The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

The Necessity Of Surplus For Tech Innovation

by Bruce Wilder

(Ian–this is an elevated comment from my post on Breakout Societal Power. It fills in much of the gap elided to in this phrase “Small groups in competition have the chance, though not the certainty, of fast progress, stuck as they are in a cauldron. It doesn’t always happen…” but does so better than I would have. It’s not just about why some societies in sharp competition don’t make it, however.)

There is an underlying dynamic of solidarity and surplus that seldom gets the attention it deserves.

Ancient Greece at the end of the of the Bronze Age participated in the famous but mysterious collapse and entered a Dark Age of significantly diminished population, political organization and culture. They emerged beginning around 800 BCE, apparently with a new set of technologies, politics and agriculture and trade that generated surplus. People were healthy and well-fed (comparatively). Greece experienced a population boom, increasing in numbers roughly ten times over 400 years and a critical part of the competition among city-states was to found colonies. It wasn’t just Greece, Phoenicia and the Etruscans and others were involved.

Technological innovation is not a merely moral phenomenon; it is a matters of surplus and numbers. There must be a surplus to feed an artisan class and trade and a differentiation of labor.

The surplus that fed the urban civilization that Rome engineered diminished with soil erosion. The extraction of the tradeable surplus from a slave class on the great latifundia was inefficient and self-defeating on many levels, undermining the economic foundation of an urban civilization. People at the bottom of the system were unhealthy. Famines and plagues ensued. Trade declined with falling division of labor in a dimishing artisanal class, compounding the effects of declining agricultural surplus.

The rise of China followed on the creation of enormous agricultural surplus to feed vast armies and an urban civilization with a huge artisanal population, with trade driving deep division of labor and technological inventiveness. The surplus originated in vast hydraulic projects and the elaboration three-crop rice production.

There would be no social barrier in China to ever more labor intensive agriculture: more and more hands in the fields until the extraction of surplus was choked off by congestion losses. By 1500, Chinese peasants could barely feed themselves. Ordinary people were physically weak. The cities were huge, but represented only single-digit percentages of total population.

Europe recovering from the Dark Ages that followed the collapse of Rome saw a revival of surplus, especially after iron plows turned the heavy but fertile soils of Northern Europe and dug deeper in the south. But, the congestion losses of too many hands in the fields showed quickly too and the flowering of the High Middle Ages ended in overpopulation and the Black Death, which was driven as much by imminent famine as rats and fleas.

The contrasting aftermaths of the Plague of Justinian and the Black Death — two, long series of bubonic plagues sweeping thru Europe is worth contemplating. One destroyed a civilization and the other seemed to spark a new civilization.

Agricultural surplus feeding a growth of artisanal production and merchant trade, but being choked off by congestion and extractive oppression is a recurrent dynamic. It underlies the peculiar history of rivalry between England and France. France, with the greatest agricultural potential in western Europe, occupying an extensive well-watered plain, had a vastly greater population than England thruout the Middle Ages and well into the 19th century. But, France became overpopulated. Famine and hunger drove the French Revolution when bad weather triggered bad harvests that threatened the surplus that fed Paris.

England’s ability to feed its industrializing cities was a near-run thing in the 18th and 19th centuries. The additional surplus generated by the British Agricultural Revolution was a paltry thing and Ireland was kept on the edge of famine by overpopulation until pushed over the edge.

The productive often desperate competition that Ian draws attention to has a multi-path causal relation to the generation and/or extraction of surplus. That surplus may originate in accidents, be managed or neglected by elites and be extinguished without intention.

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11 Comments

  1. Eric Anderson

    Written, as we strip mine and pollute the earth with finely tuned industrial might, of the very surplus resources that would allow the innovation necessary to get out of our current mess.

    And for what: Billionaire yacht money?

    The end is nigh.
    Repent your ecocidal ways to Gaia while you still can.

  2. Eric Anderson

    On a more positive note —
    You never fail to impress me with your depth of historical knowledge Bruce.
    Huzzah!

  3. Jan Wiklund

    There are lots of competing theories about why England industrialized and France didn’t do nearly that well.

    There is Kenneth Pomerantz: The great divergence, that suggests that it depended on coal – the English coalfieldes were very easily getatable and close to shipping, and for that reason very cheap to use.

    There is Margaret Jacob: Scientific culture and the making of the industrial west, that maintains that the English Puritans nurtured a culture focused on utility, and that the class compromise between them and the Royalists in 1660 included a crash venture in science and technology.

    There is Prasannan Parthasarati: Why Europe grew rich and Asia did not, that maintains that England was the only country that reacted on the Indian textile export drive in the 17th century with a conscious wager on technical development (of course this is consistent with Jacob’s thesis).

    But I agree with Wilder’s thesis. People must be reasonably happy to engage in development. Parthasarati has written another book, The transition to a colonial economy, about how the East India Company destroyed the Indian textile industry. They simply prohibited everyone from buying, exept themselves, and they paid so miserably for the textiles that the weavers – who had until then lived rather well – were driven into poverty, with no resources to keep up their standards or skill.

  4. Carborundum

    I tend to think that the key, at least in the modern environment, is effective public administration. Production of surplus over significantly historical periods (i.e., long enough to see some sort of a “breakout” phenomenon) is pretty much the norm through most of the history of complex societies;* how one uses that surplus, first narrowly, then widely is the kicker. Surplus is a necessity, but more a symptom and intensifier than a prime mover.

