Mass market handcrafts are no longer a viable means of subsistence anywhere in the West. You can still produce things like handwoven cloth, bespoke rocking chairs, and novelty birdhouses, but you market them primarily to an upscale clientele. It’s next to impossible to compete on price when the average consumer is basing their idea of what a thing is worth on products being assembled by machinery in countries where labor is cheap and regulatory compliance is negligible.

So you go after high-income earners who are not concerned with price, but this requires proximity, networking, and then on-going relationship management with a much smaller group of people who are all much more likely to talk to each other.

Effectively, this is the problem the grandparent comment outlined with extra steps; it isn’t your labor by itself that is uniquely valuable, it is your relationship with buyers, and those relationships can sour. Vendors who signed on with Walmart experienced something similar where they began scaling to meet demand only to find themselves completely reliant on Walmart’s orders to service their loans. Walmart was then free to dictate the terms of the relationship. This is a very familiar dynamic in societies that never successfully divorced themselves from feudal ideas (e.g. Most of South Asia, parts of South America).

> Mass market handcrafts are no longer a viable means of subsistence anywhere in the West.

Mass market handicrafts have never been a viable means of subsistence anywhere, ever, if we benchmark against what I think a reasonable lifestyle looks like. That is why we stopped doing things that way.

Nevertheless mass market handicrafts are still a theoretical option. It hasn't become a worse option over time, it is in fact a better option now than it ever was in the past. Today is the best day in history to be a weaver, even for those that do it by hand. A weaver in the 1700s would weep tears of joy at the opportunity to weave things by hand today at market rates. They would say things like "wow, I can afford a much better life than in the 1700s with my weaving skills", "what just happened to me? What was that time portal?" and "maybe I should learn to code, they earn even more money than I do".

> Mass market handicrafts have never been a viable means of subsistence anywhere, ever, if we benchmark against what I think a reasonable lifestyle looks like.

There were plenty of craftsmen who lived lifestyles that were acceptable for the time periods they were living in. From around 1400, to around the early 1900s, European settlements consisting of more than a few hundred people would have had blacksmiths, cobblers, tailors, furniture makers, and various other craftsmen. It wasn’t until the late 19th century that this arrangement started to be replaced by the economies of scale made possible by the factory system.

> A weaver in the 1700s would weep tears of joy at the opportunity to weave things by hand today at market rates.

The idea that a medieval peasant would be envious of our standard of living is doing nothing to further the point you are trying to make.

> The idea that a medieval peasant would be envious of our standard of living is doing nothing to further the point you are trying to make.

It is a fair chunk of the point I'm making - you still have the option of living like a medieval peasant if that is important to you. The option never went away. It is still on the table. People could have kept doing what they did before and maintained the lifestyle that they were used to. It is more that people choose not to do that and I've been saying a variant of that in every comment in this thread so far. The only people who chose to do it that way wouldn't have if they'd had any alternatives because the lifestyle it enabled was terrible.

Having better options available doesn't mean the old option isn't available, more that someone'd need to be either a bit stupid or very motivated to live a particular lifestyle to choose it. it has been a lousy option that led to a mean existence for all of human history. It still does. But in absolute terms, it would be a better option in the modern economy than the ancient one.

People are social beings. I could live a life which is (vastly) better than people in 1930 or 1960 by doing the most menial work. The problem is that if most of society wouldn't, I'd be seen as a paria. If I didn't have a partner it would be extremely difficult to find one, children would be bullied at their school.

I actually did very menial work in a food processing plant while still in education, I'm not better than the people working there but I'm different from them in interests and in upbringing (even though I didn't come from wealth, the people I studied with, shared hobbies with did). I wasn't able to discuss the things I read with these people and they weren't able to talk about their interests. I believe if I had to work there for years or decades it would lead to dysfunction.

>Mass market handicrafts have never been a viable means of subsistence anywhere, ever, if we benchmark against what I think a reasonable lifestyle looks like.

When your community was a village of a few hundred collectively sharing resources as a tribe, being a Weaver was extremely valuable and viable. Becsuse a Weaver wasn't worried about weaving 200 baskets to afford a home. We're in a very different model now. So saying it was "never" viable is myopic to history.

