Norberg on Improvement

... once the government is in the business of providing support to businesses, it becomes attractive for more and more companies to build political connections and lobby for their own government-granted privileges.--deRugy

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From the Economist:

It is far from clear such [manufacturing] jobs can be brought back—no matter how much governments spend. For a start, the manufacturing wage premium has fallen sharply. Production workers’ wages in America now lag behind those of similar service-sector workers by 5%. Moreover, the sort of high-tech factories that America and Europe are attempting to attract are highly automated, meaning they are no longer a significant source of employment for people with few qualifications…
According to the IMF, the gap between manufacturing and services productivity growth has shrunk in many countries since the turn of the millennium. In China and India its direction has flipped, with services productivity rising faster. Moreover, services are a broad church, ranging from teaching to tech. The latter boasts extremely fast productivity growth, which may soon be propelled further by artificial intelligence.

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There are now more NBA players with $30 million annual salaries than CEOs of S&P 500 companies who are guaranteed that much.

Norberg on Improvement

In his book “The Invention of Improvement,” Paul Slack writes that a belief in a steady rate of improvement began to take hold in 17th-century England. No more did England think that prosperity and well-being would come from returning to some better past. Instead, it would come from applying human ingenuity to improve skills, work the land better and engage in trade and industry. Indeed, the very word “improvement” was of recent coinage, first applied to broader areas than agriculture in the mid-17th century. In his interpretation of the Enlightenment, Peter Gay explains: “Fear of change, up to that time nearly universal, was giving way to fear of stagnation; the word innovation, traditionally an effective term of abuse, became a word of praise.”

This perspective was expressed in many works—for example, in John Locke’s founding document of classical liberalism, 1689’s “Two Treatises of Government.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously expressed the zero-sum theory of economics in 1755, saying that the great robber of mankind was “the first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say ‘this is mine.’” In fact, 65 years earlier, John Locke had already refuted such assumptions, with the much more modern idea that productivity and market exchange create prosperity for both sides: “he who appropriates land to himself by his labour, does not lessen but increase the common stock of mankind.” Since the individual who encloses land increases its production by some hundred to one, according to Locke, the agricultural entrepreneur does not take one acre from mankind, but gives it 99 acres.