Governor of Bank of Canada Doesn't Know Canada's Own History

This is a simple video, cheap to produce, and free to post. It is about the fact of its own existence. The talking head is the remarkable investigator James Corbett.

We are witnessing an incomparable transformation of world civilization, and we barely recognize it. We are too busy to recognize it. We are hard-pressed to think through the implications of it for our own lives, let alone the lives of seven and a half-billion other people. But the transformation is taking place. We have gone through it, almost oblivious to the fact that we have been going through it. We almost take it for granted. That was Corbett's point.

I want to make another point. The most important unanswered question that any historian can ask is this one: what made possible, beginning around 1800, compound economic growth per capita of about 2% per annum? Historians rarely ask this question. None of the ones who have attempted to answer it have come up with a plausible answer. Yet that phenomenon has led to the creation of the world that would be completely unrecognizable to anybody born in 1800. This has taken place within the lifetime of three generations. I have come back to this point repeatedly. John Tyler was born in 1790, and he became President in 1841. I have interviewed his grandson, Lyon Tyler. Both Lyon and his brother Harrison are still alive. This is inconceivable.

The 2% per annum per capita real economic growth that has taken place over the last two centuries was imperceptible to the people living through the transformation. Year-by-year, the world got richer, and the only exception was the decade of the 1930's. Yet people did not perceive the transformation. Gadget by gadget, the world was completely changed, but people only noticed the gadgets that applied to their lives. There is more to life than the compounding of gadgets, yet the compounding of gadgets ultimately transformed the world.

Corbett's point applies to the last two decades. Here, breakthroughs were made, based on Moore's law, which have changed our lives. Moore's Law accelerates a lot more than 2% per annum. It accelerates at something close to 50% per annum. Despite this, we have lived through the repercussions since 1965 in the field of silicon technology, and we have adjusted without any problem. We barely notice what is taking place around us. We take it for granted. That's why I thought Corbett's video was impressive. Using digital technology, he made his point in such a way that we understand it. He did it simply by using a piece of digital music. At first, it was not clear what he was getting at. But, by the end of the presentation, it was clear what he was getting at.

To his sense of wonder, I add a sense of gratitude. I am a writer. Writers want to find readers. In the history of mankind, up to 1996, writers had to find either a publisher that would print and distribute their materials, or else they had to become direct response marketers who could seek out an audience through the use of mailing lists. I tried the first approach, and I failed. I tried the second approach, and I succeeded.

Today, as the extraordinary experience of Jordan Peterson indicates, all you have to be is good. Never before in the history of man has the principle outlined in Albert J. Nock's 1936 essay, "Isaiah's Job," been truer: the Remnant will seek you out. To use the words of the voice that spoke to Kevin Costner, if you build it, they will come. Warning: if it's not any good, they won't stay long unless they are crackpots. Of course, there is always a large number of crackpots. You may get an audience, but they won't be worth recruiting.

We now are being pressured to restructure our lives. We do it voluntarily. People who use Facebook and social media, which I do not, have had to re-budget time in their lives. The way we communicate has changed. We are told that the way people get elected has changed. There is nothing that the critics can do about it. That really is the bottom line. All the handwringing about the supposed Russian involvement in American politics is essentially irrelevant. The two main candidates used the system to the hilt. Trump used it cheaper. He won. The candidates will always use the best tools available.

There is nothing anybody can do about it that is significant. The establishment doesn't like it. The people who were the pioneers of the transformation want to be in the establishment. More or less, they have been adopted by the establishment. But our lives are changing in a completely un-predictable way. The geniuses who created Facebook, Amazon, and all the other digit-based institutions have been financially successful, and they have solved little problems to make their empires grow. But they have no control over the direction in which history is moving, because, visibly, there are so many new directions in which it may be moving. So many different groups use Facebook that there is no way of knowing which group is going to be successful. Everybody has some eschatology. Everybody has some theory of the future. But, with respect to specific predictions about how old movements are going to use specific new technologies, nobody has a clue.

Let me give a recent example. Google, renamed Alphabet, has a subsidiary: Waymo. Waymo has developed the new technology of self-driving cars. I have thought myself radical in saying that I think self-driving cars are going to be widespread in 2025. Little did I know. Waymo has just ordered 20,000 self-driving Jaguars, which will be delivered between now and the end of 2020.

My wife understands their strategy. She says they're going to appeal to rich people whose time is valuable. Waymo thinks that their cars will be driving a million trips a day in 2020. If this turns out to be true, there will be tremendous pressure on everybody else whose time is valuable to either use Waymo or else buy self-driving cars of their own. Other companies, such as Uber and Lyft, are going to have to compete by using self-driving cars.

Let's talk politics. If the rich people find that self-driving cars save them money, then they are going to make certain that politicians vote for policies that will enable the spread of self-driving cars. That's another reason why Waymo is buying Jaguars. Anyway, that's my theory.

For articles on this, go here, here, and especially here.

New York City cabbies are going to be out of business in 48 months. They see what is coming. They are desperate for politicians to save them. It will not work. Some have begun committing suicide.

This protest is futile. Moore's law is relentless. Self-driving cabs are coming. We must adjust. Despair is futile. Politics is futile. An unplanned, widespread, international process of innovation is irreversible, short of a total breakdown of world civilization. This is unlikely.

Hayek called this the spontaneous order. The free market is replacing politics in the realm of economic planning. The state is on the defensive.

The central planners are holding up signs: "Stop!" The process will not stop. They will be run over.

It is a time for gratitude, not just wonder.