Via a mailing list I discovered a stunning series of photograhs of machinery taken at the Hagley Museum, set among beautiful gardens at the original gunpowder mill built by Eleuthère Irénée du Pont in 1803 in Delaware in the US. The museum includes several restored buildings, and offers a romantic, languorous view on America’s industrial past.

Selecting just one example of the photography was hard, because the composition, textures, colours and lighting in all shots are just beautiful — do view the rest of the set — but I particularly like this press:

The photographer, Harold Ross, specialises in techniques such as light painting, used in the Hagley series, and has a great porfolio at the Ross Studios website.

Who said machines are ugly? Who said Charles Dickens wrote all you need to know about the industrial revolution?

Every entrepreneur that’s in the business of making something new or better would love to get government subsidies to help them “reach economies of scale”, or “pay for the social benefit of being green”, or some such thing. Of course they would. Government intervention can reduce the risk of innovation, and can even force customers to buy your product whether they like it or not. Such subsidies are fundamentally unjust, however, because in effect, taxpayers end up paying for the research and carrying the risk, without being able to share in the entrepreneur’s profits should he succeed. I’d also like to do business on those terms. After all, the only cost of such a subsidy is a pledged vote. It would put a floor below my losses, and boost my potential profits, all at some other sucker’s expense. Nice. And that sucker can’t even argue, because tax is the sole remaining debt for which people still get thrown in prison.

This Cato Institute paper from 2005 explains the problem neatly:

The current debate about U.S. oil policy is equally enlightened. It is dominated by a special-interest lobby whose primary interest is to enrich automakers and alternative-fuel producers, and by journalists whose enthusiasm for the green agenda has clouded their understanding of basic economics.

My question is, when a private organisation raises a prize purse, and the contenders look like this, who needs government subsidies anyway?

(Click on any of the images for the relevant Popular Mechanics page.)

I haven’t looked into the economics of each car, because that’s not my problem. The Tesla Roadster, for one, has already proven perfectly competitive and very, very desirable. All that’s required is an investor with his own money to stake on the notion that a market might exist. Governments are not only singularly unsuited to determine the latter, but have no right to gamble taxpayer money on it.

So welcome back to the glory days of the industrial revolution, when ingenuity, risk and free market capitalism built the modern world. And thanks to the X-Prize Foundation for demonstrating that the economics of human action and progress is alive and kicking.

PS: Prescient typo, perhaps, on www.tesla.com? “The associated domain name has been reserved by a GANDI’s customer and parked as unsued.”

I just responded to a comment on my “10 reasons to reject global warming” post, and since I often get variations on these questions, I thought I’d turn that response, with minor edits and additions, into a separate post.

Here are the questions:

1) Would you risk the Earth for your carefree lifestyle?

2) I’m pretty sure you’ve seen heavily industrialized areas before (such as Beijing)…I promise you that that smog was not there before we humans got around to letting out excess carbon all the time. How do you propose cleaning up our mess? By sitting around watching TV all day? (Not that I’m saying that’s what you do, but you get my drift.)

Both questions involve fallacies of various kinds, so I’ll address them in some detail.

1) I’m not risking anything. Rejecting global warming orthodoxy — and a government-imposed “solution” to the “crisis” — doesn’t constitute a “carefree lifestyle”. It simply means a different view of the environment, and a different view on how to solve environmental problems. I don’t believe that the Earth is being risked. The Earth will be just fine. The environment has proven to be a pretty robust system, with a tendency to return to stable equilibrium, rather than a fragile system whose unstable equilibrium is easily disturbed for good. Besides which, there’s risk in anything, whether it’s planting a field of wheat, drilling a borehole shaft, building a house, taking a job, crossing the road. There’s also risk in not doing any of those things.

Surely one doesn’t go around asking people, “Would you risk your life to cross the road? Is it really worth your life to get to the other side?” Surely one doesn’t advocate laws that restrict road crossing only to people who can demonstrate that they have no alternative, have paid their road-crossing tax, have undertaken at their own cost a documented study of traffic conditions in the area so their road-crossing has the minimum possible impact, and undertake not to cross the road more than three times a day? (Insert gratuitous chicken joke here.)

2) Environmental pollution and global warming orthodoxy are not the same thing. Saying that carbon emissions cause smog is not the same as saying they cause global warming. Smog can be tolerated, dissipated, or minimised. Global warming, by contrast, is supposedly an irreversible catastrophe making life on Earth hard or impossible.

