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The Price of Nails Since 1695

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Re: The Price of Nails Since 1695

#51

Post by Ancapistani »

tasha0663 wrote: post #15
WalterBright wrote: post #6

I hadn't realized how valuable and useful nails were until I toured Monticello, and there was a nailery out back. I.e. you couldn't just go buy a bag of nails, you had to make them yourself.

> you had to make them yourself Well... not quite... > Up to fourteen young male slaves, aged ten to twenty-one, worked at the forges of the nailery. From 1794 to 1796, while he was in temporary retirement at Monticello, Jefferson calculated the efficiency of the nailers, each day weighing their nail rod and the nails they produced. (Source: https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/nai... ) Though it…

Jefferson did in fact make a number of those workers as well.

Re: The Price of Nails Since 1695

#52

Post by watwut »

taneliv wrote: post #48
shanecoughlan wrote: post #8

I found this to be an enlightening and fun article. The one negative I would flag is that it is US-centric and - while nails did not change much during that period - the US was created as a collection of states while being settled by colonizers. That was a very disruptive geographic phase. It would probably be more useful to have run a similar study against Europe during this period. While the formation of nation sta…

I'm no historian, but your view appears almost ignorant of European history. There were a number of very disruptive wars in Europe during the last three centuries, not to mention emergence and disappearance of whole nations, whether defined by language or state borders or armies. The numerous famines and genocides had a very real socio-economic impact. Socialist and communist governments in the last hundred years wit…

I think you ignore quite a lot of US history when you call period from 1695 up stable. US was expanding - that implies a lot of war and conflict, both internally and externally. There were also multiple notable population migrations within US. Either to new territories, or disposal of people from them, or what they call "the great migration" of african americans in the twenty century.

Re: The Price of Nails Since 1695

#53

Post by Cthulhu_ »

amcoastal wrote: post #47
runeks wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - The main driver of this cost increase is more expensive labor and services, essentially human time is becoming more expensive to purchase. This is interesting, because I’d assume that the labor part of the total cost to produce a nail has fallen to practically zero nowadays. I would assume that capital (machines and factory buildings) and raw material (steel) would comprise practically the entire cost of producin…

Not relative to the 90s. I doubt nail manufacturing has gone through many changes, but the workers (as few as they may be) now make much more money.

And yet at the same time, production has moved to regions and countries with lower wages.

Re: The Price of Nails Since 1695

#54

Post by Cthulhu_ »

divbzero wrote: post #49
jacquesm wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once upon a time nails were valuable enough to be passed on to offspring in the estate of a deceased person. It was also pretty common to recycle them when taking something apart, not to remelt them but simply to re-use them after straightening.

My high school teacher said that there were American colonists who burned their houses to reuse the nails. It sounded farfetched to my teenaged mind but apparently that probably actually happened [1]. [1]: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/40503/were-iron...

Reminds me of a shop I once worked at, they would pile up the used wooden pallets out back - no deposit or return policy I guess? - and once a month or so a guy would come around with a trailer to pick them up. He'd take them apart, burn the wood, and sell the nails for scrap.

Re: The Price of Nails Since 1695

#56

Post by inglor_cz »

thombat wrote: post #24
jacquesm wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lovely that you added the piece of string in there, that's about the most multi-functional tool there is. Plumbbob (using a large nail as weight!), level line, marker, fixture (and many others) all at once.

And far too valuable to discard frivilously - I heard a medieval historian bewailing the cinematic convention of cutting a prisoner's bonds when setting them free, basically "do they not know how many hours of work it took to make a good rope? Nobody poorer than Alexander the Great would go slashing knots!"

Interesting.

I read a book by a Czech resistance guy who managed to escape the death penalty in a Nazi court by feigning enough stupidity and "only" got sentenced to 10 years in prison in Glatz (nowadays Klodzko in Poland).

According to him, they spent their prison days working on manually recycling old ropes for the German war effort. In 1944-1945.

Re: The Price of Nails Since 1695

#59

Post by taneliv »

watwut wrote: post #52
taneliv wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no historian, but your view appears almost ignorant of European history. There were a number of very disruptive wars in Europe during the last three centuries, not to mention emergence and disappearance of whole nations, whether defined by language or state borders or armies. The numerous famines and genocides had a very real socio-economic impact. Socialist and communist governments in the last hundred years wit…

I think you ignore quite a lot of US history when you call period from 1695 up stable. US was expanding - that implies a lot of war and conflict, both internally and externally. There were also multiple notable population migrations within US. Either to new territories, or disposal of people from them, or what they call "the great migration" of african americans in the twenty century.

I hope I'm not ignoring, but it is possible. I don't know how to capture the instability in either region by some sort of a metric to make them comparable. However, the examples you give seem almost insignificant in comparison to events at the same time in Europe.

For example, in 1900s Soviet Union alone forcefully displaced more than 20 million people. In the 1700s and 1800s Europe saw several wars, which claimed millions of casualties each and were largely fought in areas where people in peaceful times would be producing and consuming nails. I think the US westward expansion and conflicts (with the exception of the Civil War) happened largely in the new areas and possibly had relatively little effect on the more established regions in the East.

I could go on with more examples, but that would not increase my understanding. How could I better understand the instability in the US?

As a hopefully illuminating example on the other side, some of the European instability is implicitly captured by the Wikipedia list of conflicts[1], keeping in mind that casualties are hundreds of thousands or even over a million deaths in many cases even though not listed. Are there similar (or more in-depth) resources that would indicate my ignorance and help me learn more about how the US expansion, conflicts and migration caused instability?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_Europe#18...

Re: The Price of Nails Since 1695

#60

Post by watwut »

taneliv wrote: post #59
watwut wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you ignore quite a lot of US history when you call period from 1695 up stable. US was expanding - that implies a lot of war and conflict, both internally and externally. There were also multiple notable population migrations within US. Either to new territories, or disposal of people from them, or what they call "the great migration" of african americans in the twenty century.

I hope I'm not ignoring, but it is possible. I don't know how to capture the instability in either region by some sort of a metric to make them comparable. However, the examples you give seem almost insignificant in comparison to events at the same time in Europe. For example, in 1900s Soviet Union alone forcefully displaced more than 20 million people. In the 1700s and 1800s Europe saw several wars, which claimed mi…

I reacted to this "The colonizers of the US were largely immigrants from Europe, who were fleeing war, oppression, famine or other calamity. There has never been any comparable immigration from the US to Europe (or indeed to anywhere). To me this indicates very strongly which region has been stable or not."

In terms of wars and moving away, US had a lot of action going on. US history is actually interesting.

* 1695 - 1865 is period of slavery and thus massive forced movement of huge amounts of people. Especially by the last decades, there was a lot of movement of slaves within united states. By a lot, I mean really huge amounts due to business moving.

* The whole native-american population was displaced or killed from majority of the continent in that span. Those areas did not magically appeared out of nowhere empty.

* The war between north and south was actually major conflict. The leadup to it was bloody. The aftermath of it completely transformed economy and culture in the South.

* South consequently went through short but real period of democratization and then closing up the politics to groups.

* Approximately six million Black people moved from the American South to Northern by the beginning of 20 century.

------------

And before you say they did not produced nails, neither did peasants in Soviet Union all that much. That region was hugely rural, hugely behind the times in terms of industry or literacy.

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