 Protons, 8 Neutrons), a certain percentage Oxygen-17 (8 Protons, 9 Neutrons), and a certain percentage of Oxygen-18 (8 Protons, 10 Neutrons)? Then counting up the right number of Proton Masses plus the right average number of Neutron masses got almost exactly the right number for the measured atomic mass of Oxygen.
Oxygen wasn't much of a problem because almost all Oxygen is Oxygen-16. So the Atomic mass comes out close to 16. But the same is not true for other elements. Their atomic mass differs significantly from what it should be. But the right mix of various Isotopes brought their masses very close to the right number too. (Getting the atomic mass to come out exactly correct requires the application of complex nuclear theories like Quantum Mechanics that account for the differences between the masses of the components and the mass of the composite particle.)
But the discovery of the Neutron and the develoment of the idea of Isotopes moved things forward a great distance. This resulted in a simple model where all atoms consist of s certain number of Neutrons, Protons, and Electrons. This model is to nuclear physics what Newtonian Mechanics is to astrophysics. It's all you need in a very large number of circumstances.
This model worked so well that Asimov opined that "[t]he Proton-Neutron model of the nucleus is not likely to be seriously upset in the future." He was completely wrong about that. But, in his defense, this simple model, with a modification he explains next, works really well if you don't need to look very closely at what is going on.
And this is an attribute shared by Newtonian Mechanics. If you don't need to look closely, Newtonian Mechanics works fine. But as science and technology advanced it became possible to make more and more accurate measurements. This led to more and more problems popping up. Eventually, this led to Newtonian Mechanics being replaced with Relativistic Mechanics. The same thing happened with the Neutron-Proton-Electron model. As measurements got more accurate and experiments probed more deeply more problems emerged. This simple model was eventually replaced with what is now called the "Standard Model".
But that's for later. In the mean time, with the exception of a small modification, the Neutron-Proton-Electron worked pretty well. The modification involved the Electron. Nucleuses sometime emit an Electron. How was this possible? We'll get to that in a minute.
Asimov correctly opines that "[t]o scientists, every retreat from simplicity is regrettable". The Neutron required them to retreat from a two particle model to a three particle model. Scientists were quickly forced to retreat to a four, five, six, and on and on, particle model. The first of what turned out to be a cascade of new particles to be discovered was the Positron, also known as the anti-Electron. It is identical to an Electron in every way except it has a positive electric charge instead of a negative one. At about the same time the anti-Proton was discovered. Again, the only difference was that it had a negative electric charge instead of the Proton's positive one.
Okay, so there are particles and anti-particles. That is only a little more complicated. (In this formulation the Neutron is its own anti-particle.) And when a particle and its anti-particle meet they annihilate each other and produce a large amoung of energy. How much? The amount Einstein predicted with his famous "E equals M C squared" equation. The "nuclear Electron" problem could also be handled by assuming a Neutron could be turned into a Proton by emitting an Electron. But it also turns out that a Neutron can absorb a Positron and become a Proton. You're confused, right? So were nuclear physicists.
But this simple add/subtract an electron/positron reaction was not the only possible transformaton. Experiments with Alpha particles quickly turned up lots more. Remember an Alpha particle consists of two Protons and two Neutrons. Adding an Alpha particle to a nucleus (or subtracting one) quickly resulted in various other reactions like the emission of a Proton. But there were rules.
The number of Protons always stayed the same. If you add up all the Protons you started with you ended up with the same number at the end too. The same was true when it came to Neutrons. As more and more complex reactions were studied the field of "nuclear chemistry" came into existence. In the same way that regular chemists study reactions involving various combinations of elements, nuclear chemists study reactions involving various combinations of subatomic particles.
But it quickly became obvious that the number of Protons/Neutrons did not always stay the same. Initially the idea was that atoms were the most fundamental particle. Then it was subatomic particles like Electrons and Neutrons and Protons. But there were various ways to change a Proton into a Neutron and vice versa. So subatomic particles were not fundamental. At least some of them weren't. This led to speculation that there were sub-sub-atomic particles. This went nowhere until after Asimov's book was published.
Eventually Quarks were discovered. They were the sub-sub-atomic particles that eventually explained how the Neutron-to-Proton transformation was possible. It also explained a lot more that we will be getting to but not in this post. And as far as I know Quarks are fundamental. There are no sub-sub-sub-atomic particles. It is possible to create and destroy Quarks. But I don't think you can change one kind of Quark into another. That's my understanding. But I am not 100% certain of it. Back to Asimov.
One side effect of this exploration of nuclear chemistry was the discovery of Phosphoros-30. This isotope does not exist in nature because it is radioactive and has a short half-life. All the naturally occurring Phosphorus-30 has long since decayed into something else. Phosphorus-30 was the first "artificial" Isotope to be discovered. All known Phosphorus-30 is man-made. But it was by no means the last man-made Isotope to be created.