Not believing that global warming is a catastrophic crisis, or rejecting a government-imposed tax-and-regulate approach to it, does not mean one favours pollution, slash-and-burn agriculture, or not caring about the environment. There’s a difference between opposing modern environmentalism and opposing a healthy, sustainable environment or sensible nature conservation.

If I said the war on drugs isn’t working, would you ask me whether I favour mainlining kids on heroin? If I said I’m opposed to banning alcohol, would you ask me whether I want to die of cirrhosis of the liver and heart disease? Would you ask how I propose to deal with drunken bar fights and marital violence while alcohol remains legal? This question on pollution is just as absurd. The “drift” is irrelevant, and does not address any of the reasons why I claimed I don’t believe the orthodox dogma about global warming, its causes, and its solutions.

But let me address pollution, since it often comes up as a convenient way to change the subject from arguments about climate change. Pollution is something that people won’t tolerate when they can afford not to tolerate it. Look around the world: pollution is inversely correlated with prosperity. The richer people get, the less pollution they are willing to accept, and the more they care about the environment. They can’t get prosperous without some measure of pollution or environmental damage, but they also can’t get prosperous without giving some care to the sustainability of their economic growth. This is why the best way to ensure both health and prosperity, to ensure both economic growth and environmental sustainability, is to grant private property rights that ensure people will consider their land and environmental resources as assets to be wisely exploited for long-term gain.

London is a classic example. During the Industrial Revolution, Londeners bore the burden of air and water pollution, in return for remarkable economic development. Today, London’s air is cleaner than it has been at any time in the last four centuries, the streets are no longer covered in ankle-deep manure, starvation and plague are unheard of, and the average citizen lives three times as long and many times as well. Pollution was a temporary cost, which is not tolerated in a prosperous, successful society. In fact, the pollution peak came 120 years ago. It was since then, the most prosperous time of all, which saw the introduction of the fossil-fuel-burning motor vehicle, in which the majority of historic smog was eliminated.

Part of the reason is that our predominant fuels have contained progressively less carbon. We used to burn straw and wood. Then we burnt coal. Then oil. Then natural gas. Each contains less carbon than its predecessor, and there’s no reason to believe that this trend will stop.

It is also instructive to note that the most filthy industrial areas of all have been in regions where governments run industrial production on behalf of the people, instead of companies producing for private profit. Examples are common in former Soviet regions, for example — and indeed in China, to a considerable extent. Where there aren’t any property rights, or people are not free to wield power over their government or industrial organisations, that’s where things go badly wrong. That’s where people are unable to take care of their own wellbeing, and where people with no stake in society and the environment get to mismanage it however they please. To this day, the most serious environmental problems occur in regions where there aren’t any private property rights, and the tragedy of the commons is the rule. Think fishing, logging, hunting, for example.

So in short:

1) Irrelevant question, because both assumptions — that the Earth is at risk, or that the alternative to global warmism is a “carefree lifestyle” — are false.

2) I propose that people get rich enough to sit around watching TV all day. That way, they won’t tolerate pollution, will want a healthy environment, and can afford to invest in cleaner, more sustainable environmental resources.

This column was first published in Maverick, 9 August 2007. If you live in South Africa, and like great photography and copy marred only by my own, do subscribe.

We think we’re so smart. We think the problems we face are unique and modern and unprecedented. We think things are different now. They aren’t. When the invisible hand is bound, the dead hand rules.

Who wouldn’t kill for a name like Isambard Kingdom Brunel? It has the grandeur of his life about it. He was driven by an iron will and untiring work ethic. Even his failures – such as propelling trains by a sort of very long pea shooter with a vacuum pump at the end – were stupendous feats of grand engineering.

He died in 1859, aged only 53, yet his life story reads like the parallel lives of two men – one a railway engineer of renown, and another a famous ship builder. Throughout his life, while working on some of the most complex and grand projects of the golden age of engineering, he fought tirelessly against his commercial rivals. Yet he reserved his strongest animosity not for his competitors, but for the government.

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I often say, in connection with issues such as foreign aid, state subsidies, or celebrities stumping for Africa, that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Good intentions alone do not justify policy. The consequences of policy are what matters.

This observation cuts both ways, however. This editorial by Gregory Clark, author of Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, uses the same aphorism, and then, ironically, proceeds to illustrate the point.

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Last week, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial by John Fund about Roşia Montană¹, a small town in Romania, where Western “environmentalists” such as George Soros and Vanessa Redgrave are trying to stoke up opposition to a proposed gold mine. This is a place with 70% unemployment, where the filthy remnants of Soviet-era mining remain a scar on the landscape, and where 80% of the population voted for a mayor who supports the project because it will create 700 new jobs. The mine will also clean up a lot of the damage done in the past, according to its backers.

