Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Assumptions don't trade in manufacturing
Layers of abstraction
Much of the modern economy sits on layers and layers of abstraction. People trade Neopets and monkeys on the internet and think that's the economy. At the bottom of the stack is something like a bond someone wrote that said it was fine to do CBOs on all the houses, which wasn't resilient and wasn't making contact with reality.
Rome's rule for senators
Rome handled this differently. The old rule in the Roman Senate was that if your son was going to become a senator, he went and fought the barbarians at the front. The point was contact with the ground-floor reality of the people, in the hope that he made better decisions once he was part of the elite.
Good part, bad part
Manufacturing delivers that contact every day. It's either a good part or a bad part. Without it, people stare at computer screens and forget that the world runs on chips, machine tools, 3D printers, planes, and missiles. Their hands aren't dirty anymore, and that disconnection feeds a fragmented culture.
How did mortgage bonds become so fragile?
Banks pooled home loans into securities and sliced them into tranches, with the safest slices paid first. Some of the riskier slices were repackaged into collateralized debt obligations. When U.S. house prices began falling in 2006 and 2007, defaults spread through the pools. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission's 2011 report concluded that the crisis was avoidable.
Why did Roman politicians have to serve in the army?
The Greek historian Polybius wrote in the second century BCE that a Roman had to complete ten years of military service before standing for public office. Military service was part of the career path later called the cursus honorum, the sequence of offices from quaestor to consul. It gave aspiring politicians battlefield experience and standing with the voters who had served beside them. Polybius, who lived in Rome for years, described the system in the sixth book of his Histories.
How did offshoring concentrate job losses?
Economists David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson studied the surge of Chinese imports after 2000 and estimated that it cost up to 2.4 million U.S. jobs between 1999 and 2011. The losses clustered in particular local labor markets, such as furniture and textile towns, where few other employers filled the gap. Those regions saw lasting drops in employment and wages. Their work became known as the China shock research.
More from The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe
