(a chapter from the unpublished The Economic Philosophy of a Non-Economist)
“Every good or service is subsidized by its history. Therefore, the total cost of a good or service is never captured by its present-day price. If it were, we could not bear it.”
A weird jumping off point
The “reimagined” Battlestar Galactica is a hell of a television show. The SciFi Channel (wussies renamed it SyFy) series tells the story of humans at war with robots they created; the robots, called Cylons, strive for an idealized version of human perfection, while the humans struggle to maintain their humanity under desperate, horrific conditions. It’s an old story, as old as mankind: Man playing God and God not liking it one bit.
Great science fiction must meet one of two criteria: (1) It is either plausible or (2) The implausible is presented in such a way that we want it to be plausible. J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Trilogy of the Ring meet the second criteria like nobody’s business; Battlestar Galactica brilliantly succeeded on the first.
Though the series is not set on Earth, things resemble our world enough to provide a useful context for storytelling: language, dress, people’s names (with some unusual admixtures), military and political protocols, fucked up personal lives, worship of Greek gods, even a classic rock song, All Along the Watchtower, which played a key role in the end; but there are sufficient differences to keep us guessing about who these people are, what the hell is going on, and what is going to happen next. A cleverly irreverent difference is a ship’s doctor who openly chain smokes in the sickbay. Right on, bro!
Any story, which at its simplest level tells a tale of good versus evil, heroes versus villains, is made much better if the demarcation line between the two warring sides is blurred to an extent which forces us—the audience—to think in greater depth about our own lives, our own history, real world events in the here and now. Mission accomplished here, also.
Science fiction allows us to face controversial topics and important real-life issues from a bearable objectivity, one provided by time, distance, or an alien species serving as a thinly disguised stand-in for ourselves, camouflaged just enough for our collective denial to remain intact should things get too uncomfortable. The ability to pretend that make-believe is, well, really make-believe, and not an allegory that hits too damn close to home.
Most importantly, Battlestar Galactica didn’t play patty cake with its fans. A show where the cancer-stricken female president makes a compelling case for genocide, and the profoundly flawed founder of a new (at least for these humans) monotheistic religion tells his flock that God should come down here, get on His knees, and beg us for forgiveness, isn’t shying away from really serious shit. I respected the show for respecting me as a viewer who is not afraid to get down and dirty with tough subjects. Fuck political correctness and cultural and religious sensitivity.
I mean, can you imagine yourself discussing such powerful subjects with family or friends in your living room or a stranger seated next to you on the bus? How about a substantive conversation on a first date: Is genocide ever justified? Does a god to have the right to judge its creations? Can the crime of rape occur if the victim is not human? In a time of war, how far should a free society go to protect itself from destruction?
Yeah, neither can I.
At various points, and to varying degrees of depth, the show touched on scores of raw, real topics, including abortion, the suspension of democracy during time of war, national security, terrorism, torture, genocide, justice, revenge, class, homosexuality, rape, motherhood, religion, inter-racial (and inter-species) romance, adultery, alcoholism, drug use, prejudice, bioethics, civilian control of the military, and, yes, many economics issues such as black markets, logistics, securing raw materials, the division of labor, to name a few. Hell, the viewer was forced to ponder what does victory even mean in a war in which both sides are determined to mercilessly extirpate the other, an intractable position that for both combatants is fully understandable if you give it some very real, very politically incorrect—but profoundly human—thought. If “there cannot be,” as Genghis Khan said, “two suns in the sky,” then you better damn well make sure the one hanging up there is yours and not your enemy’s.
Whatever your opinion on any of these topics, you were served up reason to consider—and perhaps reconsider—your stand. Perhaps, take a position for the first damn time in your life. Which is a good thing. No longer can we leave debate on any important topic to the pussies of the world (e.g., politicians, pundits, and candy-ass activists).
As a side note, here’s my definition of an activist: Someone who has way too much fucking time on his hands, and therefore—while productive folks are working real jobs—is able to publicly indulge his narcissism, self-indulgence, phony piety, and immature mischief making. In other words, a sanctimonious asshole who harms others, including harming those on whose behalf he claims to be “fighting for.”
I began writing this chapter prior to the series finale. In fact, the original title of the chapter was, “How Much Does a Washing Machine Actually Cost?” I decided to too-cleverly rename it using the human pejorative for Cylon. The household appliance (durable good in economic parlance) chosen for the title doesn’t change the economic aspects we discuss soon enough.
Man, the show’s final episode left me stunned and made me better appreciate several key points about economics—all from the comfort afforded me by time, distance, alien surrogates.
Suffice to say, it was a confluence of some of my favorite interests: mathematics, economics, astrophysics, not to mention a good love story. Before I tell you why, I need to summarize the show to set the table as to how economics is involved. For those of you who haven’t seen the show, this background is critical; if you have watched it, you can compare my interpretation with your own. Either way, bear with me.
Here goes…
Human beings (at least they look human and call themselves human) live on twelve planets united as The Twelve Colonies. They’ve developed faster than light (FTL) space travel and metallic robots (Cylons) to do their bidding—the Cylons toil in dangerous jobs, perform grunt work, fight wars. The human lives appear real to the viewer: all damaged in some way, but doing the best they can—or can’t. Many times, while watching the series, I muttered to myself, “All the damaged lives…all the damaged lives…how do they go on?”
But they did go on. Just as humans always have. Always must.
Eventually, the robots rebel against their human masters and the First Cylon War erupts. After much bloodshed (and metal-shed), a truce is declared, the Cylons disappear, and for forty years there is peace between human and Cylon.
As Nietzsche advises, “Use peace as a means to new war,” and, boy, did the Cylons ever; returning hell bent on finishing the job of exterminating the humans once-and-for-all. But now there is a new complication, and it’s a delectable one: The metallic Cylons are still around…ironically serving as soldiers and menial laborers in their culture (man, nigger can’t catch a break), but they’ve developed twelve “advanced” models which look human (the aptly named “skinjobs”) and serve as leaders. As we’ve seen time and time again in human history, the leaders of a revolution eventually resemble the very enemy they overthrew. In blunt economic terms: Societies always seem to divide themselves into niggers and non-niggers, and it ain’t necessarily based on melanin.
Further adding to the drama, some of the skinjobs live among the humans (planted as operatives prior to renewed hostilities) and some of these infiltrators don’t realize they’re Cylon until activated, and even the ones who do know—or come to know—are rife with emotions, desires, failings, which make their “lives” as damaged and complicated as their human foes. Several of the skinjobs desperately want to be human, be accepted by humans, experience love (the fools!), not realizing we humans are nothing more than a flawed wreck in progress ourselves, no closer to achieving our ideals than the most advanced robot could ever hope to realize. In some ways the Cylons make a better effort at these ideals than many of the humans; perhaps they’re in possession of greater appreciation of what it means to be human, brought about by the ultimate objectivity: The fact they’re not.
The Battlestar Galactica series begins with the Cylons launching a massive surprise nuclear attack on the Colonies (a very brief Second Cylon War), resulting in an almost complete obliteration of the human race. Out of billions, approximately fifty thousand humans survive, a tally ominously updated with regularity on a dry erase board hung in President Laura Roslin’s meeting room onboard Colonial One, and which steadily decreases over the show’s run. The first birth among the fleet is duly noted as a rare, celebratory uptick. (President Roslin also banned abortion, which is understandable under the dire circumstances facing their species.)
Led by a single battlestar (a spaceship that is a hybrid battleship-aircraft carrier), Galactica, a ragtag fleet of surviving civilian spaceships searches for a new home, a legend cryptically described in the sacred scrolls of their polytheistic religion (the Greek gods/Lords of Kobol): the planet Earth. (As an indication of the success of the Cylon attack, Laura Roslin, as Secretary of Education for the Twelve Colonies, was 43rd in the line of succession to be president!)
A multi-year exodus ensues during which the humans suffer attacks from the pursuing Cylons, political upheaval, electoral shenanigans, betrayal, treason, terrorist attacks, hunger, disease, fuel shortages, false hopes, court cases, a religious reformation movement, coups, mutiny, death, and an eventually an uneasy alliance with Cylon rebels who turned against their own kind. Over the course of the show, the Cylons seek for themselves a humanness imitative of real humans, perhaps mistakenly believing we’ve actually found it ourselves. Intriguingly, the Cylons are monotheists and use their religion on any number of occasions to justify their actions, no matter how brutal—or tender. Sound familiar?
At the series conclusion, the rebel Cylons and humans, including a child Hera who is the daughter of a Cylon mother and a human father—a complex romantic subplot if there ever was one—arrive at long last at a habitable planet, which they name Earth…in an earlier episode the real Earth was found destroyed by a nuclear war which occurred thousands of years ago.