> They would say things like "wow, I can afford a much better life than in the 1700s with my weaving skills", "what just happened to me? What was that time portal?" and "maybe I should learn to code, they earn even more money than I do".

By Christ’s bones, where am I set now? This town’s all noise and hurrying. Aye, cloth fetches money, they say so; but meat costs dear, and a room dearer yet.

I weave as I ever did. My hands know the work. But the buyer stands far off, and sends his price by another man, and I must take it, for what choice have I? At home we knew who cheated us, and who’d answer for it. Here, a man shrugs and says, ‘That’s the market.’ I know not the fellow called Market, but he rules harder than any master I’ve known.

The loom is quick, I’ll grant it. Too quick. Three men’s work in one frame, and the rest turned loose. They’ll not thank thee for cheap cloth.

And thou say’st a man may earn bread by "code"? Is that writ-work then, like tallies and ledgers? If so, God help him when the ink runs dry. A loom at least makes cloth a body can wear.

Thou tell’st me I live better. Maybe. I eat white bread. But I sleep light, and when work stops, there’s naught beneath me.

--

The past makes for more interesting stories; the present, I find, has all the limits of setting a short story in Iain M Banks' The Culture, where too many solutions already exist to every drama, and we've not internalised how easy the solutions are.

But that combinatorial explosion of complexity, beyond our own grasp… that itself is scary for many, it leaves us open to exploitation we can't well counter. The internet connects us all, but 2 billion online means being exposed to 20 million people who are top-percentile psychopaths, it's not all good.

This is one of those cases where it's really important to remember the assumptions built into comparative advantage theory, such as "no mobility of labor". If the Green-country people are more productive at all tasks than the Blue-country people, they can still both profit from trade with each other. But that does not represent the maximum productivity allocation of resources. Output can be increased still further by the Green people replacing the population of the Blue-country with more Green people, in which scenario the optimal resource allocation to sustaining the Blue people is unfortunately zero.

This is why the population of labor animals plummeted in the 20th century. And to put it plainly, it means that there's no guarantee you can always sell labor for enough to keep your home from getting paved over for a data center.

> It runs in to comparative advantage theory eventually - just because someone else is much more efficient than you at literally everything doesn't mean you can't still do something inefficiently and set up a win-win situation.

Comparative advantage has some assumptions built in, which can be violated in practice, especially by technology, especially when you can (we can't yet in general but can in specific domains) build compute and power supplies for that compute for less than it costs to raise a human to the point of being economically productive.

There's a few isolated tribes around the world, most famously North Sentinel Island. They have nothing to trade with us, nothing we want to buy. We let them be because even their land itself isn't important to us. They could be educated the way anyone else is and become as productive as any of us, but even people interested in taking slaves wouldn't bother with the effort required.

> I dunno why geohotz thinks in this article that shares in a granary are a bad idea, someone has to profit from storing food. May as well be me. I'll do it if he won't. I like granaries.

Because:

  When the grain is produced by machines, the peasants are cut out of the loop.

Trump, Exxon Mobil, Venezuela. Exxon Mobil says Venezuela is "uninvestable", the comments I see say they've got legitimate reasons to fear that any investments they do make would just get seized by some future government.

Same applies.

It is a luxury good like Art, which is an elevated form of labor that is only possible on account of the development of technology like the automated loom, which provides clothes for most people at almost no cost, affording some lucky individuals the leisure time to do things like hand weave cloth or argue about capitalism on Hacker News.

Sure, I don't know why anyone would want to hand-weave cloth in this era of miracles where a machine can do it for you faster and better. It looks like hard work and it is technically a waste of time. But, hypothetically, if there was a portion of society that for some mad reason can't get access to machine-made cloth they can still weave their own.

And the fact is, for those souls who are motivated to do so, they can make a living hand-weaving anyway and do not need to weave 3,000x faster. They weave at a similar pace to that people always have. They can still afford bread. Society will almost give bread away to people, it is absurdly cheap.

At this point it really seems like your taking bread too literally here.

To put it more simply, you won't keep a roof over your head by only selling baskets to your local village these days. You can scale it up, but by that point you need much more than a craftman to maintain a business and keep up with a minimum wage lifestyle.

Bread is only cheap on account of mechanization. Before technological innovations bread was often paid in wages, like those of the workers who built the pyramids.