Economics In RPGs 5a: Electric Age Ch. 1

Image by Kevin Phillips from Pixabay
A word of advice: Each part of the series builds heavily on the content from the previous one. While you may be able to get relevant information without doing so, to get the most of out of each, you should have read the preceding article.
Welcome & General Introduction
I’ve said it before: With each passing entry in the series, the more familiar the ground becomes, the more like what we experience every day.
Think about that for a moment – it means that the building blocks of our current society are mostly in place already, and we’re just arranging the stack in the right shape. Historians like to stress the changes and highlight the differences that distinguish one era from another so that those characteristics become identifiable traits, and that’s perfectly valid in terms of creating awareness of history – but I think this relationship of relatability gets somewhat lost in the process.
These eras are more alike than they are different. One small change replicated a million times for several million families becomes a huge change in terms of influence, but it’s still just a different shade of the same essential picture.
Another consequence is that there is no consensus on where dividing lines should be drawn – they blend into one another and overlap and it’s consequently easy to group them this way or that. This played a notable part when it came to laying out this part of the series – my initial thought (back before I started) was that the Automobile was the narrative thread that tied everything together, but when it came to the actual writing, the spread of electrical power became more and more significant, even to the point of usurping the role of dominant theme.
And that had consequences for the structure of the series. There was so much to say on various subjects that I’ve had to split what was going to be one article into two.
From A Writing Perspective
As originally conceived, this era would start with the early automobile, continue through mass production, head into World War I, the roaring 20s, the Great Depression, and then emerge out the other side through the New Deal.
Well, by the time I had all that laid out, I had 47 sections and sub-sections, and I know that some of them will grow and need to be subdivided, and that there will be the occasional sidebar along the way – I know I will need to do one on Radium, for example, and another or Lead Poisoning, and one on home-grown electricians. One on the periodic table might sneak in, too.
It’s too much. So I’ve split it roughly equally in two. It means that this article will end kind of abruptly, only to pick up exactly where it left off, next week.
A disclaimer: I am not an economist and I’m not trying to turn anyone else into an economist. An awful lot of this content will be simplified, possibly even oversimplified. Bear that in mind as you read.
A second disclaimer: I’m Australian with a working understanding, however imperfect and incomplete, of how the US Economy works, and an even more marginal understanding of how the UK economy works (especially in the post-Brexit era). Most of my readers are from the US, and number two are Brits. Canadians and Australians fight over third place on pretty even terms, so those are the contexts in which what I write will be interpreted. And that means that the imperfection can become an issue.
Any commentary that I make comes from my personal perspective. That’s important to remember. Now, sometimes an outside perspective helps see something that’s not obvious to those who are enmeshed in a system, and sometimes it can mean that you aren’t as clued-in as you should be. So I’ll apologize in advance for any errors or offense.
I’ll repeat these disclaimers at the top of each part in this series.
Related articles
This series joins the many other articles on world-building that have been offered here through the years. Part one contained an extremely abbreviated list of these. There are far too many to list here individually; instead check out
the Campaign Creation page of the Blogdex,
especially the sections on
- Divine Power, Religion, & Theology
- Magic, Sorcery, & The Arcane
- Money & Wealth
- Cities & Architecture
- Politics
- Societies & Nations, and
- Organizations, and
- Races.
Where We’re At – repeated from Part 3
Along the way, a number of important principles have been established.
- Society drives economics – which is perfectly obvious when you think about it, because social patterns and structures define who can earn wealth, the nature of what wealth even is, and what they can spend it on – and those, by definition, are the fundamentals of an economy.
- Economics pressure Societies to evolve – that economic activity encourages some social behaviors and inhibits others, producing the trends that cause societies to evolve. Again, perfectly obvious in hindsight, but not at all obvious at first glance – largely because the changes in society obscure and alter the driving forces and consequences of (1).
- Existing economic and social trends develop in the context of new developments – this point is a little more subtle and obscure. Another way of looking at it is that the existing social patterns define the initial impact that new developments can have on society, and the results tend to be definitive of the new era.
- New developments drive new patterns in both economic and social behavior but it takes time for the dominoes to fall – Just because some consequences get a head start, and are more readily assimilated into the society in general, that does not make them the most profound influences; those may take time to develop, but can be so transformative that they define a new social / political / economic / historic era.
- Each society and its economic infrastructure contain the foundations of the next significant era – this is an obvious consequence of the previous point. But spelling it out like this defines two or perhaps three phases of development, all contained within the envelope of a given social era:
- There’s the initial phase, in which some arbitrary dividing line demarks transition from one social era to another. Economic development and social change is driven exclusively by existing trends.
- There’s the secondary phase, in which new conditions derive from the driving social forces that define the era begin to infiltrate and manifest within the scope permitted by the results of the initial phase.
- Each of the trends in the secondary phase can have an immediate impact or a delayed impact. The first become a part of the unique set of conditions that define the current era, while the second become the seeds of the next social era. There is always a continuity, and you can never really analyze a particular period in history without understanding the foundations that were laid in the preceding era.
The general principles contained within these bullet points are important enough that I’m going to be repeating them in the ‘opening salvos’ of the remaining articles in the series.
The Industrial Era II: The Age Of Electrification & Motoring
Electrification may, perhaps, be said to have begun in the latter days of the age of steam, but it didn’t come to full flower until this time period (the same thing happens with aviation between this era and the next). For that reason, many view Motoring as the definitive feature of this era, and the personal independence that it fostered (though that would not fully flower in some respects until the 1950s!)
In many respects, at least in its first half, this era is characterized by the development of these two industrial phenomena and their consequent impacts.
Three Trends
There are three trends in particular that I want to highlight as functional themes for the era.
Government vs Individual
Motoring, and the motor vehicles that make it possible, is symbolic of the individual being at liberty to go where he will, when he will, to a far greater extent than had ever before been possible. This sense of independence translated into many other spheres of activity, and the success of the suffrage movement (which was spreading like wildfire in this time period) created the perception, perhaps for the first time, that governments were answerable to the common people. Government actions were frequently seen through the filter of personal inconvenience and personal responsibility, and were frequently seen as government overreach.
This was also the era of the rise of the FBI and it’s claims to early fame under the stewardship of the controversial J Edgar Hoover; again, there is the theme of government vs the individual, carried to extremes and with a criminal twist.
This simply wasn’t part of the age of steam; government had been seen as protecting and nurturing the citizenry to the collective benefit of all, and within the boundaries of birth and society, how far one advanced was a function of intellect, networking, and conscience (or the lack thereof).
This only makes it more interesting to look at what happened to the most economically successful individuals of that prior age, the robber barons. Now in their declining years, they often became concerned with their footprints in history and how they would be perceived by future generations; perhaps belatedly, they seemed to grow consciences and become benevolent philanthropists. Perhaps this was the result of greater scrutiny and judgment of them as individuals rather than a social class which had intrinsically permitted the taking of certain liberties.