Now various Isotopes are known for all the elements. Some are stable. Some are radioactive. Among the radioactive Isotopes some have a long half-life and some have a short one. A typical element will have some stable Isotopes and some radioactive ones. But some elements have only radioactive Isotopes. And if all the Isotopes are radioactive and all the half-lives are short then little or none of this element is to be found in nature. All of the elements whose atomic numbers are above 92, the atomic number of Uranium, fall into this latter category. That's why for a long time they were not thought to exist in nature.
We now move on to the "Particle Accelerators" section. You can bend the path of a charged particle by subjecting it to an electrical or magnetic field. Or you can just "accelerate" it, make it go faster in a straight line. Cockroft and Watson were the first to build a "voltage multiplier" device for use in studying particles. With such a device they could "smash" a high speed particle into a target. This is where the nickname "atom smashers" comes from. In modern parlance they are called "colliders" because they cause particles, one or both of which have been accelerated, to collide with each other and hopefully cause an "interaction".
The first device they made was capable of accelerating Protons to 400 K-ev (Kilo - thousand, ev - Electron Volt, a unit nuclear Physicists find convenient that I am not going to further explain). More powerful machines were soon rated in M-ev (Mega - million) and later G-ev (Giga - billion). Currently, the largest machines are rated in T-ev (Tera - trillion). The next step, should we reach it, will be P-ev (Peta - quadrillion).
The original devices accelerated particles in a straight line. These devices are called "Linear Accelerators". One of the largest ever built is SLAC, the Stanford Linear Accelerator. But at a certain point it becomes hard to extend the straight line. SLAC is two miles long. A much longer device would run into problems due to the curvature of the earth. SLAC was built shortly after Asimov's book was finished.
The alternative is to accelerate particles around a circular "race track". A boost can then be applied to the particle on each lap, or "cycle", around the track. And this resulted in the name "cyclotron". Lawrence built the first of these devices in the '30s. It was about a foot in diameter. Larger and more powerful devices quickly followed. By '39 a cyclotron that was five feet in diameter was capable of 20 M-ev of acceleration. Larger and more powerful devices continued to be built ever since. The LHC (Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Europe), the largest cyclotron ever built, is rated at about 10 T-ev. It is also a little over 5 miles in diameter.
Why is the diameter so large? Many cyclotrons use a "synchrotron" design. Pulses of energy are synchronized to the path of the circling particles as they loop around. But there is a cost associated with bending the path of the particles so that they say in a circle. Magnetic and electric fields must not only accelerate the particle. They must also bend its path. But the vary process of bending causes the particles to emit "synchrotron radiation". Not only is this radiation dangerous but it represents wasted energy, energy that must be injected into the device but does not go to accelerating the particle.
The sharper the bend the more energy is lost to synchrotron radiation and the less efficient the device becomes. But the larger the diameter the less sharp the bend must be. As the overall energy goes up it usually makes sense to also increase the diameter. The LHC is so large that part of it is in France and part of it is in Switzerland.
Making a cyclotron with a dimeter ten times as large as the diameter of the LHC is possible from an engineering standpoint. But it becomes fantastically expensive. And finding a piece of land that big is also very hard. Nothing anywhere near the scale of the LHC had been built by the time Asimov finished his book. The largest cyclotron at that point was rated at about 800 M-ev.
Asimov spends some time on the various designs and specifications of various machines of the time. I will not. I will just note that the design needs to be quite different for this interaction scenario as opposed to that one. The LHC is designed and built to smash two beams of Protons into each other. That is pretty much all it is capable of doing. A quite different design would be necessary to handle a different scenario.
And, except in very rare cases, a machine designed and built to handle a specific scenario can't be modified to handle a different one. You need to instead start from scratch and design a new machine from the ground up. And top of the line machines like the LHC cost tens of billions of dollars (and many years) to design, build, and operate. They are often tweaked (at great cost in time and money) to improve their performance but the basic design stays the same.
One alternative design would be to smash Protons into anti-Protons. CERN managed to pull this feat of for a much smaller collider called the "Super Proton-Antiproton Synchrotron", which operated from 1981 to 1991. This required that they produce anti-Protons by the billion on demand. Asimov discusses the first successful effort to create anti-Protons. 60 were created over a period of days in 1955. All of the anti-Protons created then were annihilated almost immediately.
For the SPS CERN perfected techniques not only for creating billions of anti-Protons on demand. But they have also perfected techniques for keeping them intact long enough to put them to work. Essentially what CERN did is to make sure the anti-Protons didn't come into contact with anything made out of Protons. Except, that is, until the anti-Protons were in the right spot to interact with Protons just where and when the results could be carefully observed and measured. I don't know why CERN went with a Proton-Proton design rather than a Proton-Antiproton design for the LHC. But they did.
Asimov then moves on to discuss "spin". This seems like an easy concept to understand. A child's top has certain attributes because it spins. In a similar manner, an electron, a particle with an electrical charge, can exhibit a similar behavior as it circles around the nucleus of an atom, right? That all seem sensible. But, like many subatomic phenomena, what actually happens is not that simple and not at all sensible. There are rules for the "spin" that nuclear Physicists talk about. But they are Quantum Mechanical rules and not sensible "child's top" rules.