Like a punch in the stomach, we learn this newly discovered world, named in honor of their planet Earth, is our Earth, the viewers’ cozy little planet, and it is populated by prehistoric human(oid)s who are only viewed from a distance, so it is unclear if they are Homo sapiens, Neanderthal, Cro-Magon, or some other limb plucked from the anthropological tree we’ve seen detailed in textbooks or stuck on the wall of a natural history museum. Are they perhaps the post-human remnants of another destroyed civilization?
Breathing a sigh of relief, at this point, a rational viewer assumes the human/Cylon settlers would get cracking on setting up a new civilization; try and do better this time around—a “Three Laws of Robotics” programmed to take comes to mind. We expect—at least I did—these pioneers would lay down streets and cities, develop water supplies and sewage disposal, set up schools, hold elections, cling to the shreds of an advanced civilization in the hope of building it back up again, the goal surely to avoid the same mistakes this go around.
Instead—oh, my God, instead—they decide on a profoundly final choice: They destroy their ships, separate into small groups and spread out over the planet’s surface, and walk away (literally) from their technology. Kind of like going camping—only forever.
I would not have made this same choice—at least, I think I wouldn’t. Its finality and magnitude made me want to scream, “No! No! Don’t you see what you’re doing! You’re throwing it all away!” But I understood it. They’d let technology get away from them and blamed it for all their ills, and perhaps they no longer trusted themselves to derive sufficient good from technology to justify the evil (or risk of evil) side effects. Maybe they thought renouncing and then forgetting technology would let them forget the unimaginable suffering they’d endured and avoid a repeat.
They didn’t think it through. But how could we expect them to give it much thought after years of pain and loss and horror. They were fully spent emotionally and logistically, and had nothing left, nothing at all. To them the choice was easy under the circumstances; there was no protest, and the sense of collective relief among the survivors was obvious. They’d return mankind (and its Cylon allies) to the simplest of technological states (and economic systems) known to humans: hunter/gatherers or the slightly more advanced sustenance farming.
But in doing so, they guaranteed bringing additional horrors upon themselves (and their descendants): famine, malnutrition, pestilence, disease, staggeringly high levels of infant mortality, untreatable medical conditions, significantly shorter life spans, back-breaking work, slavery, oppression of women, superstition, ignorance, religious persecution, human sacrifice, inquisition—more, yes, much more war and genocide. All the isms to plague mankind over again: communism, capitalism, socialism, environmental extremism, polytheism, monotheism, Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam. Did they not see that idyllic romanticism is a most foolish idealism?
How do we know this? How can we be certain that they didn’t settle comfortably into simple itinerant tribes or more-settled agrarian societies devoid of the worst human shortcomings? How do we know their lives weren’t uncomplicated, happy, and carefree—the simple, unsurpassable perfection of the herder/farmer/artisan/philosopher envisioned by our own modern-day Ecotaliban?
We know this because at the very end of the final episode we’re fast-forwarded 150,000 years into the future and find ourselves in modern-day New York City. Turns out the human and Cylon settlers intermarried, had babies, and became us—possibly mixing with the indigenous inhabitants, as well. We the viewers are their descendants. The Twelve Colonies, it turns out, are in our long ago past, a fact lost to us with the passage of the millennia.
The show closes with shots of the primitive robots of today, still a curiosity rather than a full-blown servant. The statement that was repeated throughout the series screams inside our heads, an echo of a passage from Ecclesiastes in our human Bible: All this has happened before and will happen again.
They threw away all the hard-won knowledge; there was no “learning from mistakes” but the curse of having to relearn everything—mistakes and all—over again, over the course of 150 millennia.
Talk about starting from scratch.
Now that we know how we got here (to this point in the chapter, not Earth necessarily), let’s see what we can do with it. Using the last episode of Battlestar Galactica as our context, a host of economics questions come to mind:
- What does a toaster really cost (one that toasts bread)?
- What is the minimum number of people necessary for an advanced society to function and, most importantly, continue on?
- What happens to technological knowledge if the underlying infrastructure no longer exists—or the population drops below a critical threshold?
- What type of economic system forms under such conditions?
- Are there people among us (i.e., the Ecotaliban, Just Stop Oil) who would force upon our society the final choice made by the humans/Cylon rebels if given the opportunity?
These are meaty questions. For this chapter, we dig into the first one.
The cost of a toaster: The price of something is not necessarily its cost
I’m not talking about an expensive top-of-the-line designer toaster costing hundreds of dollars and guaranteed to last a lifetime. For that much money, the damn thing better give me a lap dance with each serving of what I’m sure is the most perfectly golden-brown toast you ever saw. You got that kind of money to waste, then this book probably isn’t for you, but I’m glad you read it anyway.