Or perhaps they were concerned by the changing social standards and the prospect of their past deeds being judged against the new standards of what was tolerable. Avoiding this danger demanded the rise of the “faceless corporation” and economic entities that were no longer characterized by a single individual as focal point. There were a few holdouts against this trend, as individuals seized the opportunity to become household names through deeds of adventure and bravery, who are remembered to this day – not always in a positive light.
Industry vs Unions (of individuals)
Individuals also had greater economic freedom than ever before, thanks to improvements in manufacturing and the consequent decline in price of mass-produced commodities. Individuals who were becoming accustomed to independence and oversight of their own activities, employed in their hundreds or thousands in harsh working conditions – the rise of unions as a collective voice was inevitable.
This created a new dynamic, that of the individual worker vs the industry or the factory owner. Often, it was seen as the role of government to function as powerbroker and umpire in the resulting confrontations, and it is this new social oversight function (and the way it differs from the perception of government listed in the previous section) that makes this more than simply another manifestation of the rise of the individual.
Of course, this became a focal point for political differences almost immediately; progressives became aligned with worker’s rights, while conservatives backed the business interests. Collectivism vs Big Business would not be resolved in this era; in fact, it’s still a hot-button issue today, more than a century after this era began.
The Growth Of Technology
The third theme to play out throughout this era was the rise of science. It wasn’t called that during the age of steam; back then, it was philosophy, or perhaps, natural philosophy. The transition didn’t happen overnight, but well before the end of this era, it was complete.
More significantly, science created technology, and technology empowered the people. Another term sometimes used for this era (and it’s more relevant to some genres of RPG than others) is “The Age Of Wonders”. There was a universal optimism for technology and what it could make possible.
Some of these wonders would take decades to mature and have their full impact on society; others would fade away as horrifying realities were uncovered. In the case of the former, I will defer doing much more than mentioning them until the era in which they become significant (Aviation, for example), but the seeds are laid in this time. The latter, on the other hand, are stories that will have to at least be touched on as the article progresses.
These three themes will pop up repeatedly in the course of these discussions, so much so that I will avoid mentioning them as much as possible; to do otherwise would make the contents dreadfully repetitive. So, I’m alerting readers now to remain alert to their relevance while we proceed.
Electrification
These days, electricity is so ubiquitous that it seems to have materialized in full bloom, like the flipping of a light switch. It wasn’t so.
“The commercial distribution of electricity started in 1882 when electricity was produced for electric lighting. In the 1880s and 1890s, growing economic and safety concerns lead to the regulation of the industry.
In 1878, in the United States, Thomas Edison developed and sold a commercially viable replacement for gas lighting and heating using locally generated and distributed direct current electricity.
Robert Hammond, in December 1881, demonstrated the new electric light in the Sussex town of Brighton in the UK for a trial period. The ensuing success of this installation enabled Hammond to put this venture on both a commercial and legal footing, as a number of shop owners wanted to use the new electric light.
— Wikipedia, Electric Power Industry
The first central station providing public power is believed to be one at Godalming, Surrey, U.K. autumn 1881. The system was proposed after the town failed to reach an agreement on the rate charged by the gas company, so the town council decided to use electricity. The system lit up arc lamps on the main streets and incandescent lamps on a few side streets with hydroelectric power. By 1882 between 8 and 10 households were connected, with a total of 57 lights. The system was not a commercial success and the town reverted to gas.
— Wikipedia, Electrification
In 1882, Edison launched generators in both London and New York. The big problem was that he was using Direct Current (which was a much simpler technology than Alternating Current) and it has massive inefficiencies and power losses over distance – so customers had to be situated close to the generators. Edison seriously proposed generators every couple of city blocks in NYC – generators that his company would sell, install, and maintain..
Westinghouse and others solved the problems of alternating current, and after a bitter fight with Edison (sometimes referred to as The War Of The Currents, the AC system became standard. The benefits of this change has made this the universal choice all over the world, though early DC systems would linger here and there – Helsinki had a DC system until the 1940s, and the last DC generator servicing NYC wasn’t shut down until 2007.
Those advantages come down to a far lower transmission loss over distance, and the ability to convey high-voltage current (still more efficient) and ‘step it down’ locally using transformers. This made it practical to have large, efficient power generators that were located great distances from the customer and became far more affordable through economies of scale.
Mergers reduced competition between companies, including the merger of Edison Electric with their largest competitor, Thomson-Houston, forming General Electric in 1892. Edison Electric’s merger with their chief alternating current rival brought an end to the war of the currents and created a new company that now controlled three quarters of the US electrical business.
Westinghouse won the bid to supply electrical power for the World’s Colombian Exposition in 1893 and won the major part of the contract to build Niagara Falls hydroelectric project later that year (partially splitting the contract with General Electric).
— Wikipedia, War Of The Currents
This generator wasn’t the first to be powered by the falls, but its completion in 1895 marks the boundary between this era and that of the past.
In 1938, the UK set up their National Power Grid, making electrical power of a uniform standard available throughout the country.
In the United States it became a national objective after the power crisis during the summer of 1918 in the midst of World War I to consolidate supply. In 1934 the Public Utility Holding Company Act recognized electric utilities as public goods of importance along with gas, water, and telephone companies and thereby were given outlined restrictions and regulatory oversight of their operations
The electrification of households in Europe and North America began in the early 20th century in major cities and in areas served by electric railways and increased rapidly until about 1930 when 70% of households were electrified in the U.S.
Rural areas were electrified first in Europe, and in the U.S. the Rural Electric Administration, established in 1935 brought electrification to rural areas.
— Wikipedia, Electrification
By 1930, nearly nine in 10 urban and non-farm rural homes had access to electricity, but only about one in 10 farms did. It wasn’t that farmers had no use for electricity. In 1923, the National Electric Light Association, a trade organization of electric companies, conducted a study in Red Wing, Minnesota, where a handful of farms were given access to electricity and electric appliances. Those households reported significantly higher productivity and happiness.
In May 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order creating the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) “to initiate, formulate, administer, and supervise a program of approved projects with respect to the generation, transmission, and distribution of electric energy in rural areas.” The REA was part of the suite of public works projects under the New Deal designed to counteract the Great Depression. Congress set aside $100 million ($1.88 billion in 2020 dollars) for the new agency, enabling it to make loans to finance the construction of electricity generation and transmission to rural areas.
“When you read books from that era, one of the things people always talk about is how rural communities can solve different problems by forming a co-op,” says Price Fishback, an economic historian at the University of Arizona whose research focuses on New Deal programs. “Every county had several co-ops of varying sizes.”
A co-op is an organization that is collectively owned by its members, making them both customers and shareholders … but there were few examples of co-ops designed to distribute electricity – only 33 electric co-ops existed in the United States in 1930.
