Rory Groves - Durable Trades: Family-Centered Economies That Have Stood the Test of Time

Part I

Brittle Systems

Men always build their towers so high they fall down.

Francis Schaeffer

We all have grown up in complex societies, so we consider complexity to be normal, and we consider it to be the natural state of affairs. The problem with this view is that its historically inaccurate. We are in fact an anomaly of history. We dont realize that low complexity is the normal state of affairs and the way we live today is very unusual.

Joseph Tainter

R esearch into the topic of durable trades invariably leads to the causes of decline. After all, why bother investigating such a topic unless there is an underlying sense that the way we live today is not indefinitely sustainable? If such a project is worth undertaking, what assumptions are being made about the way things are?

Jobs in the building trades are projected to increase faster than jobs in every other sector in America over the next decadefaster even than health care and technology. Over the same period, many white-collar jobs requiring -year college degrees will cease to exist. Why is this?

To answer these questions, we must examine the more serious cracks in modernitys foundation so that we can understand the need for more durable alternatives for those living in the twenty-first century.

Complexity & Specialization

In his renowned work, The Collapse of Complex Societies , historian Joseph Tainter posited a new theory for the cause of decline and collapse in civilizations. Prior to his work, theories of societal collapse ranged from such catastrophes as nuclear war, resource depletion, economic decline, ecological crises, or sociopolitical disintegration. But Tainters theory differed from other literature on the subject. Tainter asserted that societies collapse not because of external pressures forced upon them, but because of increasing levels of complexity from within:

Human history as a whole has been characterized by a seemingly inexorable trend toward higher levels of complexity, specialization, and sociopolitical control, processing of greater quantities of energy and in formation, formation of ever larger settlements, and development of more complex and capable technologies.

As societies face problems, they increase in complexity in order to solve them. Eventually, Tainter argues, the complexity overwhelms a societys ability to maintain it, and the result is a rapid loss of complexity in a society, otherwise known as collapse .

To prove his point, Tainter documents the collapse of civilizations through history, from the Old Egyptian Empire ( 2181 BC) to the Roman Empire (AD ), to the Chacoan (AD 1300 ) and Mayan (AD ) civilizations in North and South America, all of which were at their heightssome having lasted thousands of yearswhen collapse came suddenly.

One way to measure complexity in a society is to look at the stratification of professionsthat is, job specialization. As societies increase in complexity, the labor force must continually re-orient itself to meet new demands and challenges, subdividing complex tasks into simpler ones. In America, as with the rest of the industrialized world, we have seen a logarithmic rise in the number of occupations over the last two centuries.

At the founding of our country, there were at most a few dozen distinct occupations. Within years that number had risen to over ,. Today there are over , occupations, with dozens of new specialties being invented daily.

Sources: Virginia Center for Digital History; Colonial Williamsburg; US Census 1850 ; US Census ; IPUMS USA; 1950 Census, Alphabetical Index of Occupations and Industries; Census 2000 Occupational Index; Data for 1800 is estimated.

To analyze the rapid increase in specialization and complexity, twentieth-century economists developed models to interpret the data. The Three-Sector Theory, developed by Allan Fisher, Colin Clark and Jean Fouraste, proposed organizing job specialties into three megasectors of economic activity: primary, secondary, and tertiary. Later a fourth sector was added, the quaternary.

This categorization is seen as a continuum of distance from the natural environment, explains geographer Matt Rosenberg. The continuum starts with primary economic activity, which concerns itself with the utilization of raw materials from the earth such as agriculture and mining. From there, the distance from the raw materials of the earth increases.

Primary Sector activities include raw material extraction, namely, farming, mining, fishing, forestry, and hunting. The Secondary Sector produces finished goods from the activities of the Primary Sector. This includes manufacturing, processing, and construction. The Tertiary Sector is broadly known as the services industry. Activities in this sector involve selling goods made by the Secondary Sector and providing servicestransportation, banking, healthcare, and lawto people in all sectors. The more recently defined Quaternary Sector consists of intellectual activities known as the knowledge economyscientific research, education, government, and information technology.

Clark codified this theory into a time-series chart to illustrate how civilizations progress from Primary Sector activities to Tertiary and Quaternary Sector activities as they mature and industrialize.

In pre-industrial America (prior to 1790 ), more than two-thirds of the population was directly involved in such primary activities as farming and forestry, with a small minority involved in manufacturing and even fewer in services. Today these allocations have reversed dramatically, with only a small minority involved in primary activities, while the vast majority are employed by the service (tertiary) and knowledge (quaternary) economies.

Keep in mind that the names given these various sectors are Primary, Secondary, Tertiary, and not First, Second, Third. While the expansion of subsequent sectors correlates to an increase in prosperity for the society being measured, these sectors still depend on precedent-sector activities. In other words, before scientists, computer programmers, and biotech engineers can be employed in a society, there must be robust construction, manufacturing and service sectors. And before there can be robust construction and manufacturing, there must be farming, forestry and mining. Even the theoretical astrophysicist has to eat.

Consider viewing these sectors as a pyramid. In simpler societies, the foundation consists of a broad base of Primary Sector activities: agriculture, mining, and forestryand a broad base of laborers to work those professions. Upon this foundation rests manufacturing, processing, and construction activities. Towards the top of the pyramid we see the Tertiary (service) and Quaternary (knowledge) sectors.

A society that is formed thus would be inherently stable and self-sufficient. External impacts such as supply-chain disruptions would have limited, if any, impact. With its broad foundation of primary activities, such a society maintains the essential knowledge to feed, clothe, and shelter itself without being overly dependent on secondary and tertiary activities. But imagine if the pyramid were inverted. What if the foundation is minuscule and has to support the weight of the entire rest of the economy? How stable would that society truly be?