The heresy of the pre-modern economy threatened to destroy the very basis on which Western societies operate. The greatest champion of the Independence Heresy was Robert A Heinlein who wrote
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
It gradually became apparent to economic planners in the early part of the twentieth century that this heresy was undermining the establishment and had to be stamped out.
The modern economy cannot operate if people are capable of doing things for themselves and certainly not a list of things as comprehensive as that.
If you reflect on your own experience, you will understand why. If everyone was capable of making a coffee, reading a prospectus, mowing their lawns, choosing their own clothes, understanding a sporting match, replacing a frayed electrical cord or developing an opinion, where would the employment be for baristas, financial advisers, mowing services, fashion columnists, commentators, electrical safety inspectors or pundits? These people would all be out of a job.
In the special case of my barista, if she doesn’t learn to stop yelling at her staff and trying too hard to be exuberant with her customers, thereby ruining the ambience of my morning coffee, I will take it upon myself to ensure she no longer contributes anything to the economy (or the production of carbon dioxide, for that matter).
The modern economy depends entirely on the consuming public getting others to do things for them that they could perfectly well have done themselves.
The first step towards ensuring doctrinal orthodoxy was the rise of Standards. Where previously people could decide for themselves if a product or service was good enough, Standards took that power away by insisting that it was all too complicated for the average person to understand and that only the experts could differentiate poop from clay. The Standards were written in language that was impenetrable, given code numbers to disguise their subject and stored in a locked filing cabinet behind a sign reading “Beware of the Leopard”.
Government regulation supported the rise of Standards. Written in another language entirely, the Regulations couldn’t be interpreted by anyone other than a lawyer. Given that there were more lawyers than scientists in the economy, it was important to find work for them all. Once the Regulations were understood (in part, subject to certain caveats and no guarantee at all that the lawyers had read them correctly) it became apparent that a Standards Expert was going to be required to ensure that the Company was compliant with the Standards. Big companies employed a Standards Manager, others engaged contractors and the money supply went round and round.
Home owners and average people were also brought into the economy of learned helplessness. Regulations were made and public safety campaigns launched to either force or scare people out of building, installing, fixing, cleaning, painting, servicing or altering pretty much anything around the home. The rise of trades and sub-trade businesses offering “Standards assured comprehensive service packages” for everything down to and including wiping the baby’s bum was guaranteed.
The final piece of the modern economy, again aided and abetted by lawyers, came in the form of “no user serviceable parts”. Manufactured goods were hermetically sealed at the factory door and any attempt by the user to make them work the way they were supposed to was thwarted by threats of unspecified punishments for breaching unfindable clauses of the end-user warranty contract - which usually ran to three densely typed pages of 5 point font. Engineers did their part by inventing ever stranger screw heads that no living person had the right tool to undo.
By the early years of the twenty first century the modern Insect Economy was in place and the world’s economic planners expressed hope, for the first time in nearly a century, that orthodoxy had been established.
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