What if Jefferson had gotten the agrarian country he wanted?

[brewster]

I'm reading Hamilton, and it's impressive what a douche Jefferson was. But it leaves me wondering what if? Was Jefferson's dream even possible? Is there currently a country of noble yeoman farmers on earth? NZ? There's some failed states with no industry, but I don't think that counts.

One thought that does occur to me is would we have reached our current labor singularity a century earlier? What would happen when Jefferson's country of farms mechanized and put out of work 90% of the population with no industry to employ them? Or is that chicken & egg since there's no industry to make farm machinery? Or would we just buy it from the Brits?

It's so hard to come up with a plausible scenario for his vision that it makes clear Jefferson was delusional and Hamilton a visionary of where the global economy was headed.

[SuburbanFarmer]

I'm reading Hamilton, and it's impressive what a douche Jefferson was. But it leaves me wondering what if? Was Jefferson's dream even possible? Is there currently a country of noble yeoman farmers on earth? NZ? There's some failed states with no industry, but I don't think that counts.

One thought that does occur to me is would we have reached our current labor singularity a century earlier? What would happen when Jefferson's country of farms mechanized and put out of work 90% of the population with no industry to employ them? Or is that chicken & egg since there's no industry to make farm machinery? Or would we just buy it from the Brits?

It's so hard to come up with a plausible scenario for his vision that it makes clear Jefferson was delusional and Hamilton a visionary of where the global economy was headed.

That's pretty much what we ended up with.. Huge population of homesteaders/farmers that were replaced by machines. So the difference is that we would have been buying the machines, instead of making them ourselves? We didn't achieve an infinite credit limit until WWI, so I don't think that would have worked out well...

[brewster]

That's pretty much what we ended up with.. Huge population of homesteaders/farmers that were replaced by machines. So the difference is that we would have been buying the machines, instead of making them ourselves? We didn't achieve an infinite credit limit until WWI, so I don't think that would have worked out well...

The much bigger difference is we had an industrial economy to absorb the farm workers. We currently have nothing to absorb the industrial workers.

[Okeefenokee]

lol,

slaves, folks.

they had slaves.

not only does slavery allow you opt out of industrialization, it actually inhibits it.

y'all ask these questions like they're deep thinking questions, and it makes me wonder how you make it through life.

add to that, you're making these profound statements armed with the knowledge of what happened in the following two centuries, as if people in 1787 were making plans based on the existence of machines that would not exist for another century and a half.

if you had any intellectual honesty, you would, ya know, find out more about what the other side thought than just the cropped summation of a writer with a clear bias toward it.

there's a part about industrialization that hamilton and jefferson knew that strangely got left out of this narrative you're pushing, and that's that 18th century industrialization wasn't profitable without the exploitation of sources of raw materials. did we forget about that whole thing where european industrial powers would create colonies, and then squeeze them for resources by force?

hamilton and jefferson were baseball players in 1787, looking around and noticing that all the other players were juicing. hamilton says the US should start juicing too in order to compete. jefferson says, yeah let's not behave like the people we just rebelled against, and for whom we were the same sort of blood vassals that we will have to create for ourselves if we want to be like them.

and of course that was possible, because of slaves. otherwise, no, there was no path to wealth and power as a nation of humble farmers.

but y'all are also assuming that jefferson intended his plan as a means to become wealthy and powerful as a nation, competing on the world stage with european industrial nations, which wasn't what he wanted at all.

it probably didn't seem likely that slavery was going to end at that time. there was already some push against it, but a ten thousand year old institution only looks destined to end to us, a century and a half after the fact.

[Okeefenokee]

That's pretty much what we ended up with.. Huge population of homesteaders/farmers that were replaced by machines. So the difference is that we would have been buying the machines, instead of making them ourselves? We didn't achieve an infinite credit limit until WWI, so I don't think that would have worked out well...