Once co-ops organized and drafted a proposal, they could borrow at low interest from the REA (between 2 percent and 3 percent) to finance construction of transmission lines and to pay for wiring and appliances for farms and homes.
“The REA hired engineers to help design new ways to build the lines,” says Kitchens. Rural electric customers required a different type of load than urban customers, allowing engineers to use single-phase wires and space utility poles farther apart. The REA was also able to make bulk purchases for materials and standardize construction practices to further reduce the per-mile costs. These techniques allowed the REA to reduce the cost of laying rural power lines to an average of less than $825 per mile by the end of the 1930s — a significant drop from the roughly $2,000 per mile utilities had previously estimated.
Progress on electrification temporarily slowed with the outbreak of World War II, but by the end of the war, roughly half of the farms in America had power. After another decade, farms had nearly caught up to cities in access to electricity.
— Econ Focus, Electrifying Rural America
These landmark events show that it took about 40 years for electrification to become widespread. World War 2 then intervened, but even that only slowed the spread. By 1955, most places in the US and western Europe had access to mains power.
This map shows the spread of electrification, defined as public access to mains power as of 2017: But even into the 2020s, there are a few remote communities even in England that are not yet electrified.

Map by Getsnoopy. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Background by Mike, key inserted from source Wikipedia page.
This variability makes it hard to draw a dividing line between this era and the next, but – since I’m making the rules of this series and have no need to be consistent – I’m going to define the end of this period as the late 1930s, while the next era – defined by the rise of fascism – will actually overlap with this one.
Automobiles
I once saw a Top Gear segment in which the hosts (well, two of them) tried to identify the first automobile to have a controls arrangement that was recognizably the same as the ubiquitous and global arrangement found today – power under the right foot, clutch, brake, steering wheel, and maybe gear lever. They ended up with a Renault as I recall, having tried out three or four forerunners.
The history of the automobile is as rich and complex a subject as you will ever find, stalked by Characters and Personalities. But that’s not actually what we’re here for; what interests us is the social impact of cars, and the economic impact of road transport.
Socially, the automobile represented freedom and mobility far in excess of what could be provided by horse and carriage. Trains can only go where the tracks lead, and laying track is expensive and manpower-intensive work. Once the track is laid, train is far more efficient for freight and mass-transit – but only to the places where the train stops.
A recurring theme in the journey through Arkansas that the PCs in my superhero campaign have been undertaking lately is the number of times a community’s fortunes have ridden on the back of the rail line. They represent prosperity and growth and industry, and should they close or simply cease stopping somewhere, so those things all vanish like soap bubbles popping. In any sort of rural or semi-urban landscape, railroads are life, and deadly serious.
All that changes when a community reaches a certain size of urban center. Rail can carry masses of produce and products to a central rail yard, but distribution from there requires something else – the truck. The subways are busy carrying people around, and wouldn’t solve the door-to-door need of businesses; road freight is the only option. Without them, and their carrying capacity and speed, horse and cart is necessary, and a truck can haul eight times as much in a trip if not more. And that makes the truck cheaper to operate, and that in turn can make the difference between a business that is growing and prospering, and one that is floundering and failing.
Mass Production
But, in a way, the produce and products needed to fill that truck are only possible because of the automobile, more specifically, due to mass production, famously introduced by Henry Ford. Except that this is an urban myth – Ford adopted the techniques and made them famous, and even led journalists to coin the term, but he was riding the crest of a wave with much earlier origins.
Some mass production techniques, such as standardized sizes and production lines, predate the Industrial Revolution by many centuries; however, it was not until the introduction of machine tools and techniques to produce interchangeable parts were developed in the mid-19th century that modern mass production was possible.
In the Industrial Revolution, simple mass production techniques were used at the Portsmouth Block Mills in England to make ships’ pulley blocks for the Royal Navy in the Napoleonic Wars. It was achieved in 1803 by Marc Isambard Brunel in cooperation with Henry Maudslay under the management of Sir Samuel Bentham. The first unmistakable examples of manufacturing operations carefully designed to reduce production costs by specialized labor and the use of machines appeared in the 18th century in England.
Prerequisites for the wide use of mass production were interchangeable parts, machine tools and power, especially in the form of electricity.
— Wikipedia, Mass Production
One of the pioneers in the field, working for Ford, was Frederick Winslow Taylor (who most people have never heard of). In 1908 Taylor was awarded the Dewar Trophy for creating interchangeable mass-produced precision engine parts, Henry Ford downplayed the role of Taylorism in the development of mass production at his company, but Taylor’s techniques were used to perform time studies and experiments to mechanize factory processes by Ford management, focusing on minimizing worker movements. The difference was that while Taylor focused mostly on efficiency of the worker, Ford also substituted for labor by using machines, thoughtfully arranged, wherever possible, regarding the worker as a machine operator and part of a larger process, rather than a processing unit in their own right.
Mass production makes it possible to make thousands of X in the time that it used to take a skilled worker to make one X, or more. That this is accomplished by a hundred or more workers is not all that relevant, because of the earning differential between the master craftsman and the pay scale of a (relatively) unskilled worker – those 100+ workers actually cost no more, or even less, than the single expert. And that means that the manufacturing cost of X drops more than 1,000-fold – say, from $400 to $0.40¢. Distribution might have added another 10¢ to that, advertising and promotion 5¢, profits for various hands in the distribution chain may have doubled the resulting price – but that’s still only $1.10 each to the customer.
I’ll deal with the impact of that reduction on consumers and consumerism a little later. For now, suffice it to say that the things that people already wanted became a LOT cheaper, and many products for which price would have restricted demand sufficiently to make them unviable suddenly became completely affordable.
Sidebar: a brief conversation about Design
The master craftsman was still needed to create prototypes, which engineers then translated into designs and assembly processes. There would still have been quite a lot of variability in the efficiency of the processes – a good engineer could make things possible that an ordinary one couldn’t conceive of, and make the resulting units cheaper at the same time.
Liberated from the need to be practical, designers started to focus on style and form, and this produced whole new schools of design, frequently called ‘movements’.
These ‘movements’ were philosophies of design that influenced everything from furniture to decoration to art to architecture. Art Nouveau was one, and the industrialized minimalism of Bauhaus is another (The Wikipedia page dedicated to the Art Nouveau movement is massive and full of images depicting variations on the style – strongly recommended as a ‘style guide’ to the start of the era).
The Bauhaus movement can similarly be used for cutting-edge designs in the latter part of the era. At the heart of the Bauhaus movement was capturing a sense of modernity and efficiency in design through bends and minimalism, and the success of the movement can be discerned from the fact that office furniture in the Bauhaus style still looks ultra-modern modern today. I can pretty much guarantee that readers have seen the style in use, even if they didn’t recognize that fact at the time.
You don’t have to employ these styles if they don’t fit your campaign world – the key point to emphasize is that mass production makes widespread adoption of A given style inevitable. You can pick any style that seems right to use as your template.
