If we look at inequality on the population level, as measured by the share of the wealth owned by the top 10%, we’re roughly at the same level today as we were in ~1700, at least according to recent work by Guido Alfani (I only knew of the Piketty work before)1:
Thus, inequality rose all through the industrial revolution, up to an all-time high in ~1910 in the age of robber baron capitalism. Then, through the two world wars, and social and taxation reforms thereafter, inequality sank to its lowest point in ~450 years in 1975, when with the neoliberal reforms of Thatcher and Reagan—concerning mostly tax breaks for the rich and relaxed taxation on inheritances—wealth concentration picked up speed again.
The graph only goes up to about 2010, but since then, things have become more dire: since the COVID pandemic, about two-thirds of all newly-created wealth has gone to the top 1%.
So while we are living now (probably still) in more egalitarian times than in the 18th century, that’s not thanks to the industrial revolution, but thanks largely to reforms in the wake of major social upheaval, the walking back of which in the 1970s/1980s has set us firmly onto the path of greater inequality again—something I fear now all but locked in with the oligarchic takeover of the US.
1The Alfani series is an average of the Sabaudian State, the Florentine State, the Kingdom of Naples (Apulia), and the Republic of Venice (the estimates for the Sabaudian State, the Florentine State, and the Kingdom of Naples have been adjusted to include those with no property). Before 1500, only information about the Florentine State and the Sabaudian State is available. The Piketty series is an average of France, the United Kingdom, and Sweden.
Depends on how you measure “egalitarian” - by population overall, sure, because of the middle class that wasn’t at all substantial then and is now. But our mega-wealthy still outstrip the 18th C mega-wealthy versus the dirt poor of now vs then. That to me isn’t egalitarian at all.
Fair point. By either metric, though, I guess the conclusion remains the same—without a substantial decrease in inequality, living conditions for the bulk of humanity will deteriorate under climate change (not that getting rid of or at least substantially reducing inequality isn’t itself a valuable goal).
Update: I finally got through my library’s waiting list and am now a bit less than halfway through A City on Mars. My impressions so far, with more as I finish the book:
The authors are space enthusiasts who are NOT doing a hit piece on space exploration in general or even Elon Musk and SpaceX in particular. The tone of the book is more cautionary than pessimistic. They came to the conclusion that space settlement is not as easy and straightforward as the rah-rah enthusiasts presume, that it’s not as simple as summoning the will to just go ahead and go out there. The authors even self-depreciatingly label themselves the “Space Bastards” for administering a dose of cold water on the subject.
They start by saying in the introduction that the revolution in launch pricing and capacity of the past ten years is real, and that Musk’s plans are sincere. They specifically say:
Whatever else you could say about these ideas, they do appear to be sincerely held. In our experience, people often think that space billionaires are hucksters or liars or even Ponzi schemers. It’s never fun being in the position of saying “Guys, wait! These billionaires are misunderstood!” But look, setting aside the hype and showmanship, there is every reason to believe rocket billionaires really care about space settlement. Jeff Bezos gave his valedictory speech as a high school student on the topic of space colonies and today is the most important advocate for large, rotating space-station settlements of the type advocated for by O’Neill. When Elon Musk first got rich off the sale of PayPal, before he created SpaceX, he looked into sending a mouse colony or a small greenhouse to Mars. There is no money to be made doing this sort of thing; Musk wanted people to see his vision for space during a time when space activity was lackluster.
In our experience, a lot of people think Space X in particular is some sort of scam, using old government-created space technology for personal enrichment, or somehow hiding the true costs of space launch to fleece public coffers. We’ve encountered this idea again and again, and all we can say is that it’s so contrary to the plain facts as to verge on a conspiracy theory.
The rest of the book then goes on to critically analyze proposals for utilizing and settling space. Chapter One deals with space myths, debunking various utopian ideas that space will somehow revolutionize the human condition. While they repeatedly stress that many of the long-term benefits of space are potentially realizable, the scope required is probably unworkable in less than a century.
Section One, Chapters Two through Four addresses biological issues. Aside from repeatedly stressing that our data is too limited to be sure one way or another, the authors point out that the need to mitigate radiation exposure is strong, and that a real concern is that even if all else goes well, children gestated and raised in reduced gravity might never be able to acclimate to Earth gravity; with all the ethical issues that raises. They also touch upon mental health issues in a settlement just large enough to statistically encounter mental illness but not large enough to have the capacity to deal with it well.
Section Two, Chapters Five through Eight examines the prospects of settling different locations in space. Mars get labeled as the least-lousy even though that’s not particularly good. The Moon is a lousier prospect but at least easier to get to. Rotating space colonies in cislunar space suffer from two difficulties: first, the scale needed and therefore the expense of them exceeds even a Martian outpost. Second, the primary justification for them, beamed solar power, has since Gerard O’Neill and the Stanford Group studies of the 1970s been largely undercut by advances in terrestrial energy technology. Although eventually a self-supporting space infrastructure might be established, in the short or mid-term it’s difficult to say what benefits there would be to doing so. Everywhere else in space is as bad or worse in terms of economics and difficulty.