Asimov gets the ball rolling by noting that the Neutron has a spin. But it seems like there is nothing to rotate so how can this be? Physicists of the time had no clue. We now know it is related to the Quarks that make up the Neutron but the Quarks don't rotate around anything so that just moves the confusion around. And it gets worse.
One would think that spin is oriented in a particular direction. There has to be something like an "axis of rotation", right? The axis of rotation and the spin direction should be tied tightly together. In actuality we have "spin up" or "spin down" (and also something akin to "spin left" or "spin right") but there is no single axis of rotation. A Neutron's "spin" does not act at all like a top's spin. There is more weirdness about how spin works at the subatomic level that I am just going to skip over.
Subatomic "spin" does follow a set of rules called the Standard Model but the rules make no sense to normal people. It's more of that Quantum Mechanics stuff. Some of the rules associated with subatomic "spin" were understood at the time but much of it was not. Asimov wisely leaves all this alone. He instead moves on to the Matter/anti-Matter paradox.
The rules of the game, as understood at that time, predicted that equal amounts of Mater and anti-Matter should have come into existence when the universe was created. But if that had happened then everything would have smashed together and blown up. But it didn't. The universe is composed of Matter with perhaps an extremely tiny amount of anti-Matter mixed in. Why? At the time of Asimov's book no one had a clue.
Since then something called "Charge Parity violation" has been discovered. When you smash stuff together the remnants should come flying out pretty much at random in terms of direction. "There is no preferred direction" is how physicists put it. And that is true almost all of the time. Things like the momentum of each particle going into the interaction must be accounted for. But after that has been done whatever is left over should cause things to fly out in random directions.
And in most cases that's what happens. But in a few specific and uncommon situations a little extra will fly out, say to the left. There is nothing in the physics of Asimov's time to explain this. We now know under what circumstances and to what extent this particular "law" gets violated. But that's all I know about the situation. This too is an area being actively investigated.
So is this violation what's going on that causes the universe to consist almost entirely of Matter? No! Or, at least, this is not the whole story. This weird asymmetric situation is not common enough to cause the universe to end up consisting almost entirely of Matter with little or no anti-Matter stirred in. There is more going on. What? No one knows.
In Asimov's time it was possible to imagine that there might be large amounts of anti-Matter in various out of the way places in the universe. One reason was the discovery of super-high-energy cosmic rays. As Asimov notes, theorists thought they might be created by Matter/anti-Matter collisions in some far distant part of the universe.
We now know that's wrong. The details of how we can rule out a Matter/anti-Matter origin are complex so I am going to omit them. And we now know more about possible mechanisms for how they actually are created. But this too is an area of active study and there are currently lots more questions than answers. In short, with apologies to Coleridge, "it's Mater, Mater, everywhere, nor any anti-Matter to drink" (or do anything else with).
And that's a good place to stop.
Saturday, June 29, 2019
Sunday, June 16, 2019
Plantation Economics
I know. I said I was done with the whole subject of Economics. But it keeps injecting itself into my consciousness. The most recent instance of this was a column in the local paper. (See https://www.seattletimes.com/business/economy/spokane-makes-a-play-for-superstar-city-jobs-that-will-be-a-heavy-lift/). I'm not going to rehash the column, although it was well done. I'm going to instead focus on my reaction to one observation found in it.
The columnist mentioned in passing that the city he was discussing was located in a county that is "very Red". And by "Red" he of course meant Republican. And the main thrust of his column was that he didn't hold out much hope that the city he was writing about would experience rapid and sustained economic growth.
There is a profound economic split on view pretty much everywhere in the country. Urban areas are, generally speaking, doing well. Rural areas are, generally speaking, doing poorly. This is very apparent in my state, Washington. The urban "Puget Sound" area (Seattle and its environs) is doing very well. The rural eastern part of the state is not. And it will not surprise you to know that the Puget Sound area is "Blue" (Democratic) while the eastern part of the state is "Red" (Republican).
If it were just Washington State, that would be one thing. But it's not. Urban parts of the country are Blue for the most part and rural parts are Red. Urban parts are doing well. Rural parts are not. The obvious question to ask is "is there something about Blue economic thinking that leads to success and Red economic thinking that leads to failure?" I think the answer is Yes! And that's the subject of this column.
My label for Red economic thinking is "Plantation Economics". Many other names would work. But economic thinking in the modern Republican party is dominated by "southern" thinking. And by "southern" I specifically mean the thinking that was dominant in the antebellum South.
"Antebellum" is a portmanteau word composed of the Latin prefix "ante" meaning, in this case, "before" and Latin word "bellum" meaning, in this case, "war". So it means "pre-war" and refers specifically to the American South in the period before the start of the Civil War. So let's take a look at the economics of that region during that period.
The South in that period was dominated in every way, politically, culturally, and economically, by plantations and their owners. It was a predominantly rural area. There were cities like Charleston and New Orleans but they were seen as existing in service of the plantation system. Most plantations grew cotton or tobacco. Charleston and New Orleans existed to facilitate the world wide trade in these commodities. In other parts of the country cities politically dominated the countryside. But this was not true in the South. So let's look at the social structure of that time and place.