The Price Of Comfort
The Victorian and Edwardian eras are times of great change in the prices and availability of things. Mass production was a massive amplification of this effect, but it was already well underway. Only in more modern times have the true prices of some of the decorative and personal choices become known.
Victorian England, for example, is characterized by a particular shade of green – it was used in wallpaper and paint especially.
Scheele’s Green, also called Schloss Green … was invented in 1775 by Carl Wilhelm Scheele. By the end of the 19th century, it had virtually replaced the older green pigments based on copper carbonate. It is a yellowish-green pigment commonly used during the early to mid-19th century in paints as well as being directly incorporated into a variety of products as a colorant.
It began to fall out of favor after the 1860s because of its toxicity and the instability of its color in the presence of sulfides and various chemical pollutants.
The acutely toxic nature of Scheele’s green as well as other arsenic-containing green pigments such as Paris Green may have contributed to the sharp decline in the popularity of the color green in late Victorian society.
— Wikipedia, Scheele’s Green

Image by Born2clone. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Text resized & repositioned and image centered by Mike.
In fact, there was a range of closely-matching colors that collectively are now referred to as Scheele’s Green – Hex #478800 (RGB 71, 136, 0) is most common, but Hex #3c7a18 (RGB 60,122,24) would also be accepted.
Toxicity
In the 19th century, the toxicity of arsenic compounds was not readily known. Nineteenth-century journals contained reports of children wasting away in bright green rooms, of ladies in green dresses swooning, and of newspaper printers being overcome by arsenic vapors. There is one example of acute poisoning of children attending a Christmas party where dyed candles were burned
— Wikipedia, Scheele’s Green
The lessons from these cautionary tales fell on deaf ears. Until the 20th century, it took a single day’s study to become a licensed electrician in the UK; other jurisdictions may have been more strict, but it was a matter of degree, not of kind.
As a result, there were all sorts of horror stories caused by incorrect wiring causing electrocutions and fires. It is fair to say that these were spread widely by the Gas Companies of the time (who were rivals to the Electricity suppliers) , and may have been exaggerated, but there remains enough proof that it was going on.
An Electrical Issue
In Australia, from the 1920s through to March 2000, there was a magazine called Electronics Australia. In the late 70’s, I came into possession of many issues from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, and enjoyed reading a number of the articles, and especially a regular column called (I think) The Serviceman, who was an electrician who repaired televisions and other electrical appliances in the vacuum-tube era and beyond.
This provided me with my first exposure to the divide-and-conquer logic of diagnosing faults, something that has come in useful on any number of occasions, but that’s a side-issue.
One such column talked about an incident at a caravan park in which a borrowed (and badly-wired) extension cord made something – a boat? a fuse box? “live” and fully capable of electrocuting on touch. This was in the 1970s.
Luckily, the device supposedly being powered wouldn’t work in that configuration, and the person reporting the incident was clever enough to work out what the problem was without endangering himself (it transpired that both supply and extension cord were mis-wired; neither error on their own was catastrophic, but the combination was potentially lethal).
The deeper issue was that many caravan parks have (had?) home-wired electrical distribution systems by people who didn’t know half as much as they thought they did.
I’ve never forgotten that material, since (at the time) my father was living in a Caravan Park and my sister and brother-in-law were running it, and I had re-read the article/column just before visiting them, purely by chance. It stuck.
Even today, buildings are being discovered in which the builder either cut corners (and should not have), or otherwise messed up – usually in the act of restoring them. Some were ready to collapse under the wrong combination of circumstances, dangerous to reside in. Standards back at the turn of the century were not as rigorous as they are now, and training even less so, and that’s a dangerous combination.
A Healthy Radioactive Glow
Another area that was poorly regulated until the New Deal was pharmaceuticals. All sorts of snake oil was sold, so much so that the term has become associated with deceptive marketing in general.
Many 19th-century United States and 18th-century European entrepreneurs advertised and sold mineral oil (often mixed with various active and inactive household herbs, spices, drugs, and compounds, but containing no snake-derived substances whatsoever) as ‘snake oil liniment’, making claims about its efficacy as a panacea. Patent medicines that claimed to be a panacea were extremely common from the 18th century until the 20th, particularly among vendors masking addictive drugs such as cocaine, amphetamine, alcohol, and opium-based concoctions or elixirs, to be sold at medicine shows as medication or products promoting health.
— Wikipedia, Snake Oil
The discovery of Radium and of Radioactivity in general led, almost immediately, to its incorporation into all sorts of products and services. These days, it’s frequently referred to as Radioactive Quackery, which is defined as any practice that improperly promotes radioactivity as a therapy for illnesses, but I like to extend it to the misuse of radioactivity for convenience.
Radium was added to toothpaste, spa water, drinking water, and foodstuffs. Uranium, especially in its natural oxides form, was used in paint, sand houses, cigarette packets, jewelry, pendants, wristbands, and so on. For me, though, the ultimate example was the portable fluoroscope used for making sure that shoes fitted properly (see Wikipedia — Shoe fitting fluoroscope).
It was the practice of painting watch dials with radium that ultimately brought an end to most of this nonsense (some anti-5G products continue to extol the virtues of radioactivity, however, and there’s the negative-ion craze of a few years ago).
In the mid-1920s, a lawsuit was filed against the United States Radium Corporation by five dying “Radium Girls” – dial painters who had painted radium-based luminous paint on the dials of watches and clocks. The dial painters were instructed to lick their brushes to give them a fine point, thereby ingesting radium.[35] Their exposure to radium caused serious health effects which included sores, anemia, and bone cancer.
During the litigation, it was determined that the company’s scientists and management had taken considerable precautions to protect themselves from the effects of radiation, but it did not seem to protect their employees. Additionally, for several years the companies had attempted to cover up the effects and avoid liability by insisting that the Radium Girls were instead suffering from syphilis. This complete disregard for employee welfare had a significant impact on the formulation of occupational disease labor law.
As a result of the lawsuit, the adverse effects of radioactivity became widely known, and radium-dial painters were instructed in proper safety precautions and provided with protective gear. In particular, dial painters no longer licked paint brushes to shape them.. Radium was still used in dials as late as the 1960s, but there were no further injuries to dial painters. This highlighted that the harm to the Radium Girls could easily have been avoided.
— Wikipedia, Radium / Luminescent Paint
Remember what i said about warnings falling on dead ears?
In the U.S., nasal radium irradiation was also administered to children to prevent middle-ear problems or enlarged tonsils from the late 1940s through the early 1970s.
— Wikipedia, Radium / Commercial Use
The Luxury Standard
Despite these risks, consumers embraced the fact that comfort and even style were now commodities that they could afford. New businesses sprang into existence and were quickly profitable.
One consumer is a flyspeck. A thousand is something significant. An entire target market can make or break a manufacturer, and did, on a number of occasions. Competition between brands could be cut-throat, and manufacturers who risked offending customers – be it with poor service or shoddy goods – frequently paid the price.