We’re gonna get real here and talk about a toaster that regular folks might purchase.
Go shopping in just about any city in the United States in 2009; for example, at Walmart or Target or a chain drugstore, and you can find a low-end toaster for around ten dollars. [In 2024, I found one on Walmart.com for ten dollars!] Definitely nothing fancy. It’s not going to give you a lap dance, but it’ll get the toasting job done adequately. When it breaks after a few years, you’ll toss it in the garbage and buy another one. You definitely won’t take it to a small appliance repair shop to be fixed—as if such places exist anymore (think of Emmett’s Fix-it Shop from the Andy Griffith Show). They don’t, so don’t bother looking.
Remarkably, this ten-dollar toaster is cheaper in price, both in today’s dollars and when adjusted for inflation, than a toaster bought decades ago—which itself is an amazing economic fact worthy of its own book—the result of globalization, technological advances (which doesn’t always mean improved quality but sure as shit means lower prices), comparative advantage of overseas workers, and substantially lowered shipping costs (read the book, The Box by Marc Levinson). It is extremely likely the toaster was manufactured in China. (For comparison, a Sears toaster in 1949 cost $16.95, which is $224.19 in 2024 dollars!)
There is an additional consideration regarding the cost of something. The price of a good or service reflects its imbedded energy costs, so “locally” grown or manufactured doesn’t necessarily mean energy savings, despite what the Ecotaliban invariably believe. By extension, repairing an el cheapo toaster, while perhaps making us feel environmentally smug about ourselves, doesn’t necessarily save energy compared to just going out and buying a new one; in fact, it may cause more net pollution than just going out and buying a new toaster. To say a new toaster built by your next-door neighbor generates less net pollution in production and distribution than a toaster built in a factory thousands of miles away is foolish unless you perform the proper analysis to prove it true. Realize that such proof does not benefit the Ecotaliban agenda unless it’s consistent with their ideology, so it won’t be sought in the first place. This is the case with any study that might result in a contradiction to Woke orthodoxy.
Whatever the price, we assume the cost of the toaster reflects the expense of making it, plus a profit. Otherwise, how (and why) would it get manufactured?
Perhaps I’m a trouble-maker, but I don’t think we should accept this economic assumption without a deeper ponder. Therefore, we ask ourselves, “Do the bean counters in the employ of the toaster company actually capture all the costs as shown in the toaster’s price—or do they only add up those costs specifically related to their business…contemporaneous direct costs. Which is to say, the labor and materials that the company must pay out of its pocket if it intends to manufacture and sell toasters.
When considering the “cost” of any good or service, the larger question (gargantuan in fact) is to ask what historical events brought mankind to the point in time and place where the good or service is purchased or provided? What the bean counters do not include in the price are the antecedent costs; nor should they, since these costs have either already been paid by others…or long ago written off as losses, and many of these costs cannot be expressed in monetary terms anyway.
But to fully appreciate the miracle that is a ten-dollar toaster, we need to imagine what it took to get our species to the point where you, the customer, pull the box off the store shelf and drop it into your shopping cart. The journey was much longer than the time it took you to drive to the store—or make a few clicks with your computer or smart phone. Much fucking longer.
This book isn’t long enough—no book is—to fully dissect this miraculous event, so we ignore, among many things, the car the customer drove to the store, the medical care that allowed her to survive and someday make the purchase, and the economy that gave her the leisure and money to drive to the store conveniently and cost-effectively—thankfully no daylong trek over a rutted dirt road in a horse-drawn wagon is necessary…in fact, if it were this onerous, there would be no ten-dollar toasters, nor any toasters at all.
A good start to our understanding is a suggestion for a table-top experiment: Walk into your kitchen and take a close look at your toaster. Pick it up, peek inside, turn it over (clean up the crumbs that have now spilled onto your counter). Identify the individual parts (i.e., screws, wires, cord, plug, metal housing, plastic levers and moldings). Visualize a factory floor with bins containing thousands and thousands of each part—and don’t forget to think about where each part came from and the labor and raw materials that went into each of these.
All day long, people (the labor component) at the toaster factory put the parts together to make toasters, toiling away just as do the people who work at the factories who make the components that are shipped to the toaster factory. All these people are fed, clothed, educated, housed, entertained, given medical care. Armies and navies fight on their behalf. Religions preach to them. Farmers feed them. Governments build roads, dams, ports on their behalf. These wonderfully anonymous workers fall in love, get married, have children, raise children, laugh and cry, make daily economic choices, live out their lives, die, and with almost no exceptions are quickly forgotten. Yet somehow the ten dollars you spend—and all the others who buy these toasters—somehow, miraculously pays for the labor and materials that went into making it, including all the steps occurring outside the toaster factory, and still leaves a little bit left over as profit.