The editorial contrasts two documentary films. Opposed is Gold Futures, by Hungary’s Tibor Kocsis, partly funded by Soros. In favour is Mine Your Own Business by Irish journalists and filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney. No surprises which side I back. A Google search suggests that Gold Futures hasn’t exactly aired (on America’s PBS) to rave reviews either.

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1. Rosia Montana, if you can’t see funny characters [↩]

Neil Blakey-Milner asked the following, in response to my previous post on fear of trade with China and protectionism. It’s a good question, worthy of a detailed response.

What should a country do about imports from countries that are known to be or highly suspected of using child labour or other forms of “slave” labour or other techniques that are banned by that country?

First, let’s stipulate that only a small fraction of the trade that ends up being restricted by tariffs or other forms of protectionism is, by this standard, objectionable, and that this fraction represents an extreme-case scenario. I’ll focus mostly on child labour in my response, but similar arguments go for other forms of labour policy on which prosperous nations frown.

Let me first try to be somewhat specific: Africa, not Asia, has the highest child labour force participation rate in the world. According to UNICEF, almost one in three African children work, while the corresponding figure for Asia is one in five. That Asian statistic is not much worse than that in Latin America or the Middle East. Why China should be singled out for censure is unclear to me.

Moreover, child labour below the age of 16 is illegal in China. The International Labour Organisation recommends a minimum working age of 15, and China has ratified the relevant convention. So the problem is not one of legal labour standards either.

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I never did continue with history at school, after the ninth grade. It bored me senseless. I remember mostly endless repetitions of the colonial history of South Africa, the Zulu Wars and the Great Trek. It was with some surprise that I found myself reading more and more history as I grew older, however. Why, then, the disinterest as a kid? Was it just because of the parochial scope of Apartheid education? Or was there some other reason history seemed dead and insignificant?

Sheryl Longin has a theory:

I wonder if we aren’t using a hopelessly irrelevant, archaic framework to teach a subject that is absolutely vital to our children if we care about the future of the modern world. How about basing primary school history education on the evolution of the material, of inventions, of progress? From the evolution of toilet paper will come a thousand other history lessons, touching on everything from economics to politics to religion. And those lessons will be remembered, because they will be answering questions that children (and adults) naturally have.

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Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s very name has the grandeur of his life about it. Even his failures (such as propelling trains using a sort of very long pea shooter) were stupendous feats of a grand imagination and of the motive force of iron will. He was a giant of the industrial revolution, a rugged individualist, a master architect and an excellent engineer.

He’s most famous, I suppose, for the drama surrounding his last great achievement, the leviathan that the public baptised the Great Eastern, a steam ship propelled by both screw and paddles, more than twice as long and eight times the displacement of his previous ship. It was large enough to make the Australia run without coaling, and would later be used to lay transoceanic telegraph cables to connect the world. He had built the largest ship of her day. Not once, not twice, but three times. The other two were the first real trans-Atlantic steamer, the Great Western, and the first steamer built entirely of iron, the Great Britain. He surveyed, engineered and built the longest railway to that date, the Great Western Railway from Bristol to London. At either end, he built the glorious Victorian steel structures of Temple Meads Station and Paddington Station too. At age 24 he designed the magnificent Clifton Suspension Bridge across the Avon near Bristol, though it was completed only after his death. He did build the beautiful Royal Albert Bridge at Saltash. He designed a remarkable modular hospital (”prefab”, if you will) equipped with a range of innovative hygiene facilities for use in the Crimea, to replace the festering charnel house that made Florence Nightingale famous. [Note: this para edited, no significant factual changes, July 14, 2007 @ 23:44]

He was always curious though, why it was that he could design and build that hospital and get it aboard a fleet of ships, while the government in the same amount of time couldn’t rustle up the basic medical supplies that needed to be shipped along. “They have an unlimited supply of some negative principle which seems to absorb and eliminate everything that approaches them,” he wrote, according to a 1957 biography by L.T.C. Rolt. I think I might write something about those sentiments sometime.

I’d better stick to his economics, and not his engineering. I’m already slightly weird about naval history and building my wooden ship model. I’d hate to accidentally build a model of the Great Western Railway too. There’s a line between somewhat weird and downright scary. I can clearly see that line on the horizon, through the fake brass goggles I made…