Plantations were owned by families in a very patriarchal and hierarchical structure. Members of the family lived in a big house that was a showpiece. Houses of the time were low tech as there was no electricity, indoor plumbing, etc. So there were outhouses in back and a detached kitchen. A detached kitchen was a good idea because the southern climate is warm and the heat of cooking would have made the rest of the house uncomfortably warm. By moving the kitchen to an outbuilding all that heat was kept away from the house.
The house itself consisted primarily of public rooms designed to show off the wealth, taste, and power, of the owner. There were also bedrooms, dressing rooms, storage rooms, etc., that were more utilitarian and less showy. And, of course, plantation houses featured a very showy front. It is never to soon to start the process of impressing people.
Plantations and their owners dominated the culture and economy of the region. The immediate family of the patriarch was catered to by a household staff. The plantation itself was often actually run by one or more "overseers" who supervised a large number of field workers. The household staff was commonly supervised by the wife of the patriarch of the family but this was hardly a full time job.
Beyond this there were small communities that provided services like banking, mercantile, and legal services. The clergy were also part of this group. There were also a small number of artisans to do metal work, carpentry, etc. These people constituted what passed for the middle class in the old South. They outnumbered the immediate family of the plantation owners but neither group, the plantation owner and his family, or the middle/professional class, constituted a large percentage of the population. The bulk of the population instead consisted of laborers and other unskilled or semi-skilled workers of one sort or another.
Some of the laborers were slaves. But the "free men" (poor whites) were only a little better off from an economic and political perspective. And neither group had any substantial political or economic power. Slaves were unpaid. Their "compensation" consisted of room and board. And their very position existed in order to complexly exclude them from having any political power.
Technically freed men were better off. But jobs open to them were poorly paid. If an unskilled or semi-skilled laborer could do the work and freed men demanded high wages the work was given over to slaves. So freed men had little or know bargaining power. And this lack of bargaining power extended to the political realm. Like all successful aristocracies, plantation owners were adept at collecting and retaining political power.
This structure resulted in a substantial informal economy. People hunted and fished to supplement their meager income. Cash money was scarce so bartering was common. The elites tolerated this because it kept labor costs low. Both cotton and tobacco are hard on soil if mono-cropped, which was the primary method in use. So land would "wear out" and be "abandoned" (left uncultivated) for long periods of time so that it could slowly recover. This meant there were plentiful woods and creeks available for hunting and fishing.
This is an economy that works well for the top tier. It works adequately for the small professional/middle class and badly for everybody else. Manufacturing and other alternatives to agriculture depend on markets. And in order to have a large market you need a large population that can afford the product. Yet only a small portion of the southern population had a substantial amount of money to spend on manufacturing goods. The small volumes of manufactured goods that were needed could easily be imported from somewhere else. So the North did a good business in selling manufactured goods to the South.
The structure of the Northern economy was quite different. This different structure produced a much larger component of the population with money in their pocket. So the North provided a much larger market for manufactured goods. And many manufacturing jobs paid relatively well. This virtuous circle produced an economy that produced more wealth per capita. And this in turn produced a larger population.
Southern plantation owners, both individually and as a group, were among the wealthiest people in the country. But there weren't enough of them to produce a robust overall economy. The far larger group of reasonably well paid people in the North were much poorer on a per capita basis than the southern plantation owner.
But there were vastly more of them. So they possessed much greater aggregate wealth. And as a result of these structural differences the North as a whole was far wealthier than the South. There were fewer people in the North who could match the wealth of the typical plantation owner but the aggregate wealth of the region was substantially greater than that of the South anyhow.
In short, the southern plantation economy worked very well for a few and badly for almost everybody. Yet it persisted for a long time. I would argue that it persists to this day even though the Civil War ended more than 150 years ago. For this to happen the large population of poor people must buy into the system even though doing so disadvantages them. The elites of the antebellum era pulled this trick off for a long time. I believe the modern equivalent of those bygone elites are continuing to pull the same trick off today. How do they do it?
The answer is to be found in cultural institutions. They have to tell a tale and they have to tell it in such a way that a large segment of the population believes it. And, since the tale is fundamentally a dishonest one, dishonesty is an important part of the process. This, in turn, requires control of two critically important cultural institutions, religion and education. The church must be co-opted and the educational system must be diminished.
Powerful interests have been using religion as a tool of control for as long as we have had written history, and probably for much longer than that. Southern centers of power quickly took control of religion and have maintained a stranglehold over it ever since. The most obvious manifestation of this is the Southern Baptist Church.
Why does it even exist? Because southern institutions needed a church they could control. And all it takes to get and keep control is generous funding of preachers and churches that preach the right message. Put simply, the right message is "the southern way of life is the good and moral way of life". This is coupled with "all other sources of moral guidance are suspect and likely the work of the devil".
Distance was quickly created between "southern" churches and their predecessors located in other parts of the country or the world. This was necessary because those other institutions would not have a reason to go along with the type of messaging that needed to be maintained. And a message contrary to the southern message could not be tolerated.
As a result of the successful strategy of creating "southern" churches, there were lots of "respected churchmen" available who were willing and able to declaim the rightness of the "peculiar institution" that was slavery. There was no hew and cry from these same people when black men were lynched for the entertainment of the crowd. And on and on.