This is amazing stuff.
At this point we’re ready to make a simple list of the “ingredients” that make up a toaster (go ahead, do it). Your list might include the following:
- Metal
- Plastic
- Electrical wiring and controls
- Design
- Box
- Energy
- Transportation
- Marketing and sales
- Labor
What did it take for the toaster company to obtain each of these ingredients? Each physical ingredient can likewise be broken down into its own ingredients, right on down the line until we reach the individual raw materials lying untouched in the earth. The labor ingredient is broken down into, well, the life of each worker up to and including his or her time in the employ of the store which sells the toaster. (You actually paid much more than ten dollars if you add in the money spent raising the child who became the factory worker or store employee. Your taxes were instrumental in getting that ten-dollar toaster into your hands; this includes any government subsidies applied along the way.)
I’ll offer up another way of looking at the situation using our old friend “The Desert Island Hypothesis” as a guide. Imagine if we took the most talented genius who ever lived, gave him all the knowledge of the human race, and then plucked him down on a desert island by himself—a place which happens to possess all the raw materials necessary to construct a ten-dollar toaster. The fact is he could not build the ten-dollar toaster we can buy at the local Walmart. Not if he lived to be a hundred-years old, maybe a thousand.
I guarantee it, and I say this without even considering what it would take for this super-Einstein to produce the bread, butter, and electricity concomitant with a toaster’s use…and Oh, Lord, if he wants to heat up an Eggo frozen waffle and pour maple syrup on it: that’s a whole new layer of complexity to toss into the mix.
The stainless steel alone, even in a cheap-ass toaster, isn’t something you can make merely by rubbing two sticks together. It took tens of thousands of years for mankind to develop metallurgy, build infrastructure, let alone fine-tuning manufacturing processes and business organizations to the incredible cost-effectiveness that allowed us to build a ten-dollar toaster.
If we dropped a complete set of toaster specifications on the head of a caveman, he’s not going to figure out overnight how to build the steel mill which is a necessary stop along the chain of production (hell, drop a set of steel mill plans why we’re at it). The steel mill is built of components that each has its own inescapable economic history. History that has to be lived first, before we arrive at the present. This pithy aphorism isn’t as trite as it first sounds—it may very well be the most important thing I ever wrote!
Our toaster-less Einstein is wholly dependent on legions of less intelligent folks, including those who lived hundreds and thousands of years ago, if he is wanting an inexpensive (or any) toaster. Perhaps this is a good reason to make Labor Day a more important holiday, rather than an excuse to barbecue or sleep in.
Physical labor. Mental labor.
It’s what got us to where we’re at.
With foreknowledge, we might speed up history, avoid fruitless dead-ends, advance our science and technology quicker, but there is a minimum amount of history that must occur between caveman and any future technological advance. This process is always occurring—it occurs as you read this—albeit at varying speeds and efficiencies, entailing exciting discoveries and advances and painful bouts of backsliding. We’re in the midst of it right now, though we can’t know where it’s headed, what efforts further the cause, what ones waste our time and resources.
What does it take to construct a steel mill?
I’m sure at some point there’s a lathe used to fashion parts used to build it—keeping in mind that the lathe is itself made of components, each with its own history. Go back in time. Each generation of lathe is more sophisticated than its predecessor, and finally we reach the point in our history where the lathe hasn’t yet been invented, which then brings forth an economic chicken-or-egg conundrum: How did the first lathe get built without a lathe?
As we journey further back in time, there were additional costs in resources and labor for each step in human technological development, which eventually brought our species to the modern steel mill. The first “factories” were places where craftsman or slaves were gathered, organized to some extent, to make things out of bronze or copper or iron, and these places were built from handmade (literally) parts (e.g., brick or clay ovens, leather bellows, ax-hewn wood beams); the raw materials like ore and firewood were carried to these plants by oxcart or on the backs of slaves or workers; the end result a Roman workshop making iron implements. But not really an end result. Another way-station on a long, long journey to the ten-dollar toaster. The best Roman workshop or factory stood no chance at making the ten-dollar toaster that would be taken for granted two thousand years in the future.
