Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid
arstechnica.com325 points by rbanffy 6 hours ago
325 points by rbanffy 6 hours ago
I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement. (In reality it was certainly a convoluted mixture of the two I'm sure.)
I hope we are in a similar era with regards to climate change. Surely there's a lot of money to be made in harnessing effectively unlimited renewable energy that literally falls from the sky like manna. With a bit of social pressure we should be able to extinct the fossil fuel industry in my opinion.
> I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement. (In reality it was certainly a convoluted mixture of the two I'm sure.)
More or less.
Adam Smith famously wrote that slavery was economically detrimental way back in 1776. It still took nearly 100 years to abolish slavery, and even to this day, people still equate slavery with prosperity (as implied by that controversial 1612 Project article, for example).
Another way to think about it, the South did not embrace slavery because it made them richer; the South embraced slavery because they opposed industrialization. Southerners would regularly complain about the hustle and bustle of the North, the size of the cities, and how hard regular (white) people had to work. The "Southern way of life" was a thing - a leisurely, agrarian society based on forced labor and land instead of capital.
In this regard it's a doubly fitting metaphor because much of the opposition to abolishing slavery was cultural and not economic.
> Adam Smith famously wrote that slavery was economically detrimental way back in 1776. It still took nearly 100 years to abolish slavery...
Slavery had basically been a thing for all of human history up to that point, and based on my discussions on HN many smart people don't believe a lot of what Adam Smith said. There are still a lot of basic economic ideas that would make people much wealthier that struggle to get out into the wild. With that perspective the near-total abolition of slavery in a century seems pretty quick. And it can't really be a social thing because it is clear from history that societies tolerate slavery if it makes sense.
And we see what happened to the people who tried to maintain slavery over that century - they ended up poor then economically, socially and historically humiliated.
The south wasn't really situated for industrialization at the time. They didn't have enough rivers that could turn a water wheel effectively. (That's what I've heard anyway)
Hmm, this doesn’t seem to be accurate. The missouri/mississipi rivers come to mind, as do many other river systems.
Mississippi declaration of secession.
"“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world....Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth.”
Georgia
"“The prohibition of slavery in the Territories… is destructive of our rights and interests.”
Technology developed after Smith's writing changed the calculus. The cotton gin made wide-scale cotton cultivation far more lucrative, and drove American slavery: https://historyincharts.com/the-impact-of-the-cotton-gin-on-...
Without the cotton gin, chattel slavery would have probably ended at least one generation earlier in the US
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- The difference between Ben Franklin writing about farming in the 1770s and the civil war was that industrialization didn't hit the US until the 1810s/1820s when the first steel mills and steam engines were set up.
- "These people categorically did not want to start a farm; otherwise they would not have been facing famine." The vast majority of immigrants to the US at this time WERE farmers who were not allowed to own land in Europe. The reason they came to the North instead of the South is because they were largely not allowed to settle anywhere East of the Appalachians in the South. The South was staunchly anti-immigrant and barely had any cities at the time.
- At the outbreak of war, the Union army was almost entirely made up of American born volunteers. Later, immigrant brigades were enlisted, but most were highly regarded and commended and still made up less than half of the army.
- Your explanation cutely ignores the fact that Southern troops fired first in the Civil War
- The South was staunchly anti-immigrant and barely had any cities at the time.
New Orleans has entered the chat.
I liked it better when you guys called yourselves "Know Nothings". It made it easier to follow what was going on.
These people categorically did not want to start a farm; otherwise they would not have been facing famine.
Please tell me more on your theories regarding these immigrants.
The only ones I'm aware of were Irish immigrants. Most of them were urban dwellers, not farmers. The Irish who were farmers were generally working on farms owned by the English.
What makes you think the newspapers of the day are all telling the truth? Does the media today tell the truth? Did newspapers disclose when the equivalent of a billionaire bought them out and drastically changed the editorial bias?
I'm not saying we shouldn't read historical documents. I'm saying to not apply the same skepticism you would apply to modern media to old media is a mistake.
ah yes the famine was because the people were lazy and did not want to farm. the history understander has logged on for everyone here!
Everything you’ve described sounds economic, not cultural. Being able to lounge around while others toil for your gain is absolutely economic. And the data shows this: if you exclude the enslaved, the south had a higher GDP per capita than the north.
Maybe - a lot of the material wealth of the South was having a lot of land divided amongst fewer people. Enjoying more leisure has a nasty habit of not making people richer in the end.
Here's specifically what Adam Smith had to say in the Wealth of Nations:
> But if great improvements are seldom to be expected from great proprietors, they are least of all to be expected when they employ slaves for their workmen. The experience of all ages and nations, I believe, demonstrates that the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of any. A person who can acquire no property, can have no other interest but to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible. Whatever work he does beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own.