There was an immediate impact on the upper end of society. With ordinary people now able to afford what would previously have been symbolic of success and prosperity, new symbolic tokens were needed. Hand-made – complete with imperfections that revealed this fact – became the new “gold standard” for luxury items. Fortunately, we seem to have shed that particular form of vanity at some point, though the attraction of hand-made luxury items remains.
Old Money
Which brings me to the tale of old money and the Robber Barons of the Age Of Steam. These people, and their families, began to turn toward benevolence as a means of reforming their images. Those of a cynical bent might suggest that the fate of the French Aristocracy during the revolution of 1789 had something to do with it, but for me, the gap is too great.
Inequity in social positions through wealth had been around since the landed Gentry of the middle ages, but until now it had been considered commendable, a tribute to the intelligence and business savvy of the entrepreneur.
In many cases, family money had descended through multiple generations, and wealth was long-established. Yet, it was in the Age Of Steam that many nobles lost access to their traditional sources of income and began having to pay for maintenance of their regal mansions and castles out of their own pockets. By the time the Age of Electrification begins, many have been forced to find innovative ways of raising additional funds – like tourism and souvenirs, hosting weddings, and so on.
In some cases, this was not enough, and the only solution was to sell the property to someone else who could do a better job of preserving it. Most found ways of keeping themselves afloat, even if it meant selling off some other lands.
Often, the person doing the purchasing of the larger estates was an individual whose wealth was wholly the product of the Age Of Steam, so this was only a partial redistribution of wealth, and certainly not enough in and of itself to overcome growing resentment on the part of the ordinary citizen. The wealthy had lost their protective halo of social class, and needed to find some other means of justifying their access to a greater level of prosperity.
The answer eventually found was Charity and Benevolence. Funding scholarships, and expansions of Universities, and new Hospital Wings, and the like, became the way to show that you were using the wealth your family had accrued for the benefit of society as a whole.
The Great Depression would further change this social class, but I’ll get to that later.
New Money
There were no shortage of rags-to-riches true-life stories in the late 19th and early 20th century. Someone with an idea could convince others to invest in it, and turn that investment into a fortune.
The great difference between those with this ‘New Money’ and the ‘Old Money’ is that the former had once been of lower social class than the former, no matter what their wealth now was. This gave rise to the trope of the Nouveau Riche (French for ‘new rich’) which started as a derogatory term denoting someone who had acquired wealth in the current generation and, usually, didn’t know how to behave in their new social class as a result.
That this concept is still with us is easily shown – I simply refer the reader to the movie, Caddyshack!
The concept itself dates all the way back to ancient Greece, and also appears in the Roman Empire. So it’s nothing new!
Beyond the original meaning, it has become associated with those who behave as though they had just acquired their wealth, whether they had inherited it or not. Actions such as conspicuous consumption and ‘common’ (vulgar) behavior.
Gaining acceptance within the new social stratum was made intentionally difficult by those already within it, perhaps out of snobbishness, perhaps out of valid criticism of the worst examples of the Nouveau Riche from real life. To achieve it, the newcomers had to be seen to behave like the perfect examples of the entitled upper-class, and even to marry into the ‘right family’.
The foibles and eccentricities which the Old Money could get away with were forbidden to the New Money. But they frequently found ways around the obstacles and roadblocks; for example, if prevented from donating a new wing to a hospital, they might establish a new hospital somewhere else and use their wealth to recruit only the best and brightest, establishing it as a leader in the field of medicine.
It’s going too far to describe this as a game between the two sub-classes, though it often took on childish and comic proportions, as the example above shows. But “I can be more generous than you are” is a valid trope for those who could fairly be accused of being Nouveau Riche.
Unions
I’ve already made a point of the inevitability of Trade Unions given the other social changes taking place, but the history deserves a bit of a mention.
Trade unions in the United Kingdom were first decriminalized under the recommendation of a Royal commission in 1867, which agreed that the establishment of the organizations was to the advantage of both employers and employees. Legalized in 1871, the Trade Union Movement sought to reform socioeconomic conditions for working men in British industries.
— Wikipedia, Trade Unions in the United Kingdom
Initially, following British laws, trade unions in Australia were suppressed, particularly under the Combination Laws of 1799 and 1800. A trade union or other association could also be regarded as illegal because of being considered a “restraint of trade”.
The British Master and Servant Act 1823, and subsequent updates, were generally regarded as heavily biased towards employers, and designed to discipline employees and repress the “combination” of workers in trade unions. The law required the obedience and loyalty from servants (i.e., workers) to their contracted employer, with infringements of the contract, or disobedience, subject to criminal penalties, often with a jail sentence of hard labor; and the calling for strikes was punished as an “aggravated” breach of contract.
Over time though, the position was slowly liberalized and through the British Trade Union Act 1871, alongside the subsequent Conspiracy, and Protection of Property Act 1875, trade unions were legitimized.
— Wikipedia, Australian Labour Movement
(note the British spelling)..
Labor unions represent United States workers in many industries recognized under US labor law since the 1935 enactment of the National Labor Relations Act.
National labor unions began to form in the post-Civil War Era. The Knights of Labor emerged as a major force in the late 1880s, but it collapsed because of poor organization, lack of effective leadership, disagreement over goals, and strong opposition from employers and government forces.
The American Federation of Labor, founded in 1886 and led by Samuel Gompers until his death in 1924, proved much more durable. It arose as a loose coalition of various local unions. It helped coordinate and support strikes and eventually became a major player in national politics.
— Wikipedia, Labor Unions in the United States
(note the American spelling)..
As the final extract makes clear, just because they were technically illegal, it didn’t stop unions forming; the law simply raised the stakes. The same was true in the other jurisdictions cited, too. After all, if no-one had ever committed a particular illegal act, there would be no law against it!
The rise of unions created an occasionally awkward four-corner dance between workers, unions, employers, and governments. Through the 20th century, there have been two driving forces within politics (occasionally superseded by other issues) – a liberalizing movement seeking to protect workers and amplify worker’s rights, and a conservative element seeking to protect business from unions.
In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher greatly reduced union powers; in Australia, the same was done by Malcolm Fraser and successive conservative governments.
But neither eviscerated worker’s rights to the same extent as the US, where state-level republicans enacted “Right To Work” legislation, that, despite the name, essentially permits the dismissal of a worker for any reason whatsoever save only members of a few protected classes – you can’t dismiss someone because of their race, for example. But you can dismiss that person because you don’t like the color of their socks. Twenty-eight states have “Right To Work” laws.
Unlike the right to work definition as a human right in international law, U.S. right-to-work laws do not aim to provide a general guarantee of employment to people seeking work but rather guarantee an employee’s right to refrain from paying or being a member of a labor union.
