Did Capitalist Supply Chains Make Life Fragile?

The supply chains incentivized by capitalism have made ordinary life fragile. Um good. I was hoping I disagreed uh earlier when I did this, because I absolutely disagree right now. Um one of the things I hate most is people talking about sustainability. And I don't hate just the greens who are saying, you know, oh MGOMG, this is unsustainable. They're sort of the trad right LARP who just effectively looks around and says, I don't like this, and then they work backwards. Therefore, it is not sustainable. Like I don't know. It might be perfectly sustainable, right? Uh gay race communism might dominate for 10,000 years, you don't know. Um, you not being able to afford a house might be sustainable. That might go on for 10,000 years. So whether you like something or not says nothing about it. Uh all sorts of really bad systems.

I mean, we lived in the mud for you know a hundred thousand years. That was quite sustainable. And so getting to fragility, um, what makes uh uh quality of life in an economic sense and then a subjective sense, right? Like we all like antibiotics and we like not freezing to death, and we like our you know, 50% of children not dying in childbirth, we like 100% to survive. Um, all of those come from technology. Technology depends on uh uh division of labor economies, and division of labor economies are inherently more fragile. If your village has one blacksmith and one seamstress and one loom operator and one fisherman, etc., you are much more fragile than if everyone is equally good at chewing sticks, and that's where you get your nutrition. Um and so yeah, things are fragile, but what what does fragility mean?

That if it went bad, you might fall back closer to the default level of suck, which is more sustainable. Uh so yeah, uh it leads to some increased fragility, but uh absolutely worth the trade-off. So you're saying that um you're saying it's fragility because you can have these single points of failure. So if you divide the labor, so I only have one heart, that's the day if it goes boom, done. Um but in like the practical, you know, uh most cases in capitalism, you don't just have the single point of failure. You have many competing entities and they do fill one another's And and I didn't express it well. I was sort of saying, like, even if I accepted that framing, I would still disagree with it. Which doesn't mean I accept the framing. Uh-huh. Interesting. And then you know, to me, what kind of turned on this particular proposition's phrasing is this ordinary life.

And if ordinary life is sort of our status quo, if that's what we mean by ordinary life, I would say it's seems to be remarkably stable. And that's actually to your point about people who look around and say, I don't like this, therefore it's fragile. Um actually it seems remarkably stable, especially in the way it um kind of imposes on individuals. You try to chick get outside of it, good luck. Uh so it has a remarkable stability, and because of uh the way you know capitalistic supply chains work, there is a remarkable robustness when things change, the system adapts, and uh things flow where they need to based on pricing, it was very you know Hayekian type of thing. So yeah, I wouldn't say supply chains incentivized by capitals have made ordinary life fragile. I'd say no. They've made ordinary life very stable, maybe more stable than in the history of the world.

Uh that doesn't necessarily mean that everything about ordinary life today is good or as good as it could be or something, but it's it's certainly uh not fragile in in that sense, in my opinion. Back in the 70s, there was a famous bet between I believe Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich. Um, and uh Paul Ehrlich was uh a real doomster. And I remember like as a kid in the 70s, I saw a book, I don't know if it was by him or in the the memosphere around him called The Population Bomb. And I I I got doom pilled as like a seven-year-old. I'm like, oh gosh, that future's gonna suck. And this was like terrible. It it um uh, you know, the the world sucks, and and it made me like really massively depressed for probably 20 years or so. Um, but Paul Simon won the bet. He was arguing that commodities are gonna get cheaper.

And he wrote a book on this topic called The Ultimate Resource, which is a great book. And his argument is the ultimate resource is human ingenuity. And one of the things that uh human ingenuity does is not just like, oh, when iron uh starts to run out, we dig deeper, we come up more with more ways to process low-grade ore, this and that, but we also look for things that can substitute for it. So you know, cars these days use much less steel than they did back in the 1970s. And this is amazing that we can achieve the some same functionality without the same inputs. So getting back to fragility, uh, you know, if suddenly there was some huge problem with copper, nanotech uh gets out of control and eats all the copper, um, it's not just that we could go looking for more copper, it's that we could substitute all sorts of things.

We could use aluminum as conductors, etc. So I agree with you.