    Tangentially, I find it ironic that the “deep state” is actually responsible for the relative underperformance of many western political groupings. The key problem is that folks make up fantasies about vastly powerful cabals intentionally driving any policy they [the observer] don’t like into the ditch, when the reality is that the deep state is as it was originally defined – a bunch of people organized into significantly unaccountable and not very capable institutions – mostly letting policy drift into the ditch because they can’t handle dynamics. In other words, much of what one sees isn’t a plan, it’s “just” poor public administration. (I scare-quote “just” because good public administration is very hard.)

    * We have many academic stories about how many complex societies collapsed due to resource shortfall. When one really digs into the data, it’s almost always a breakdown in resource distribution and deployment, not an equivalent decline in absolute level of production.

  5. GlassHammer

    “There must be a surplus to feed an artisan class and trade and a differentiation of labor.”

    ^Yes, the degree of specialization in labor must diminish as the surplus diminishes. This actually happens all the time in the private sector when cost cutting initiatives push specialist into other tasks that are necessary for the company but far removed from their specialized skill set. The lack of surplus is also why narrowly focused college degrees are harder to match to a employer during an economic downturn.

  6. Willy

    Hopefully not too tangential….

    Mistakes and failures in the engineering world are almost always attributed to variables which had been unseen, or some political economics which impacted the design as in not enough time and money allocated to understand the scope and limits of Murphy’s Law, or that the wrong people had achieved power over the failed design. In that world there are always reasons for failures which can be determined after failures, relatively quickly.

    From that perspective, I find it interesting that 20th century economics seems like such a failed science, with reasons for failures being hotly debated to this day. That the unseen variable is people isn’t surprising. But imagining the cause of the failure of neoliberalism for the west, is that not enough people have gotten excited about it because it hasn’t yet been fully implemented, seems completely messed up. With a true science those variables would’ve been known in advance. Now we have a great many millions with enough “less surplus” to want to revolt.

  7. different clue

    How much of Ireland’s “overpopulaton” was actually overpopulation as against the English colonial authorities driving all possible Irish into marginal lands not best suited to colonial resource extraction while monopolizing all the best lands for extracting butter and beef for sending to England?

    One could say that the potato permitted the Irish compressed onto the lands which could grow enough potatoes to keep population rising on those lands contributed to functional overpopulation on those lands. How many of the starving Irish during the potato famine could have been fed if all the colonially-extracted butter, beef, etc. mined in Ireland for shipping to England had been distributed to the starving Irish instead for the duration of the famine?

  8. marku52

    Then there is Tainter “Collapse of Complex Civilizations”

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/477.The_Collapse_of_Complex_Societies

    Tainter’s thesis is that societal problem solving (agriculture techniques, water management, defense) are all managed by an increasingly complex bureaucracy and technocracy. The cost of this overhead rises until its cost exceeds its benefits. Then the civilization falls into a less complex (and populated) system where the costs of management are exceeded by the benefits.

    Looking around the US, you can see a lot of this. Hundreds of years of infrastructure we no longer have the income to maintain. Decaying rail system. Paved roads to gravel. Potholes. falling bridges, Flint water, etc.

    Thanks to Bruce for a stimulating comment.

  9. different clue

    A further thought occurs to me relative to my just-above comment. How different was the Great Potato Famine in Ireland any different that the Great Bengal Famine in Bengal Province of India? Were both equally designed, engineered, and manufactured by Great Britain? Specifically by the Elite Colonialist descendants of the Franco-Norman Viking invader-colonialists who conquered and subjugated Anglo-Saxonistan to begin with in 1066? (And who turned “England” into a conquest-platform from which to conquer and subjugate the rest of Celtic Britain in the several centuries thereafter. And then turn all of conquered and colonized Franco-Norman Viking Britain into a conquest platform for conquering and settler colonizing other places and conquering and extracting-from still yet other places. Those Vikings sure had an impact on history, considering that it was yet another pack of Vikings who founded Kievan Rus which led to the Great Russia we have today).

  10. StewartM

    Seriously, I don’t see a strong correlation with ‘surplus’ (as it applies to ordinary people) and technological spurts. For one thing, even in relatively good times, famines and hunger was a constant threat.

    Yes, one needs specialization of labor for technological progress. But that is not a consequence of ‘surplus’, but of agricultural efficiency. Efficient agriculture (in the short term at least) frees up extra hands to do specialized tasks. Of course, the risk of this “efficiency” can be that the methods used to create it may degrade long-term productivity. Resource exhaustion and civilization collapse follow, along with a population decline which allows for the land to recover. Rinse and repeat.

  11. Jan Wiklund

    different clue: They had no impact at all.

    It’s simply that the edge of productive power has moved over the world, depending on where new developments have been made. The Chinese led in the 12th century, the Italians led in the 14th century, the Dutch in the 17th. And so on. All of these leaderships had a material base in some technical improvements.

    I have listed possible reasons for the English leadership above. The US leadership is simple enough to track – they invented the Big Mass Production Corporation, and that made them invincible, for a few generations. But they failed to follow up, or got tired, or lazy, and asked the Chinese to take over.

    The idea that things happen because there are some particular Evil People is a myth; read more about that at https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/war-in-dreamland

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