— Wikipedia, Right-to-work Law
The reason these Right-to-work laws have had this effect is by restricting or removing the ability of unions to protest and protect workers affected by unfair dismissal. While the intentions of the laws may be laudable, they frequently combine with other pro-business legislation to prevent regulation of labor practices.
The principle that Federal Law, when applicable, overrides any state law, and the constitutional guarantees in the Bill Of Rights overrules even Federal Law, afforded some protection for workers, despite the local legislation (that’s why the ‘protected classes’ exceptions exist).
Strong workplace protection legislation at a federal level, for example, would be binding on all states whether they agreed with it or not. Lately, some states have been enacting laws that would seem to disregard the Constitutional and Federal regulations, permitting the employment of teenagers in mining operations without adequate protective equipment for example. It seems inevitable that another in the long series of confrontations between Workers and Employers is coming in the near future.
Those confrontations have been taking part since before Unions became legal. Business always believes (correctly) that it can maximize profits if it is freed from regulatory restraint, but also believes that its only responsibility is to the stockholders of the company. Regulators, on the other hand, believe that corporations should have other responsibilities, including fair treatment of the workers who make the business functional, and that employers can’t be trusted to shoulder those additional responsibilities without legal force. That’s the thinking that gives rise to the EPA, amongst other government agencies.
The Boom-and-Bust Cycle
It’s going too far to blame the economic prosperity oscillations conflated in the term “Boom-and-Bust Cycle” on these periodic stouches over restriction and regulation. They don’t cause them; natural chaos in a noisy system does that as underlying trends shape the noise into temporary patterns. But they do make things a lot worse than they otherwise might be.
The Great Depression was caused by the collapse of institutions selling shares to ordinary people without adequate protections for those citizens. Afterwards, FDR wrote many such restrictions and protections into law. Businesses squeaked, but under the circumstances, didn’t have much of a leg to stand on.
Successive governments weakened those laws and protections as a result of cases put forward by the business community of how much better they could make the economy through this tool or that measure. George W Bush was the President who oversaw the removal of the last of the FDR protections. What happened? The GFC.
Would the GFC have occurred without the removal of those restrictions? Yes. But the practice of companies buying debt – and the potential future repayment of that debt – as a commodity would have been far more restricted, and the failure of one or two institutions after making bad investments would not have threatened the collapse of the entire financial ecosystem. At least, that’s my understanding of events.
Here’s the point: those tensions, those rises and falls of the stock market, those lobbyists pushing for deregulation (or against proposed regulation) and their opposite numbers pushing for tighter regulations, those are intrinsically part of the economic consequences of the electrification of society.
Organized Crime
The [Mafia] organization’s name is derived from the original Mafia or Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian Mafia, with “American Mafia” originally referring simply to Mafia groups from Sicily operating in the United States, as the organization initially emerged as an offshoot of the Sicilian Mafia formed by Italian immigrants in the United States. However, the organization gradually evolved into a separate entity partially independent of the original Mafia in Sicily.
— Wikipedia, American Mafia
The Cosa Nostra weren’t all bad. They settled disputes and prevented oppression by land-owners, acting as Judges and Juries in a time when neither Judges nor Justice could otherwise be attained. But they also committed numerous criminal acts, and facilitated more.
Their central philosophy seems to be that crime is going to happen anyway; and so it needs to be regulated. Not too much from any one victim, nothing from those who deserve or are awarded their protection, and so on. If you accept that philosophic stance, it’s probably a reasonable position to take.
All that changed when Sicilian immigrants came to the US.
The Mafia in the United States emerged in impoverished Italian immigrant neighborhoods or ghettos in New York’s East Harlem (or Italian Harlem), the Lower East Side, and Brooklyn; also emerging in other areas of the Northeastern United States and several other major metropolitan areas (such as New Orleans[10] and Chicago) during the late 19th century and early 20th century, following waves of Italian immigration especially from Sicily and other regions of Southern Italy. It has its roots in the Sicilian Mafia but is a separate organization in the United States.
Mafia groups in the United States first became influential in the New York metropolitan area, gradually progressing from small neighborhood operations in poor Italian ghettos to citywide and eventually national organizations. “The Black Hand” was a name given to an extortion method used in Italian neighborhoods at the turn of the 20th century. It has been sometimes mistaken for the Mafia itself, which it is not.
From the 1890s to 1920 in New York City the Five Points Gang, founded by Paul Kelly, were very powerful in the Little Italy of the Lower East Side. Kelly recruited some street hoodlums who later became some of the most famous crime bosses of the century – such as Johnny Torrio, Al Capone, Lucky Luciano and Frankie Yale.
— Wikipedia, American Mafia
With a tradition of breaking any law they didn’t like, illegal unions were an obvious avenue for the mafia to exploit, and one that would have earned them goodwill from many citizens.
Prohibition
On January 16, 1919, prohibition began in the United States with the 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution making it illegal to manufacture, transport, or sell alcohol. Despite these bans, there was still a very high demand for it from the public. This created an atmosphere that tolerated crime as a means to provide liquor to the public, even among the police and city politicians.
The profits that could be made from selling and distributing alcohol were worth the risk of punishment from the government, which had a difficult time enforcing prohibition… Criminal gangs and politicians saw the opportunity to make fortunes and began shipping larger quantities of alcohol to U.S. cities. The majority of the alcohol was imported from Canada, the Caribbean, and the American Midwest where stills manufactured illegal alcohol.
In the early 1920s, fascist Benito Mussolini took control of Italy and waves of Italian immigrants fled to the United States. Sicilian Mafia members also fled to the United States, as Mussolini cracked down on Mafia activities in Italy.
Most Italian immigrants resided in tenement buildings. As a way to escape the poor lifestyle, some Italian immigrants chose to join the American Mafia.
The Mafia took advantage of prohibition and began selling illegal alcohol. The profits from bootlegging far exceeded the traditional crimes of protection, extortion, gambling, and prostitution. Prohibition allowed Mafia families to make fortunes.
— Wikipedia, American Mafia
Prohibition took a small problem and made it far worse, largely because proponents were too busy dreaming of the ‘perfect society’ that the lack of alcohol would create. Temperance movements had been dreaming of a prohibition on ‘the demon drink’ for decades.
The temperance movement in the United States began at a national level in the 1820s, having been popularized by evangelical temperance reformers and among the middle classes.
— Wikipedia, Temperance Movement
Would Prohibition have worked if its proponents had been more practical, holding off until adequate enforcement was possible, ensuring that counseling services were widely available and free, and perhaps providing medically-supervised chances to wean an individual off?
I doubt it. The more effective the interdiction, the higher the price would have gone, and the more incentive there would have been for the Mafia to find every weakness in the system – corruption, bribery, blackmail, and – if necessary – murder. It would have made things worse, not better.
Would preventing Prohibition have stopped the Mafia? I doubt that, too. It would have restricted them to the traditional avenues of exploitation – gambling, extortion, and so on – and hence their growth – at least until the advent of the drug trade.
