THE MOST IMPORTANT POST

 

Thursday, October 17, 2019

THE MOST IMPORTANT POST

"Saturday, August 4, 2012

Re GEOGRAPHY AND TECHNOLOGY

You won't hear something like this from an economist, or an American politician (except perhaps someone like Perot, Buchanan, Nader: either nationalist right, or globalist left, back then...) 

It takes a sociologist, citing a geographer:

"...the United States has been the wealthiest of all industrial societies, not because it is technologically and organizationally the most advanced, but most importantly because it controls the wealthiest territory upon the earth." Collins citing Bartholomew, Physical World Atlas.

This is not the economists', (from Adam Smith onward), product, natural resource, industry, education, or technology- centered, notions of comparative or competitive advantage, but, if anything, the geographic antithesis of most of these, in a situation such as the United States, 

(because virtually all economists' examples of comparative advantage assume relative national scarcities of capital and resource inputs, thus inherently encouraging presumptively mutually beneficial, or at least not harmful, international trade among nations).

"Hence the United States' world leadership in GNP (both absolute and per capita) must be attributed to geographical peculiarities that cannot simply be imitated by other countries.  This fact has often been lost in discussions of economic development that attribute the observed world patterns to social organization or culture, and which hold out the United States as a stage through which all societies will pass.  In explanations of current American social structure, it is important to see that the high level of economic productivity is determined by factors other than the output of the educational system or by the shape of the modern professions; indeed, these appear primarily to be luxuries that a resource-rich society has been unusually able to afford.  Thus introducing geographical peculiarities into our view of an economy enables us to see the direction of causality more clearly." Collins, The Credential Society, p. 77."

Now, what kinds of implications, and what kind of history of the United States does this suggest?

There are really so many different directions one can speculate about, both counter factuals of various kinds, and counter Whig interpretation actuals of others.