Keynes My Early Beliefs - excerpt

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Keynes    My Early Beliefs - excerpt

   I said that we were amongst the first to escape from Benthanism.  But of another eighteenth-century heresy we were the unrepentant heirs and last upholders.  We were among the last of the Utopians, or meliorists as they are sometimes called, who believe in a continuing moral progress by virtue of which the human race already consists of reliable, rational, decent people, influenced by truth and objective standards, who can be safely released from the outward restraints of convention and traditional standards and inflexible rules of conduct, and left, from now onwards, to their own sensible devices, pure motives and reliable intuitions of the good.  The view that human nature is reasonable had in 1903 quite a long history behind it.  It underlay the ethics of self-interest – rational self-interest as it was called – just as much as the universal ethics of Kant or Bentham which aimed at the general good; and it was because self-interest was rational that the egoistic and altruistic systems were supposed to work out in practice to the same conclusions.

   In short, we repudiated all versions of the doctrine of original sin, of there being insane and irrational springs of wickedness in most men.  We were not aware that civilization was a thin and precarious crust erected by the personality and the will of a very few, and only maintained by rules and conventions skillfully put across and guilefully preserved.  We had no respect for traditional wisdom or the restraints of custom.  We lacked reverence, as Lawrence observed and as Ludwig with justice also used to say – for everything and everyone.  It did not occur to us to respect the extraordinary accomplishment of our predecessors in the ordering of life (as it now seems to me to have been) or the elaborate framework which they had devised to protect this order.  Plato said in his Laws that one of the best of a set of good laws would be a law forbidding any young man to enquire which of them are right or wrong, though an old man remarking any defect in the laws might communicate this observation to a ruler or to an equal in years when no young man was present.  That was a dictum in which we should have been unable to discover any point or significance whatever.  As cause and consequence of our general state of mind we completely misunderstood human nature, including our own.  The rationality which we attributed to it led to a superficiality, not only of judgment, but also of feeling.  It was not only that intellectually we were pre-Freudian, but we had lost something which our predecessors had without replacing it.  I still suffer incurably from attributing an unreal rationality to other people’s feelings and behavior (and doubtless to my own too).  …

from pp 95-96 of  this work

Dawn of Innovation

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Early parts from Dawn of Innovation:

Finally, political and economic power shifted decisively away from society's traditional elites, as the world's first true middle class seized control of the political apparatus. The archetypal American was almost a new species, literate and numerate, shrewd and confident, an unvarnished striver, swimming through a delightful chaos where money and opportunity were for the grasping on every side. As the United States became the world's dominant power in the twentieth century, that model of society, albeit much adapted and trammeled, became the norm in advanced countries.

The country was just too productive, too entrepreneurial, too inventive, too original not to burst into the front rank of world powers, almost regardless of its leadership.

The story of American development can be charted as an evolution from local to regional and finally to national networks. Strong regional economies emerged in the Northeast in the first quarter of the century. By the 1820s, rural New England and the Middle Atlantic region were hotbeds of industrialization, with farms and forges working cheek by jowl and the self-subsistent farm family already an anachronism.

Since interior transportation was virtually nil, there evolved a pellet economy of little self-sufficient towns clustered on riverbanks. The breakthrough was the development of the western steamboat by Henry Shreve and Daniel French. It was a cunningly adapted craft that could carry massive loads on shallow, swift water, blithely steaming upstream againt rapids.

Within a decade the region's great grain, lumber, and meat animal enterprises were centralizing in Cincinnati, as a tight-knit riverine economy took shape within the Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi valleys.

The United States emerged as a world economic powerhouse in the 1840s and 1850s, when the railroads finally linked the Northeast and the Midwest, as it was now called, into an integrated commercial and industrial unit. The heavy industry of the Midwest flowed from its resource endowment – coal and iron, food processing, a mechanized lumber industry – as well as derivatives from steamboat building, like engines, furniture, and glass. In the Northeast, its traditional industries like clocks, textiles, and shoes grew to global scale, along with big-ticket fabrication businesses like Baldwin locomotives, Collins steamships, Hoe printing presses, and the giant Corliss engines.

The South, in the meantime, slipped into the position of an internal colony, exploiting its slaves and being exploited in turn by the Northeast and Midwest. Boston and New York controlled much of the shipping, insurance, and brokerage earnings from the cotton trade, while earnings left over went for midwestern food, tools, and engines shipped down the Mississippi and its branches.

Few Britons even noticed, as one sharp-eyed civil servant put it, that in the United States, almost all industries were “carried on in the same way as the cotton manufacture of England, viz., in large factories, with machinery applied to every process, the extreme subdivision of labour and all reduced to an almost perfect system of manufacture.”

Destructive though it was, the Civil War broke the slaveocracy's power to obstruct an American development agenda. In one of the darkest years of the war, the Republican congress passed the Homestead Act, the Land Grant College Act – no other country had conceived the possibility of educating its farmers and craftsmen – and the Transcontinental Railroad Act. The rise of a new world economic hyperpower was virtually assured.