The mafia dons actually opposed the family getting involved in narcotic smuggling. But by then, their control over younger, more ambitious members was slipping (not that it had ever been all that strong), and narcotics brought money – lots of money, more even than they had seen in prohibition. And money is power, and power makes the decisions. So it may have delayed the inevitable, but that’s about all.
No, the rise of Organized Crime of some sort is a natural consequence of the social changes in the economic times, and as inevitable.
Individual Leisure
Let’s turn to an altogether more palatable topic – leisure time. I don’t think I need to quote a definition, everyone knows what it is.
Leisure used to be the exclusive province of the upper class, but that ship had sailed long ago. Leisure was now available to all in at least some measure.
Unions played a part in the increase, negotiating shorter working hours. While opposed, many businesses found that worker productivity actually went up when workers were content and well-rested.
Equally importantly, new industries rose up to fill that leisure time, and extract the newly-disposable income. Entertainments – theaters and movies and radios; Sporting facilities and tournaments; restaurants, holidays and tourism, and so on. None of these would have become as ubiquitous as they now are without the new economic drivers; there was not enough membership in the upper classes to support them as industries. They had to target the masses.
Economic consequences
Any time you introduce new industries to an economy, you make that economy more robust, at least in theory. But that’s a theory that overlooks interdependence, because it complicates the situation too much. Nevertheless, even if it’s not completely right, it’s also not completely wrong.
Mass entertainment was one of the things that got the world through the Great Depression. Not only from a pressure-valve psychological point of view, but also from the point of view of keeping currency circulating through the economy. That keeps a core of the businesses functioning, and that keeps the banks functioning, and that enables everything else to keep ticking over.
The New Demographic I: Suffrage
I mentioned this in discussing the previous era because suffrage started then, but it spread like wildfire once it got going. So you have a newly-acknowledged sub-class, given power and authority and some measure of respect as a result, who are nevertheless constrained to the roles deemed acceptable in the Age Of Steam – can anyone else see problems arising?
Women’s liberation movements may have been largely inchoate in this era; the technological foundation wasn’t there yet, nor the political will, for anything more to be the case. But the seeds would have been planted now, the offspring of suffrage, and there would be early manifestations that would have revealed the future trend to anyone who looked closely.
Those manifestations would have been small things – a small increase in the level of responsibility afforded women, such as giving them control over household budgets and letting them own businesses in their own names. Greater freedom of choice in the areas traditionally afforded women, such as what to serve for dinner.
Trivial little things that could not reasonably be opposed, but from those beginnings, male control over women would begin to be eroded. Those who, in modern times, wish to turn back the clock are doomed to fail, because they are turning back the clock to a time when womens’ movements were about to explode in full force; they are simply creating a venue for history to repeat itself. To have any chance of success, they would have to target an era at least 70 years earlier than their stated goals, and undoing suffrage – and that’s unconstitutional, and so doomed to failure, too.
There are small social cues that would also have started to manifest themselves. It would no longer be necessary for a woman in public to be escorted by a ‘trusted’ male. Safer, perhaps, but 99,000 times in a hundred thousand, such safety measures would not be needed. And this was still an era in which gentlemen would come to the assistance of a woman in distress.
Women therefore would be better able to make choices for themselves – and their inclination (at least after the War To End All Wars) was to party. But I’ll get to the roaring 20s in due course – where aren’t there yet.
Governmental Lack Of Control
Control is absolute – you either have it or you don’t. With business grabbing control for themselves, and unions grabbing some of what was left, and individuals grabbing self-determination and a key economic role, and the number of such individuals doubling, and science taking some of what little remained, it could no longer be said that the government had absolute control over anything (except, perhaps, the military).
What they had, instead, was influence. They could shape the outcome of the inevitable confrontations, even those to which they were a party.
They didn’t realize this; from their perspective they were presiding over new prosperity, ultimately responsible for it all, and it would last in perpetuity because they would make it so.
The First World War would shatter that overconfidence and cause a shift in political attitudes; but I’ll get to that next week. For now, the subject is the pre-war years and the sense of optimism they held.
Fixed Currency
If you increase the amount of currency circulating in the economy, but not the fundamental wealth of the economy, that means that each dollar (or whatever) in that economy has to shrink just enough to make the books balance. The problem is that you have to predict in advance what the economic growth is going to be when you have no control over it, then match that with your currency production.
It simply is never going to happen. There are all sorts of dire consequences for producing too little – banks failing, economy collapsing, failures of public confidence, that sort of thing – so the only solution is to produce an amount that you know to be too much, but not too much too-much.
That’s called inflation, and it means that the currency gets a little bit smaller against your fixed standard. And that means that everything gets that little bit more expensive.
There’s an argument that a fixed currency is more stable than a ‘floating’ currency. I’m not going to delve into that, right now; but its worth recognizing that all the major economies have that attitude, and the confidence that goes with it.
Instruments Of Debt
Another consequence of the fixed currency is that there’s only so much money that the government has to spend. That’s going to become important next week, but for now, let’s look at the question: if the government needs more money, what does it do?
Answer: it issues instruments of debt, which it then sells to the public, and to other governments, and to its own wealthy citizens.
Not for free, mind you; they have to promise to repay more than they have borrowed. They percentage difference is called the Bond Yield.
Let’s imagine a hypothetical or two.
Scenario 1: Interest Rates much higher than bond yield
Bonds are typically issued for periods of 5 or 10 years – that’s when the debt has to be repaid. Let’s say we have an average of 4% inflation over a five-year period:
Year 1: 1×1.04 = 1.04
Year 2: 1.04×1.04 = 1.0816.
Year 3: 1.0816×1.04 = 1.124864.
Year 4: 1.124864×1.04 = 1.16985856
Year 5: 1.16985856×1.04 = 1.2166529024
A 5-year Bond Yield of say 10%? That means that the government has borrowed $100, say, and promised to repay $110 – which, by then, will be worth 110/1.2166529024 = 0.82192710675935177878387149771205 x $110 = about $90.40.
Who’s going to take that deal? It’s not going to happen.
Scenario 2: Interest Rates lower than bond yield
Same inflation rate, to make things simpler.
A 5-year Bond Yield of 30%? That’s borrowing $100 and promising to repay $130. Even with the devaluation caused by inflation, you’re still going to have $130/1.2166529024 = 0.82192710675935177878387149771205 x $130 = about $106.85.
That’s better, but it’s still only a 6-7% gain over a 5-year period – clever investing in the stock market is likely to earn more than that.
