Tuesday, July 3, 2018
Episode 105: FOB Show Me The Incentives
Play Now!A simple question too often sends my brain into overdrive. That's what happened here, when I was forced to confront the ugly realities of how money warps elections, a confrontation that jived with other reading about how similar realities has warped our nation's agricultural system. If you want to know how things will conclude, consider first Episode 105: FOB Show Me The Incentives.In this episode, I read from: John Moe's Conservatize Me; Keith Bradsher's High and Mighty: SUVs- The World's Most Dangerous vehicles and how they got that way ; and Charles C. Mann's The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World. I also paraphrased from a podcast episode of Peak Prosperity. Sound-wise, I couldn't resist playing a tiny bit of both Monty Python and The Wizard of Oz.
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You really out-did yourself with this one. The connections you draw between these disparate subjects are amazing. I just posted it on F**kbook but I wanted you to know that. And the "Peak Prosperity" interview you cite is just as good. It's like a crash course in permaculture, right there. Thanks!!
ReplyDeleteThanks, Dude! I really appreciate it!
DeleteOh, I'll be making an announcement tomorrow, but Blogger ain't working right. They've stopped sending me comment notifications, for some reason. And it isn't just me; it's been a system-wide problem since May. Weirdness.
Nothing you or anyone else can do; just thought I'd mention it.
Gotta go unpack the camping car.
Later!
—Jim
You didn't mention it, and I don't know if you're aware, but the analogy between mechanized farming and big media elections is exactly the same as that made by Jerry Mander in his classic "Four Arguments..." back in 1978! From the book:
ReplyDelete[A New York advertising man, Lawrence G. Chait] quoted economics professor Corwin Edwards to explain why the larger corporations inevitably get larger during periods of economic growth, absorbing or driving out smaller ones: “In encounters with small enterprises it [the corporate conglomerate] can buy scarce materials and attractive sites, inventions and facilities; preempt the services of most expensive technicians and executives; and acquire reserves of materials for the future. It can absorb losses that would consume the entire capital of a smaller rival…Moment by moment the big company can outbid, out-spend in advertising, technology or talent, or out-lose the smaller ones; and from the series of such momentary advantages it derives an advantage in attaining its larger aggregate results.
“The sociologists may very well take exception to this trend,” Chait said, “but as pragmatists, we must recognize that this in fact the direction in which the economic organization of our country is moving.” Finally, he quoted Dr. Edwin G. Nourse, who believes, “There are no discernable limits at which such concentrations of economic power, once fully underway, would automatically cease.”
A moving example of the way the process works is offered in The American Farm by Masie and Richard Conrat. The authors point out that only two hundred years ago, 95 percent of the population of this country lived on farm land; now less than 5 percent do. The family farm is a creature of the past, and so is the moderately large farm. The economics of technological scale nourish only the hugest agribusiness and their machines...The critical period in this change came immediately after World War II: “With astonishing rapidity, the 60 horsepower general purpose tractor was replaced by a new 140 horsepower model, and then by a towering 235 horsepower machine with a $40,000 price tag. The single-row corn harvester gave place to machines that could handle four rows simultaneously, then eight rows. The cost of such new equipment made it economically imperative for farmers to take on more acreage Between 1950 and 1975, the acreage of the average American farm doubled and the value of farm machinery trebled…those who could not keep up with the frenzied pace were shoved aside and forced to drop out. In the new agriculture there was no room for the man who simply wished to live on the land and work in the soil and sell enough to pay his bills. The dairyman with twenty cows was notified by his milk company that they would not be making pick-ups at his place anymore. From now on the company trucks were stopping only at the farms of the large operators. Small scale vegetable producers, orchardists, and general farmers found themselves underpriced and cut out of the market by supermarket chains and agribusiness corporations.”
What was true for farmers was true for all business as the rapid-growth penomenon gave automatic advantage to the larger, better-financed, more technologically advanced elements of the system.
Smaller competitors were driven from competition by the mere scale of the expenditure required at every level, from the cost of automation to the salaries of executives to the availability of bank loans. Banks, recognizing very early that large companies are better loan risks than small ones, actively aided the advancing juggernaut. Smaller companies were wise o face the fact that it was usually better to sell out before things got worse.
Nowhere were the advantages of size more evident than in advertising. Only the largest corporations in the world have access to network television time because it can cost $120,000 per minute while reaching 30 million people. Television is the media counterpart to the eight-row corn harvester.
I did not know about Mander's book, but Dude, I am so gonna read it! Right up my interest alley!
DeleteThanks for posting the excerpt!
—Jim
Here's another selection from the book. It's amazing how prescient it was. And consider how much media consolidation has occurred since then. I believe it's now only five corporations that control something like 90 percent of the media we consume, including online:
ReplyDeleteBroadcast television, like other monolithic technologies, from eight-row corn threshers and agribusiness to supertankers, nuclear power plants, computer networks, hundred-story office buildings, satellite communications, genetic engineering, international pipelines and SSTs, is available only to monstrous corporate powers. What we get to see on television is what suits the mentality and purposes of one hundred corporations:
While purporting to be a mass technology available to everyone, because everyone can experience it, television is little more than the tool of these companies. If four out of five dollars of television income derive from them, then obviously, without currying their favor the networks would cease to exist.
The corollary is also true. Without such a single, monolithic instrument as television, the effective power and control of these huge corporations could not be harnessed as it presently is. Monolithic economic enterprise needs monolithic media to purvey its philosophy and to influence rapid change in consumption patterns. Without an instrument like television, capable of reaching everyone in the country at the same time and narrowing human needs to match the redesigned environment, the corporations themselves could not exist.
The spread of television unified a whole people within a system of conceptions and living patterns that made possible the expansion of huge economic enterprise. Because of it, our whole culture and the physical shape of the environment, no more or less than our minds and feelings, have been computerized, linearized, suburbanized, freewayed, and packaged for sale.
It is a moot point whether those who control television knew what the outcome would be when they dusted it off after the war and sent it out to sell. Whether they invented television for that purpose or it invented them, the relationship was symbiotic. Its use was predetermined by the evolution of economic and technological patterns that led up to it and that have since continued on their inevitable path. As we shall see, its use and effects were also determined by the nature and limits of television technology itself.
On that note, I just saw that MSNBC intentionally told their reporters NOT to cover the Bernie Sanders campaign: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLuO1qDkoNg
^ These are fantastic comments and excerpts, Chad Hill and Escapefromwisconsin. Thanks for posting them!
ReplyDeleteActually, they are both me, lol! That interview offer still stands BTW.
ReplyDeleteIt is an offer I will certainly consider!
Delete—Jim