What made this possible was what I have noted elsewhere. Modern religion is "faith based". And what this means is that adherents are required to "have faith" that the church's teachings are right and true in spite of massive amounts of evidence to the contrary. This is an exercise in putting lies on the same level as truth. If you can lie about some aspect of a religion's belief system and get people to accept that lie then you can lie about anything and expect them to accept it too.
So the lie that this or that is the morally right thing to do when it manifestly is not is easy to imbed into people's culture and belief system. The lie can not be effectively refuted by the truth because these same people have been trained to "have faith". And having faith requires that obvious truths be ignored. So they become adept at doing so.
But capturing religions and bending them to the needs of the elites is not enough. The other requirement is to discount the value of education and especially a liberal education. And the first step in doing this is to diminish the quality of the education available to the average person. Underspend on education then loudly proclaim its shortcomings, both real and imagined. Discourage people from getting an education and do what you can to make sure that what education they get is of poor quality.
The most obvious example of this is the long standing and well funded effort to inject religion into science. Science is the opposite of "faith based". Science is experience based. Experiments are done, data is collected, then all of it is subjected to rigorous analysis with the intent of getting to the bottom of what is really going on. Not what someone says is going on but what is actually going on. People trained to a scientific perspective are very dangerous to the ability of those in power to maintain the fictions their very power depends on.
So we see a general denigration of education. People are encouraged to leave school early. Education in rural areas is generally inferior to education in urban areas. People in urban areas value it higher. Almost all of the top tier colleges and universities are located outside of the south. Georgia Tech is not on the same level as MIT or Cal Tech.
There are no top tier Computer Science schools in the South. Utah has spawned more successful tech companies than pretty much all of the South. Utah is economically much like the south. But it is walled off from "southern culture" by the Mormon Church. That has been enough for Utah to be able to develop as a successful tech hub. Religion is a necessary condition for southern culture to flourish but it is not, on its own, sufficient.
On the education front the exception used to be Texas. But there is a peculiar history behind this. For many years Texas was flush with oil money. In a bid for prestige the state poured vast quantities of money into its major Universities. With this they were able to attract top tier talent. But the days of Texas generously funding their Universities has come to an end. And their reputation is slowly declining.
The South also benefited from a geographic fluke. The closer you are to the equator the easier it is to loft a rocket into space. For a time this was coupled with a number of very powerful southern legislators like Lynden Baines Johnson. They had a strong interest in directing Federal spending to their states. So we have the Johnson Space Center in Texas. We have Cape Canaveral in Florida. We have substantial rocket building capability in Huntsville Alabama. When the space program was flush a lot of that money got spent in the South. And the space program is a scientific endeavor at its heart.
The geographic advantage of being closer to the equator persists. But the Federal government has been cutting space spending for decades. So the new generation of space entrepreneurs are private rather than being tightly bound to the Federal government.
To the extent that space money is still flowing, new initiatives have moved to the West Coast. SpaceX is a California firm. Blue Origin, funded by Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame, is headquartered in my state. Paul Alan, Bill Gates' high school buddy, invested heavily in space. But his investment flowed into the west coast. (With his death it looks like that initiative will not continue but others will.) Then there are robust international efforts by the Europeans, Japanese, Chinese, and Indians.
None of these initiatives will ever find a home in the American South. And the South used to be only mildly hostile to this sort of thing. They have seriously amped up their hostility in recent years.
On the other hand, none of the thinking behind Plantation Economics originated in the South. It originated elsewhere and actually dates back much further. The European feudal system worked in much the same way. They even featured a ruling class that was largely idle. Actually managing your interests was considered unseemly. It was almost always delegated to some kind of overseer/foreman leaving nobles to tend to "more important" matters like entertaining and being entertained, preserving one's position, and because it was critical to maintaining one's position of power, military matters.
As with the Plantation Economy you had a small group of nobility that sat at the top of the pyramid. Below them was a slightly larger group of professionals like armorers, saddle makers, etc. that supported them. Then you had the peasants. While technically not slaves the differences were insignificant.
They were tied to the land. It was illegal for them to move. They lived in a non-cash world because they had no cash. Their farms were supposed to provide for them while also generating a small surplus that went to the local feudal lord. Religion was co-opted into a complete support of a structure that provided little or no benefit to almost all of the population. Most people were completely illiterate. So what passed for education was the sermon they listened to in church on Sunday.
And it was a shift away for this to an industrial society that resulted in a general increase in everyone's standard of living. Again, the industrial system produced many people with enough money to afford manufactured goods. And the virtuous circle raised the standard of living of everyone from the top of the system to the bottom.
We also find the same kind of system in banana republics. The system supports a small group of ruling elites. They are in turn supported by a slightly larger professional class while the vast bulk of the population consisted of poor peasants. Again, the aggregate wealth of these countries are low and tends to grow slowly when it grows at all. This doesn't matter to the small group of elites as they have enough money and power to live very well. Their aggregate consumption is too low, however, to lift the economy as a whole.
And if these ideas sound familiar it is because the Republican Party is pushing Plantation Economics yet again. The elites are now composed of the super-wealthy and the senior executives of large corporations. The US used to have a large middle class but it is shrinking. And yet again their effectiveness depends on their ability to sell lies. So far they have been quite adept at it.
If we take the bottom of the crash of '09 as our starting point (other starting points yield pretty much the same conclusions but are not as well documented) we can ask who is now doing better and who is not. And the answer is clear as a bell. Urban areas have rebounded more quickly and are in many cases actually ahead of where they were in '09. Rural areas were, if anything, hit harder. They have seen some rebound but not nearly as much as urban areas have. Urban areas generally support Democrats and Democratic policies. Rural areas generally support Republicans and Republican policies.
Trump got elected by getting rural voters to buy into the idea that he would make things better for them. But he has implemented an economic policy that follows the Plantation Economics model. And rural areas have seen no improvement in their lot. Lots of rural areas are now worse off then they were in '16. But rural voters continue to stick with him.
He lies to them and they believe the lies. He is running a totally faith based administration. "Believe what I say in spite of the evidence to the contrary, not because of it". He has strong and unwavering support from religious conservatives. This is in spite of the fact that he is the opposite of a Good Christian.
This should come as no surprise as these churches are the descendants of the "southern" churches of the antebellum period. He also has strong and unwavering support from the conservative press. Both of these institutions are happy to lie and cover up on his behalf. This is straight out of the Plantation Economics playbook.
This sort of thing has worked in a lot of places and for long periods of time. We will find out if it is going to continue to work in the US in less than two years.
The columnist mentioned in passing that the city he was discussing was located in a county that is "very Red". And by "Red" he of course meant Republican. And the main thrust of his column was that he didn't hold out much hope that the city he was writing about would experience rapid and sustained economic growth.
There is a profound economic split on view pretty much everywhere in the country. Urban areas are, generally speaking, doing well. Rural areas are, generally speaking, doing poorly. This is very apparent in my state, Washington. The urban "Puget Sound" area (Seattle and its environs) is doing very well. The rural eastern part of the state is not. And it will not surprise you to know that the Puget Sound area is "Blue" (Democratic) while the eastern part of the state is "Red" (Republican).
If it were just Washington State, that would be one thing. But it's not. Urban parts of the country are Blue for the most part and rural parts are Red. Urban parts are doing well. Rural parts are not. The obvious question to ask is "is there something about Blue economic thinking that leads to success and Red economic thinking that leads to failure?" I think the answer is Yes! And that's the subject of this column.
My label for Red economic thinking is "Plantation Economics". Many other names would work. But economic thinking in the modern Republican party is dominated by "southern" thinking. And by "southern" I specifically mean the thinking that was dominant in the antebellum South.
"Antebellum" is a portmanteau word composed of the Latin prefix "ante" meaning, in this case, "before" and Latin word "bellum" meaning, in this case, "war". So it means "pre-war" and refers specifically to the American South in the period before the start of the Civil War. So let's take a look at the economics of that region during that period.
The South in that period was dominated in every way, politically, culturally, and economically, by plantations and their owners. It was a predominantly rural area. There were cities like Charleston and New Orleans but they were seen as existing in service of the plantation system. Most plantations grew cotton or tobacco. Charleston and New Orleans existed to facilitate the world wide trade in these commodities. In other parts of the country cities politically dominated the countryside. But this was not true in the South. So let's look at the social structure of that time and place.
Plantations were owned by families in a very patriarchal and hierarchical structure. Members of the family lived in a big house that was a showpiece. Houses of the time were low tech as there was no electricity, indoor plumbing, etc. So there were outhouses in back and a detached kitchen. A detached kitchen was a good idea because the southern climate is warm and the heat of cooking would have made the rest of the house uncomfortably warm. By moving the kitchen to an outbuilding all that heat was kept away from the house.
The house itself consisted primarily of public rooms designed to show off the wealth, taste, and power, of the owner. There were also bedrooms, dressing rooms, storage rooms, etc., that were more utilitarian and less showy. And, of course, plantation houses featured a very showy front. It is never to soon to start the process of impressing people.
Plantations and their owners dominated the culture and economy of the region. The immediate family of the patriarch was catered to by a household staff. The plantation itself was often actually run by one or more "overseers" who supervised a large number of field workers. The household staff was commonly supervised by the wife of the patriarch of the family but this was hardly a full time job.
Beyond this there were small communities that provided services like banking, mercantile, and legal services. The clergy were also part of this group. There were also a small number of artisans to do metal work, carpentry, etc. These people constituted what passed for the middle class in the old South. They outnumbered the immediate family of the plantation owners but neither group, the plantation owner and his family, or the middle/professional class, constituted a large percentage of the population. The bulk of the population instead consisted of laborers and other unskilled or semi-skilled workers of one sort or another.
Some of the laborers were slaves. But the "free men" (poor whites) were only a little better off from an economic and political perspective. And neither group had any substantial political or economic power. Slaves were unpaid. Their "compensation" consisted of room and board. And their very position existed in order to complexly exclude them from having any political power.