Then, too, 4% stable growth is a pretty healthy economy, and governments aren’t all that desperate to borrow money when times are good. So let’s mix it up a bit:
Scenario 3: Interest Rates much lower than bond yield
Year 1: 4% inflation. 1×1.04 = 1.04
Year 2: 2.5% inflation. 1.04×1.025 = 1.066
Year 3: 1% inflation. 1.066×1.01 = 1.07666
Year 4: -1.5% inflation: 1.07666×0.985 = 1.0605101
Year 5: 0.5% inflation: 1.0605101×1.005 = 1.0658126505
Call it 6.6% inflation over the 5 years. Notice that there’s a recession in year 4, but the government manages to keep it from becoming a depression – just barely – in Year 5.
How’s a bond yield of 20% sounding about now? Where do I sign?
But the government can’t afford to put the bond yield too high, because that’s all money that the government loses. Ideally, you want the yield to be just enough over the forecast inflation rate that it becomes an attractive investment.
You also have to factor in the security of the investment – governments have to repay their debt, or they won’t find anyone willing to lend them money. That helps keep the bond yield down to reasonable limits. So let’s set it to 2½ times the forecast inflation rate, plus 5…
Scenario 4: Realistic forecasts
So let’s say that the economic woes described in Scenario 3 are unexpected, but so is the growth of 4% in the first year, and set expectations to a more modest 3%.
2½ × 3 = 7.5, +5 = 12.5%.
First year, growth is great at 4%. Second year is a little down on expectations, but that’s okay – it’s just a “market correction” because of the higher than expected year 1 result. Year 3 is down, and the economy is noticeably slowing. The government is exerting all its influence to try and get things happening, but the economy usually has a mind of its own. The cause is something unexpected – maybe there’s been a collapse in housing prices, or the biggest bank in the country has been hacked, or something (if it were something expected, the government would have done more to prepare for it).
Year 5, and the government response is dragging the economy back into the black – if it doesn’t have to pay out too much in 5-year bonds (and ten-year bonds from five years earlier).
Overall, the inflation rate is 6.6% over 5 years. The stock market is likely to have gained clever investors three times this much – at the risk of losing their shirts. The yield that had to be set at the start of the 5 years, of 12.5%, is about 6% better than inflation – with the security factor, that’s probably good enough.
There are a couple of other tools the government has. It can set interest rates to push the inflation rate down or let it rise. And, if it finds that it isn’t selling enough bonds, it can issue some more at a higher yield – rinse and repeat as often as necessary.
Access To Education
I’ve talked a lot about social mobility, the capacity to improve your social standing, without ever mentioning it explicitly. One of the major tools of upward mobility is access to education, because it makes you able to hold down a better job, and actually makes you more intelligent according to some.
Access to education comes in three basic flavors.
Vanilla
The vanilla is universal basic education.
The Separatist Congregationalists who founded Plymouth Colony in 1620 obliged parents to teach their children how to read and write.
In 1852, Massachusetts was the first U.S. state to pass a compulsory universal public education law. In particular, the Massachusetts General Court required every town to create and operate a grammar school. Fines were imposed on parents who did not send their children to school, and the government took the power to take children away from their parents and apprentice them to others if government officials decided that the parents were “unfit to have the children educated properly.” In 1918, Mississippi became the last state to enact a compulsory attendance law.
In 1922 an attempt was made by the voters of Oregon to enact the Oregon Compulsory Education Act, which would require all children between the ages of 8 and 16 to attend public schools, only leaving exceptions for mentally or physically unfit children, exceeding a certain living distance from a state school, or having written consent from a county superintendent to receive private instruction. The law was passed by popular vote but was later ruled unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court.
— Wikipedia, Compulsory Education
Western Australia was the first Australian state to make education compulsory, in 1871 – the same year as Michigan, Washington state, New Hampshire, and Ontario.
This was 9 years before England did likewise.
Pistachio
Not everyone likes pistachio. Sometimes I do, and sometimes I don’t. So I’ve used it to symbolize option #2 – paid education. Private schools, and then a guaranteed university place. Only the wealthy can afford this, it’s been their ‘edge’ for many years.
Byakuya
Byakuya is a Japanese combination of white truffles imported from Alba, Italy; Parmigiano Reggiano cheese; and sake lees, a byproduct of the sake production process. The resulting frozen dessert costs an absolutely eye-watering ¥873,400 ($6,696) for a single 130 mL (4.4 ounce) serving.
— Foodandwine.com / world record most expensive ice-cream via Google
Option three isn’t for everyone. It costs too much, for one thing. And it’s not necessarily going to appeal to anyone outside Japan and fans of Japanese cuisine.
That makes it perfectly symbolic of scholarships and endowments – money provided by the wealthy to be used to give the meritorious an education, on the principle that they are likely to improve or benefit society as a result, and that in turn benefits the donor of the money.
And it makes you look good.
Vanilla with Sprinkles
Finally, there’s a fourth option – government scholarships.
Both this option and the preceding one raise the question of how you find the potential recipients. Do you only consider those who apply, for example? Or is there some sort of standardized testing that might automatically trigger an offer? Or perhaps you need a letter of introduction from someone?
If it’s available, the standardized testing is probably the easiest answer. But it means that states with poor educational standards are going to miss out, each and every time – and further assumes that such problems have no bearing on the test scores of individuals, that you are in fact comparing Granny Smiths with Red Delicious Apples.
When you take those considerations into account, you suddenly find that there are no easy answers. That’s why so many donors leave it up to the Universities themselves – when they find a student they would desperately like to keep, but who can’t afford it, they put his name forward for a scholarship.
Well, that system isn’t perfect, either.
This article will continue next week! Still lots of ground to cover!
- Economics In RPGs 1: The Early Medieval
- Economics In RPGs 2: The Later Medieval
- Economics In RPGs 3: Pre-Industrial Eras
- Economics In RPGs 4: The Age Of Steam
- Economics In RPGs 5a: Electric Age Ch. 1
- Economics In RPGs 5b: Electric Age Ch. 2
- Economics In RPGs 6a: Pre-Digital Tech Age Ch 1
- Economics In RPGs 6b: Pre-Digital Tech Age Ch 2
- Economics In RPGs 6c: Pre-Digital Tech Age Ch 3
- Economics In RPGs 7: Economic Realities
- Economics In RPGs 8: The Digital Age Ch 1
- Economics In RPGs 8: The Digital Age Ch 2
- Economics In RPGs 8: The Digital Age Ch 3
- Economics In RPGs 8: The Digital Age Ch 4
- Economics In RPGs 8: The Digital Age Ch 5
- Economics In RPGs 9: In-Game Economics
Discover more from Campaign Mastery
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
June 20th, 2023 at 10:07 pm
The Australian Prime Minister you mentioned was actually Malcolm Fraser (not Frazier). However I believe at one point a U.S. president mispronounced his name as Frazier.
June 20th, 2023 at 11:03 pm
I always seem to misspell that name, I don’t know why! Thanks for the correction, James – now fixed!
June 21st, 2023 at 12:30 pm
I agree with every factor that you have pointed out. Thank you for sharing your beautiful thoughts on this.
June 22nd, 2023 at 4:44 am
Thank you, Dennis!