The much bigger difference is we had an industrial economy to absorb the farm workers. We currently have nothing to absorb the industrial workers.

yeah we do. we have the damn tractors now. we can now have industry without the need for large numbers of unskilled workers due to ever increasing automation, and we can have a large population of small farmers who can maintain profitable farms on the backs of tractors and gasoline. they won't be rich, but when the alternative is welfare in an inner city ghetto, waiting for that UBI check to come in the mail as you wonder if today's the day you're going to end your meaningless life, sign me up to be farmer okee.

it would take policy changes, sure, but that's the easy part.

if you've got the technology, changing the policy is feasible.

if it's 1787 and you lack the machines, all the policy changes in the world won't amount to shit.

[Okeefenokee]

now, if you're asking me in 2017 which way I think is the way to go, I go with hamilton. greatest nation in the history of the world. more technological innovation than any nation's ever produced.

yeah, it turned out alright in the end.

but if it's 1787, and we're a little backwoods nation of colonials with no reason to think we'd ever be the world power, I'd probably be a little less in favor of the idea.

[brewster]

Okee, while I could debate much in your posts, they're all off topic. In all that you didn't answer the question, which was what the alternative history would be. Sure we had slaves, would we still? What would our place in the world be as everyone else industrialized?

This is close enough to on topic I will respond.

but if it's 1787, and we're a little backwoods nation of colonials with no reason to think we'd ever be the world power

A number of the founding fathers besides Hamilton totally saw the newborn US as having potential of being a great state on par with the European powers. Why else would Washington have told us to stay the fuck out of European wars? We had already had the population of the Netherlands, who had been the nemesis of England the previous century, and nearly unlimited resources. Both Hamilton and Jefferson saw the infant industrial revolution in England as the writing on the wall of where the economy of great nations was going, but had different reactions. Jefferson knew that his vision would be sending raw materials abroad to industrializing nations, but wanted his nation "clean". The battle went on long after 1787, and even after Hamilton's death, arguably to the civil war.

[Hanarchy Montanarchy]

I imagine we would look like other parts of the world that didn't modernize but have resources.

They don't call it the resource curse for nothing.

Are you reading the Chernow Hamilton? My favorite thing in that book is his detailing Hamilton's industrial espionage against English textile companies.

[brewster]

I imagine we would look like other parts of the world that didn't modernize but have resources.

They don't call it the resource curse for nothing.

Are you reading the Chernow Hamilton? My favorite thing in that book is his detailing Hamilton's industrial espionage against English textile companies.

Yes, that's the book. I had read quite a bit about that story before. A lot of it he played no part in, was kinda inevitable.

It's hard to imagine the US looking like a 3rd world country, but there's been many places, notably in Latin America, that had as much potential and failed to realize it. What Okee got wrong in his juicing analogy is that the US, unlike the European mercantilists, had both the resources and the domestic market for industrializing. They didn't need to compete in the colony game, and it wasn't what Hamilton was proposing.

[Speaker to Animals]

I imagine we would look like other parts of the world that didn't modernize but have resources.

They don't call it the resource curse for nothing.

Are you reading the Chernow Hamilton? My favorite thing in that book is his detailing Hamilton's industrial espionage against English textile companies.

Don't be silly.

It correlates to the mean IQ.

Iceland and Japan have fuck all for resources, but their mean IQ is relatively high, and they built strong economies. Most of Africa has plenty of resources but the lowest mean IQ on the planet, and thus no high tech civilization. North America and Europe have relatively high mean IQ *and* plenty of resources. Thus, we basically lead the world in this aspect.

It's not all IQ, though. East Asians have the highest IQ, and while they built high-tech societies, those are partly modeled on the west. There has to be either another genetic factor, or possibly a cultural one.

But to discount the cultural angle.. Africa has access to all the ideas and values that made the West great. We hardly kept these things secret. But they seem constitutionally unable to adopt these ideas. Asians are willing to adopt western ideas and values as needed to get the effect. They didn't have trouble doing it. So, maybe it's partly cultural too, but you need the genetic predisposition to adopt these kinds of social behaviors in the first place.