Technically freed men were better off. But jobs open to them were poorly paid. If an unskilled or semi-skilled laborer could do the work and freed men demanded high wages the work was given over to slaves. So freed men had little or know bargaining power. And this lack of bargaining power extended to the political realm. Like all successful aristocracies, plantation owners were adept at collecting and retaining political power.
This structure resulted in a substantial informal economy. People hunted and fished to supplement their meager income. Cash money was scarce so bartering was common. The elites tolerated this because it kept labor costs low. Both cotton and tobacco are hard on soil if mono-cropped, which was the primary method in use. So land would "wear out" and be "abandoned" (left uncultivated) for long periods of time so that it could slowly recover. This meant there were plentiful woods and creeks available for hunting and fishing.
This is an economy that works well for the top tier. It works adequately for the small professional/middle class and badly for everybody else. Manufacturing and other alternatives to agriculture depend on markets. And in order to have a large market you need a large population that can afford the product. Yet only a small portion of the southern population had a substantial amount of money to spend on manufacturing goods. The small volumes of manufactured goods that were needed could easily be imported from somewhere else. So the North did a good business in selling manufactured goods to the South.
The structure of the Northern economy was quite different. This different structure produced a much larger component of the population with money in their pocket. So the North provided a much larger market for manufactured goods. And many manufacturing jobs paid relatively well. This virtuous circle produced an economy that produced more wealth per capita. And this in turn produced a larger population.
Southern plantation owners, both individually and as a group, were among the wealthiest people in the country. But there weren't enough of them to produce a robust overall economy. The far larger group of reasonably well paid people in the North were much poorer on a per capita basis than the southern plantation owner.
But there were vastly more of them. So they possessed much greater aggregate wealth. And as a result of these structural differences the North as a whole was far wealthier than the South. There were fewer people in the North who could match the wealth of the typical plantation owner but the aggregate wealth of the region was substantially greater than that of the South anyhow.
In short, the southern plantation economy worked very well for a few and badly for almost everybody. Yet it persisted for a long time. I would argue that it persists to this day even though the Civil War ended more than 150 years ago. For this to happen the large population of poor people must buy into the system even though doing so disadvantages them. The elites of the antebellum era pulled this trick off for a long time. I believe the modern equivalent of those bygone elites are continuing to pull the same trick off today. How do they do it?
The answer is to be found in cultural institutions. They have to tell a tale and they have to tell it in such a way that a large segment of the population believes it. And, since the tale is fundamentally a dishonest one, dishonesty is an important part of the process. This, in turn, requires control of two critically important cultural institutions, religion and education. The church must be co-opted and the educational system must be diminished.
Powerful interests have been using religion as a tool of control for as long as we have had written history, and probably for much longer than that. Southern centers of power quickly took control of religion and have maintained a stranglehold over it ever since. The most obvious manifestation of this is the Southern Baptist Church.
Why does it even exist? Because southern institutions needed a church they could control. And all it takes to get and keep control is generous funding of preachers and churches that preach the right message. Put simply, the right message is "the southern way of life is the good and moral way of life". This is coupled with "all other sources of moral guidance are suspect and likely the work of the devil".
Distance was quickly created between "southern" churches and their predecessors located in other parts of the country or the world. This was necessary because those other institutions would not have a reason to go along with the type of messaging that needed to be maintained. And a message contrary to the southern message could not be tolerated.
As a result of the successful strategy of creating "southern" churches, there were lots of "respected churchmen" available who were willing and able to declaim the rightness of the "peculiar institution" that was slavery. There was no hew and cry from these same people when black men were lynched for the entertainment of the crowd. And on and on.
What made this possible was what I have noted elsewhere. Modern religion is "faith based". And what this means is that adherents are required to "have faith" that the church's teachings are right and true in spite of massive amounts of evidence to the contrary. This is an exercise in putting lies on the same level as truth. If you can lie about some aspect of a religion's belief system and get people to accept that lie then you can lie about anything and expect them to accept it too.
So the lie that this or that is the morally right thing to do when it manifestly is not is easy to imbed into people's culture and belief system. The lie can not be effectively refuted by the truth because these same people have been trained to "have faith". And having faith requires that obvious truths be ignored. So they become adept at doing so.
But capturing religions and bending them to the needs of the elites is not enough. The other requirement is to discount the value of education and especially a liberal education. And the first step in doing this is to diminish the quality of the education available to the average person. Underspend on education then loudly proclaim its shortcomings, both real and imagined. Discourage people from getting an education and do what you can to make sure that what education they get is of poor quality.
The most obvious example of this is the long standing and well funded effort to inject religion into science. Science is the opposite of "faith based". Science is experience based. Experiments are done, data is collected, then all of it is subjected to rigorous analysis with the intent of getting to the bottom of what is really going on. Not what someone says is going on but what is actually going on. People trained to a scientific perspective are very dangerous to the ability of those in power to maintain the fictions their very power depends on.
So we see a general denigration of education. People are encouraged to leave school early. Education in rural areas is generally inferior to education in urban areas. People in urban areas value it higher. Almost all of the top tier colleges and universities are located outside of the south. Georgia Tech is not on the same level as MIT or Cal Tech.
There are no top tier Computer Science schools in the South. Utah has spawned more successful tech companies than pretty much all of the South. Utah is economically much like the south. But it is walled off from "southern culture" by the Mormon Church. That has been enough for Utah to be able to develop as a successful tech hub. Religion is a necessary condition for southern culture to flourish but it is not, on its own, sufficient.
On the education front the exception used to be Texas. But there is a peculiar history behind this. For many years Texas was flush with oil money. In a bid for prestige the state poured vast quantities of money into its major Universities. With this they were able to attract top tier talent. But the days of Texas generously funding their Universities has come to an end. And their reputation is slowly declining.
The South also benefited from a geographic fluke. The closer you are to the equator the easier it is to loft a rocket into space. For a time this was coupled with a number of very powerful southern legislators like Lynden Baines Johnson. They had a strong interest in directing Federal spending to their states. So we have the Johnson Space Center in Texas. We have Cape Canaveral in Florida. We have substantial rocket building capability in Huntsville Alabama. When the space program was flush a lot of that money got spent in the South. And the space program is a scientific endeavor at its heart.
The geographic advantage of being closer to the equator persists. But the Federal government has been cutting space spending for decades. So the new generation of space entrepreneurs are private rather than being tightly bound to the Federal government.
To the extent that space money is still flowing, new initiatives have moved to the West Coast. SpaceX is a California firm. Blue Origin, funded by Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame, is headquartered in my state. Paul Alan, Bill Gates' high school buddy, invested heavily in space. But his investment flowed into the west coast. (With his death it looks like that initiative will not continue but others will.) Then there are robust international efforts by the Europeans, Japanese, Chinese, and Indians.
None of these initiatives will ever find a home in the American South. And the South used to be only mildly hostile to this sort of thing. They have seriously amped up their hostility in recent years.
On the other hand, none of the thinking behind Plantation Economics originated in the South. It originated elsewhere and actually dates back much further. The European feudal system worked in much the same way. They even featured a ruling class that was largely idle. Actually managing your interests was considered unseemly. It was almost always delegated to some kind of overseer/foreman leaving nobles to tend to "more important" matters like entertaining and being entertained, preserving one's position, and because it was critical to maintaining one's position of power, military matters.
As with the Plantation Economy you had a small group of nobility that sat at the top of the pyramid. Below them was a slightly larger group of professionals like armorers, saddle makers, etc. that supported them. Then you had the peasants. While technically not slaves the differences were insignificant.
They were tied to the land. It was illegal for them to move. They lived in a non-cash world because they had no cash. Their farms were supposed to provide for them while also generating a small surplus that went to the local feudal lord. Religion was co-opted into a complete support of a structure that provided little or no benefit to almost all of the population. Most people were completely illiterate. So what passed for education was the sermon they listened to in church on Sunday.
And it was a shift away for this to an industrial society that resulted in a general increase in everyone's standard of living. Again, the industrial system produced many people with enough money to afford manufactured goods. And the virtuous circle raised the standard of living of everyone from the top of the system to the bottom.
We also find the same kind of system in banana republics. The system supports a small group of ruling elites. They are in turn supported by a slightly larger professional class while the vast bulk of the population consisted of poor peasants. Again, the aggregate wealth of these countries are low and tends to grow slowly when it grows at all. This doesn't matter to the small group of elites as they have enough money and power to live very well. Their aggregate consumption is too low, however, to lift the economy as a whole.
And if these ideas sound familiar it is because the Republican Party is pushing Plantation Economics yet again. The elites are now composed of the super-wealthy and the senior executives of large corporations. The US used to have a large middle class but it is shrinking. And yet again their effectiveness depends on their ability to sell lies. So far they have been quite adept at it.
If we take the bottom of the crash of '09 as our starting point (other starting points yield pretty much the same conclusions but are not as well documented) we can ask who is now doing better and who is not. And the answer is clear as a bell. Urban areas have rebounded more quickly and are in many cases actually ahead of where they were in '09. Rural areas were, if anything, hit harder. They have seen some rebound but not nearly as much as urban areas have. Urban areas generally support Democrats and Democratic policies. Rural areas generally support Republicans and Republican policies.
Trump got elected by getting rural voters to buy into the idea that he would make things better for them. But he has implemented an economic policy that follows the Plantation Economics model. And rural areas have seen no improvement in their lot. Lots of rural areas are now worse off then they were in '16. But rural voters continue to stick with him.
He lies to them and they believe the lies. He is running a totally faith based administration. "Believe what I say in spite of the evidence to the contrary, not because of it". He has strong and unwavering support from religious conservatives. This is in spite of the fact that he is the opposite of a Good Christian.
This should come as no surprise as these churches are the descendants of the "southern" churches of the antebellum period. He also has strong and unwavering support from the conservative press. Both of these institutions are happy to lie and cover up on his behalf. This is straight out of the Plantation Economics playbook.
This sort of thing has worked in a lot of places and for long periods of time. We will find out if it is going to continue to work in the US in less than two years.
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