The End of Industrial Society

>What does "mint preliminary social capital" mean and why is it impossible after industrialization is abandoned?

he is referring to what he describes at the beginning of the essay: preindustrial social forms and traits that lend themselves to industrialization, like high social trust between strangers

>The countryside has become an industrial resource base, rather than the setting for a pre-industrial way of life.

I would like to argue that this is the other way round:

A corn field is a highly parallelized and automatized food creation machine. Is there a significant difference between operating crops and life stock or an industrial machine? I don't think so.

Industrialization means that we have transferred the automation of life onto previously manual processes. The countryside was brought into town.

This process is far from finished. Does anybody on HN doubt that the bureaucratic processes will be automated in a not so distant future? The stalling, the increase in bureaucratic processes is good because it makes it even more profitable to invest into process automation. This will overcome the 'post-industiral trap'.

That said, the observation at the end of the article is still very interesting:

>...will require social technologies of production and knowledge very different from anything we’ve seen before. A good place to start would be a new basis for friendship that defeats atomization, and a truthfulness that is compatible with political loyalty.

Do social technologies have the potential to create systems with far greater capabilities than the ones we have? Is Facebook the 'Wright Flyer of social networks' or is Facebook already the Saturn rocket?

The entire article hinges on the principle that everything collapses because there is "on-paper upward mobility of functional industrial workers to dysfunctional knowledge economy workers." Translation: the knowledge economy isn't as robust as the industrial economy because, reasons.

He never gets into those reasons because he doesn't seem to understand industrial production, and many get it wrong. The industrial worker is actually not an intrinsically special person. The engineers behind the industrial systems, sure. But those engineers still exist in the knowledge economy, and the barrier to become an engineer in a knowledge economy, I would argue, is far lower. In many ways, the industrial worker can be a liability to the knowledge economy, not an asset, because they need to be trained, systems need to be made to met their capabilities, and they will hold on to those systems for a labor generation, while innovations get tabled.

I actually agree with a lot of isolated premises in the article, but he arrives at the conclusion in a roundabout way. He says, for instance, factories in a post-industrial society would be local. Yes, I agree. We will only have resource streams and local cities would have factories that make everything. That's the actual realization of a pure knowledge economy, with many millions of decentralized factories making everything, with a few smart engineers running things, and people dropping out of the labor pool. This is all good, and does not lead to technological decline in any way.

The article has a somber tone, lamenting the holes that have opened up in our societies and economies since the heyday of industrial production.

It mentions but does not expand on the central social problem with industrial production: a small group of people can produce enough product for the whole world. And this problem becomes more acute, the more advanced industry becomes.

(There are other problems with industrial production such as environmental destruction and resource depletion, but these problems seem to be more widely diagnosed and understood.)

We have not yet solved the problem that industrial production is too efficient. I use the word "solved" as I consider the economic system from a humanistic perspective. Much like wealth concentration can reduce the flow of money and disincentivize commerce, the concentration of production can do the same.

I think it's an error that efficiency is the only outcome that needs to be optimized, an error often accompanied by facile arguments about comparative advantage, freeing people to do more productive work, and infinite demand. Post-industrial society is, in my opinion, the result of these arguments failing in the real world.

I think the next stage of economic development is a recognition that efficiency must be weighed against redundancy. (As well as conservation, but again this is more widely recognized.) This wouldn't be a return to pre-industrial society, where redundancy was a necessary background given the limits of transportation and communication. Rather it would require a new mindset that sacrifices efficiency for redundancy in a deliberate tradeoff.

The lovely thing about this "old knowledge" or "old ways" fetishism is that the knowledge economy is a superset of all previous paradigms.

If you were to ask a blacksmith 400 years ago what he thought about people living in a modern air conditioned house and all the luxuries it affords, with a backyard hobby forge, making steel swords, he would probably be freaking miffed. A hobby?!? Forging stuff for a past time?!? I have to make 20 swords a day or my head gets cut off!

Short of catastrophe, we will not be going back. The future may look different, but the knowledge and technology will continue to improve. If we stop driving cars and stop making cars because we have clean cities with many avenues of public transportation the knowledge of 'how to make a car' still exists.

And there will be some dude in that hypothetical society building a car for a hobby.