As detailed in such books as Colonies in Space and The High Frontier, orbital colonies would support an industrial workforce that would take raw materials harvested and shot from the Moon and process it into powersats and more colonies. By utilizing an extreme economy of scale the marginal cost of building such powersats would be made far cheaper than they could ever be launched from Earth. (The point of solar power being based in space would be beamed power not limited by the Earth’s day/night cycle.) This being proposed in the late 1970s few people thought that it could be done remotely or by AI.
Automated miners on Ceres have gotten a hold of a copy of On the Origin of Species, and convinced themselves that they’re the product of natural selection. They’ve started violently disassembling any heretic robots that suggest that they have a Creator.
Beamed power from orbiting solar power-generating satellites was the essential justification for O’Neill colonies (and Lunar colonies from which the necessary materials would be mined):
Note that none of it makes much sense, either financially or technically; despite the attenuation of solar insolation through the atmosphere to Earth’s surface and the fact that you can only get about 6 to 8 hours of high insolation per day at a fixed surface location, it is vastly cheaper to build and maintain large solar ‘farms’ on the ground instead of in orbit, and even the couple of percent of power loss to absorption through the atmosphere by selecting the appropriate microwave bandwidth is potentially a problem given the projected throughput required to make such a system fiscally sound would be dumping enough energy to negatively influence climate behavior. Mining materials from the surface of the Moon or hauling it from near earth asteroids would require a massive industrial infrastructure and in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) that did not then and does not today exist, as well as resolving a host of fundamental problems like dealing with the abrasive, electrostatic dust of the Lunar regolith that caused Apollo astronauts no end of problems even with their short stays, protecting astronauts from solar particle and high energy cosmic radiation, and fabricating structural materials, fasteners, wire, et cetera in space at a scale to build a structure larger than a supercarrier.
It was all just a justification to construct O’Neill colonies because Gerard O’Neill was a nut for people living in space. Which a lot of people think is a cool concept (myself included) but the reality is that there are enormous hurdles and a decades of concerted development of technology and infrastructure before such an ambition could be realized, much less made capable of a return on investment.
And of course, the main problem with orbital solar power is that you have to be very, very sure that you can trust whoever is in control of the power beam.
Chapter Nine looks at habitats. The famous Biosphere 2 experiment, although problem plagued, is viewed more kindly than popularly regarded. The authors’ main takeaway: governments involved in space should be funding ongoing or even multiple experiments on the level of Biosphere 2 to try to develop the body of knowledge necessary for closed-cycle environments to succeed (they don’t single it out as SpaceX’s responsibility).
Chapter Ten considers physical construction. They point out that since “ores” in the terrestrial sense probably won’t exist, materials processing will have to turn rock and sand into metals and ceramics, which will require robust energy supplies. Solar will be too intermittent even with energy storage and will probably only serve as a supplement to the only other technology available: nuclear. Not undoable but expensive and a lot of development work to be done.
And finally, the rest of the book. Almost the entire second half looks not at if settlement of space and exploitation of resources is feasible, but the consequences of if it is.
The authors seem to be scared witless of the possibility of nuclear-armed states getting into conflict over space. Their ideal framework for exploring and settling space is the unloved “Agreement Governing the Activities of States on the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies” of 1979, aka the Moon Treaty. This treaty would have explicitly declared all of outer space a commons administered by the signatories, and by some interpretations would have virtually banned private enterprise in space. Only 17 nations signed on, with the glaring absence not only of the capitalist United States but also the communist Soviet Union, the two powers who dominated space activity at the time. It was bitterly opposed by the L-5 Society and was contradicted by the later Artemis Accords.
The ultimate take-away from the book is that the Weinersmiths think that rushing to establish a settlement on Mars isn’t a good idea, that both research and accordance needs to be done first.
Yeah, this is something people definitely miss when talking about settling Mars. No understanding of how most of Earth’s mineral resources come from sources that are extremely enriched in desired elements by the activities of tectonics and abundant water, both of which are in much shorter supply on Mars. Unless you build absolutely everything of iron, the one metal we know that’s easy to get on Mars, it’s going to be a tough haul, absent finding some very specific igneous sources like layered intrusions or carbonatites.
Iron is literally as common as dirt in the inner system, it wouldn’t be a limiter on any place humans chose to settle. So it’s all the other metals that become the determinants - copper, aluminium, rare earths, etc. And iron by itself won’t do many of the jobs those others are needed for.
No, not “so much for Kessler Syndrome”; a loss of control and collision of,just a couple of satellites could create a destructive cloud of debris at an altitude that it can survive for years, especially as the low point of the solar cycle, and further collisions can create a persistent and growing cloud of debris. I have spoken to one former JSpOC orbital analyst whose job it was specifically to assess orbital debris hazards who is convinced that this is virtually certain to happen eventually with the sheer number of Starlink and other satellites, potentially rendering entire azimuths of Low Earth Orbit unusable.
