New and Old #148

Friday roundup and commentary

What Happened to the US Machine Tool Industry?, Construction Physics, Brian Potter, January 18, 2024

This is a really important article, and this strikes me as the core issue on which critics of free trade (though that’s not the only factor here) are basically correct.

Machine tools – machines that cut or form metal – are the heart of industrial civilization. Sometimes called “mother machines” (because they’re machines that make other machines), machine tools are required to make almost everything….

For most of the 20th century, the US was unrivaled in its machine tool technology, and as late as the early 1980s it was the largest machine tool producer in the world.. But almost overnight, the industry collapsed: annual machine tool shipments declined by more than 50% in 2 years, hundreds of machine tool companies went out of business, and the US slipped from the largest producer in the world to the 4th or 5th (depending on the year), roughly where it remains today.

Also: “As of 2014, not a single one of the 10 largest machine tool companies in the world was a US company.” If the only answer to this is that it doesn’t really matter, well, that might not be good enough.

This is a sobering piece. Read the whole thing.

The Battle Over Communist Buildings, Mark Baker, January 22, 2024

What a cool thing for a city to have:

Thanks to the fact that Prague and the rest of the country were spared significant war damage over the centuries, visitors are treated to a nearly unbroken line of architectural development. The earliest surviving buildings, from the Romanesque period of around the turn of the first millennium, seamlessly give way to the grand 14th- and 15th-century Gothic structures of Prague, like Prague Castle or the Old Town Hall. Later centuries brought to Czech towns and cities the symmetrical, Italian-influenced Renaissance and the lavish, hypnotic baroque that was so favored by the Catholic Church and ruling Habsburg monarchy.

Czechia is also brimming with examples of those revivalist “neo” styles – such as “Neo-Renaissance” and “Neoclassical” -- that were all the rage in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 19th century. Fans of sumptuous, early-20th century Art Nouveau need look no further than Prague’s Municipal House to get their fix. Cities like Brno and Zlín were hotbeds of 1920s’ Functionalism and early-Modern. Brno’s ground-breaking Vila Tugendhat predicted – and predated by decades – the massively popular “Mid-century Modern” style that wouldn’t come to much of the rest of the world until the 1950s and ‘60s.

But the communist-era architecture is a more tenuous part of that well-loved historic fabric:

Czechia’s cultural officials say they take several factors into consideration when deciding on whether to grant a building protected status. These include things like how important or ground-breaking the structure was at the time it was built and how effectively it articulates a particular architectural style.

These considerations may well be true, but the real battle seems to have little to do with the quality of the buildings themselves, but rather the continual tug-of-war underway in society concerning the legacy of communism itself.

Interesting read, with a lot of great photos!

The Introverts Have Taken Over the US Economy, Bloomberg, Allison Schrager, January 22, 2024

One other way the pandemic altered America: It has created what might be called the Introvert Economy. The time at home made Americans less fun. 2023 was a year for daytime office holiday parties, after all, and in general Americans are going out less. And odds are it will stick: It is the youngest adults who are going out less, and when they do go out, it is earlier.

This is really interesting. The social media commentary on this piece was mixed, with people arguing over the sort-of conflation of introvert with antisocial, with whether going out less and drinking less and whatever isn’t really a healthier lifestyle, etc. But I think this is definitely a real phenomenon, whatever judgment you make on it. Schrager does note the point about less drinking in particular being probably good, but argues more broadly of socializing:

If they [young people] continue to socialize less, they may end up less connected. The result could be a decline in mental health and social cohesion. That could be the best argument against today’s introvert economy: If you don’t have fun now, you’ll pay for it later.

This reminds me of a book I reviewed back in late 2022 by David Sax, about the importance of in-person everything, which I tweeted in response to this article. I put Sax’s argument this way: “All the annoyances and frictions of everyday life were sort of like exercise or eating well: good for us but hard to choose affirmatively.”

This is an under-remarked-on element of post-pandemic life compared to, say, inflation. But maybe a far more important one.

Orientation towards the common good in cities: The role of individual urban mobility behavior, Journal of Environmental Psychology, Harald Schuster, Jolanda van der Noll, Anette Rohmann Volume 91, November 2023

This is a long academic journal piece that basically claims to find that walking and biking are associated with greater neighborly attitudes and concern for the common good. I can hear two responses: “These left-wing academics came up with a ‘study’ to ‘prove’ that motorists are bad people,” or, “Getting around in a way that roots you and connects you to the places you pass through encourages pro-social tendencies.” I think you know which way I see it. Check out the article; it’s very interesting.

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Related Reading:

New and Old #139

New and Old #140

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