It’s safe to say, even without exact figures, that the cost to the consumer of the goods from these early factories was a hell of a lot more expensive than the stuff we buy today. Back then, the one set of clothes you owned had to last as long as possible because getting a new pair cost you dearly in terms of the percentage of your total income required to buy it. Ditto for your sandals (if you could even afford them), tools, plows, pots, urns, furniture, oxcarts. Unfortunately for our poor ancestors, the contemporaneous direct cost of manufacturing goods was unimaginably brutal, and the costs could not be spread out over very many goods, which means an unimaginably high unit cost. Unbearably dear by today’s standards. So high, in fact, that if we faced such costs today, we’d scream bloody murder and swear to our god(s) that we can’t bear it or possibly go on, but our ancestors did just that: They endured and went on, and did so for thousands and thousands of years, most of which saw heartbreakingly slow technological progress. We owe them a debt that is not reflected in the price of any good or service today.
You see, at every stage in history, our ancestors paid the contemporaneous costs, which are now historical costs, most of which are not imbedded in the price paid at the cash register, today. But these were costs that had to be paid, endured, and then forgotten, written off. Not carried forward on any accountant’s ledger but remaining as a debt of gratitude inexpressible in monetary terms. If it were carried forward and reflected in the price, we could not bear it. Absolutely not.
Man’s descent from the trees was the first step in trading ignorance for an understanding of the world and the possibilities held therein. Silica is used to make the computer chip that runs the toaster. A caveman walked on top of sand every day and didn’t have a clue a potential Silicon Valley lay beneath his feet. Copper is used for the wiring. There’s some funny looking dirt over there that we modern folks know is copper ore. The plastic that covers the wiring. The black stuff oozing out of the ground over there, which we now know is petroleum, and we can use it to make plastic.
None of these raw materials is usable until thousands and thousands of generations of humans took the countless, painfully small steps—here-and-there a remarkable scientific or engineering leap forward—all of which were necessary to get us to the point of buying our now not-so-humble ten-dollar toaster. The suffering and truncated lives, the filth and disease and hunger, the countless generations of curious and innovative individuals who dared to ask, “What if…?” Added into the historical mix is slavery and the lash of the whip, sunk ships and drowned sailors, stygian factories and mines, explosions and accidents, war and death and misery. Much of it forgotten, lost in the mists of history, memories firmly blocked out by the chilled air and bright lighting found inside a modern retail store.
Every material and every ounce of human labor needed at the toaster factory has its contemporaneous costs and its historical costs: the education and health of the workers (e.g., if people are dying of plague they won’t be around to develop or produce consumer goods, let alone buy them), agricultural advances (ditto starvation), freedom from ignorance and superstition (the Galileos who challenged the status quo and allowed science to blossom), freedom from centrally-controlled economies (e.g., monarchies, dictatorships, communism), which allowed people the liberty to choose to manufacture or purchase a toaster—or not.
It is not unreasonable to believe that it had to take 150,000 years of a brutish, unimaginably difficult existence for the first humans to progress from louse-ridden caveman to modern-day toaster purchaser. Of course, if we go back to the first amoeba, we could say billions of years were required, but we’re not going to get crazy here.
I think the real question is not why a toaster costs ten dollars, but why doesn’t it cost a million dollars considering all the aggregate suffering that was necessary to get us to the point in our history where it’s stocked on the shelf at a local Target or Walmart store or bought from Amazon via a few clicks of one’s computer mouse.
A shitload of past work goes into setting the stage for the present-day work involved in manufacturing a toaster; amortized over all of human history (or Cylon/human history if you will). The cost today is comfortably borne by most shoppers. This amortization is not quantifiable, but I believe it’s of benefit to occasionally take a pause and recognize and appreciate it, a silent thanks offered up to our forebears whose anonymous sacrifices gave us the miracle of modern society.
One human trait in particular made this possible, linked the contributions of each generation to the next generation in such a way that the standard of living gradually improved in countless remarkable ways: They wanted better lives for their children. In this they succeeded marvelously, but we must realize that there remain many people in the world who desperately want significant improvement to their standard of living.
Would it would help us to grow up if we recognize and appreciate all this cost, contemporaneous and historical, whether the price tag reflects it? Does such information help our understanding of economics, or would this knowledge overwhelm our frail constitutions? I envision grief counselors rushed onto the scene of such self-reflection.
I believe it would help us, if for no other reason than it would give us an improved appreciation for the economic world around us. Labor and inert materials are both necessary for the production of goods and services. Each has a cost associated with it. That cost is the price you pay today and the price that was borne by history.
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