[ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals)

[Stefano Vaj]

On 22 December 2011 11:02, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

> On 2011-12-21 23:36, Stefano Vaj wrote:
>
>> To bring things back on topic, I would add that such deliberate effort
>> at creating artificial melting pots not only is openly aimed at reducing
>> cultural diversity in favour of a universal way-of-life, but it helps
>> slowing down, as it has always been the case in slavery-based economies,
>> technological innovation, which is instead a typical consequence of
>> highly-paid, scarce manpower in more communitarian environments.
>>
>
> I'm not entirely convinced. The US has been the main site of technological
> innovation for a long time, yet it has fairly cheap manpower and a not very
> communitarian environment. Certainly Scandinavia and Japan have been
> high-tech (expensive manpower and a communitarian environment), but it
> seems that the availability of capital in the US has been a far more
> deciding factor.
>

This is not a religious dogma for me, so I am ready to review my opinion on
the subject, but the typical examples of technological stagnation and final
fall of slavery-based economies would be the Roman Empire, the
Confederation in the American Civil War and Banana Republics in Latin
America. The typical examples of higher productivity and growth rate in
countries with relatively very highly paid manpower would be in fact
Germany and Japan - not to mention Northern Italy, at least for a while.

I do not know exactly how the United States in the Fordist era, or for that
matter in the fifties and sixties, compared with the rest of the world, but
I doubt that blue-collars in the industrial areas where at the bottom of
world labour price range, especially given that contemporary Russian mujiks
were not really running around in Model T cars. :-)

-- 
Stefano Vaj
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