Later, to explain this trap of why people insist on owning slaves even if paying workers would be more productive in the long run:
> "The pride of man makes him love to domineer, and nothing mortifies him so much as to be obliged to condescend to persuade his inferiors. Wherever the law allows it, and the nature of the work can afford it, therefore, he will generally prefer the service of slaves to that of freemen."
> Enjoying more leisure has a nasty habit of not making people richer in the end.
Human slavery might be one of the few exceptions to this. People can reproduce and create more people provided they are given the bare necessities of life. As long as you could keep the enslaved under control, you would have new slaves you could constantly sell and they mostly took care of themselves.
Honestly it sounds like a great life for an unambitious, lazy person. Maybe we’ll all be able to experience something similar when humanoid robots are commonplace in the future. Find an isolated piece of land with a few robots. Make them grow food and commercial crops. Raise some animals. Live a life of relative self sufficiency and leisure.
The issue (for the masters, and besides any ethical issues) is being a slave master is a very tenuous position, and prone to revolts.
Too capable (but also valuable!) slaves tend to be self sufficient and strong enough to throw you off.
Too weak (and therefore non-valuable!) slaves tend to be easy to control - but are a huge drain on the system, including ‘master’ management, which is often the most constrained resource anyway in any hierarchical system.
> if you exclude the enslaved, the south had a higher GDP per capita than the north.
In other words, if you remove the people that earned the least (close to nothing) the overall income per capita goes up? If you exclude the non nobles I am sure the middle ages had a very high GDP too
> Being able to lounge around while others toil for your gain is absolutely economic.
And being comfortable doing it via slave labor is cultural.
> if you exclude the enslaved, the south had a higher GDP per capita
If you exclude the murders, Ted Bundy was a really nice guy.
Prior to the steam engine, what sources of energy you have?
The wind and the water, both rather limited to specific activities (milling, sailing). And the power of human and animal muscle. Where the animals are stronger, but also much dumber, so most of the actual hard work has to be done by human hands.
Basically all the settled civilizations used some sort of non-free or at best semi-free labour. Villeiny, serfdom, prisoners of war, slavery of all sorts, or having low castes do the worst work.
And given that humans are very good at rationalizing away their conditions, the cultures adapted to being comfortable with it, even considering the societal inequality as something ordained by the gods or karma.
> Prior to the steam engine, what sources of energy you have?
Oxen? Paid laborers? It's not like the American South was unique in needing farm workers.
> Basically all the settled civilizations used some sort of non-free or at best semi-free labour.
The South was notable in clinging to slavery long after it had been abolished elsewhere.
> And given that humans are very good at rationalizing away their conditions, the cultures adapted to being comfortable with it, even considering the societal inequality as something ordained by the gods or karma.
Good, then we agree; it was at least in part cultural.
"Oxen? Paid laborers? "
In other words, animal and human muscle, we agree on that.
I didn't claim that all human labour was non-free, far from that. Every classical civilization had paid artisans and employees as well.
But the paid professions tended to be the skilled ones, and the non-free ones tended to be the arduous, backbreaking ones.
"The South was notable in clinging to slavery long after it had been abolished elsewhere."
Elsewhere where? If I look at the timeline of slavery abolition on Wikipedia, it seems that the South was not even the last holdout in the Americas, much less worldwide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...
They were about as delayed as Russia. (Serfdom in Russia was not quite slavery, but brutal and backward nonetheless.)
And the timeline of slavery abolition seems to dovetail with the expansion of the Industrial Revolution across the globe quite tightly, or not?
"it was at least in part cultural."
Chicken, egg. This is a system stretching over millennia with endless feedback loops. Runaway slaves may become the masters (such as the Aztecs) and vice versa, developing their own justifications why it happened.
> In other words, animal and human muscle, we agree on that.
Sure. My objection is to the slavery bit, not the "humans doing work" bit.
> But the paid professions tended to be the skilled ones, and the non-free ones tended to be the arduous, backbreaking ones.
There were plenty of non-slave manual laborers throughout history. Doubly so for chattel slavery of the sort practiced in the South.
> Elsewhere where? If I look at the timeline of slavery abolition on Wikipedia, it seems that the South was not even the last holdout in the Americas, much less worldwide.
What we'd now call the developed world.
That article lists many restrictions and abolitions of the practices hundreds of years prior to the 1860s. The Russians you mention managed it in 1723; Massachusets deems it unconstitional in 1783. By the 1860s still having it as a properous nation was pretty weird.