A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century by Jacques Attali
Authors: Jacques Attali
Ads: Link
sometimes gas: the bathroom becomes a major factor in middle-class comfort. At the same time, the Federal Water Power Act looks into the sources of hydraulic energy. In 1921, American industry produces 2.5 million sanitary appliances, doubling that figure in 1925. Production of sanitary appliances, barely slowed by the crash of 1929, reaches 3.5 million in 1941. By 1930, 80 percent of American homes are electrified. Household equipment progressively replaces domestic employees (chiefly black heirs of the recently liberated slaves): their number dwindles from four million in 1920 to 300,000 in 1940, while the rest go to swell the numbers of the jobless. In 1935, Congress passes the Public Utility Holding Act, aiming to give cities access to the low-cost electric power they need to use the new machines.
This eighth restructuring of the mercantile form — this time around the nuclear family — is particularly well suited to American social logic. It also shows up inEurope, and coincides with the dictatorial upheavals occurring in Italy, Spain, and Germany. Indeed, the family is also at the heart of the Nazi and Fascist ideologies. In 1935, German industrial production is far ahead of that of France, Great Britain, and the United States. From 1933 to 1938, its production of steel, cement, and aluminum triples. But since it needs a workforce, raw materials, and agricultural land, and cannot count on trade alone to acquire them in sufficient quantities, war becomes indispensable to Germany. The Soviet version next door also appears to have succeeded in organizing itself as a war economy — without anyone being able to verify the statistics provided by Soviet propaganda.
The war, yet again willed into being by Germany, once more helps the United States — immune on its own territory — to master the technologies and production levels needed for industry and finance, henceforth based in New York.
Here again, the role of energy is crucial. Hitler marches on Stalingrad to obtain the reserves of the Caucasus (once he has broken the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that had guaranteed him the oil essential to his first victories). It is because of the embargo on its oil supplies that Japan attacks Pearl Harbor in December 1941. And finally, it is on his return from the Yalta conference in February 1945 that Roosevelt takes over Saudi Arabia — and the world’s biggest petroleum reserves — from Britain.
At the end of this new world war (it cost about fifty million dead — five times more than the first), the world has utterly changed. Nuclear weapons have appeared;the Holocaust has happened; the Middle East has been splintered into ten sovereign states; communism is triumphant. Now an eighth mercantile form recreates itself in one half of the world (which also includes the former Fascist and Nazi dictatorships), while the other half, from Budapest to Beijing, enters the Soviet orbit. Yesterday’s allies become “cold war” foes.
This time, the new mercantile form is structured around New York and electricity. It is the second format whose core is in America. It will not be the last.
From 1945 onward, electrification, family allowances, and housing aid produce a mass demand for household appliances invented in 1920, reviving the world economy much more effectively than major public works.
In the twenty years from 1945 to 1965, and thanks to the electric motor, New York becomes the world’s greatest metropolis. The price of household equipment falls fivefold, while production increases by a factor of ten. New consumer appliances intensify the evolution of the market economy in the direction of nomadism (another term for individual freedom). In 1947, the electric battery and the transistor (two key inventions) make radio and record players portable. This is a major revolution, for it allows the young to dance outside the ballrooms and therefore be free of parental supervision — liberating sexuality, opening them to all kinds of
This eighth restructuring of the mercantile form — this time around the nuclear family — is particularly well suited to American social logic. It also shows up inEurope, and coincides with the dictatorial upheavals occurring in Italy, Spain, and Germany. Indeed, the family is also at the heart of the Nazi and Fascist ideologies. In 1935, German industrial production is far ahead of that of France, Great Britain, and the United States. From 1933 to 1938, its production of steel, cement, and aluminum triples. But since it needs a workforce, raw materials, and agricultural land, and cannot count on trade alone to acquire them in sufficient quantities, war becomes indispensable to Germany. The Soviet version next door also appears to have succeeded in organizing itself as a war economy — without anyone being able to verify the statistics provided by Soviet propaganda.
The war, yet again willed into being by Germany, once more helps the United States — immune on its own territory — to master the technologies and production levels needed for industry and finance, henceforth based in New York.
Here again, the role of energy is crucial. Hitler marches on Stalingrad to obtain the reserves of the Caucasus (once he has broken the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that had guaranteed him the oil essential to his first victories). It is because of the embargo on its oil supplies that Japan attacks Pearl Harbor in December 1941. And finally, it is on his return from the Yalta conference in February 1945 that Roosevelt takes over Saudi Arabia — and the world’s biggest petroleum reserves — from Britain.
At the end of this new world war (it cost about fifty million dead — five times more than the first), the world has utterly changed. Nuclear weapons have appeared;the Holocaust has happened; the Middle East has been splintered into ten sovereign states; communism is triumphant. Now an eighth mercantile form recreates itself in one half of the world (which also includes the former Fascist and Nazi dictatorships), while the other half, from Budapest to Beijing, enters the Soviet orbit. Yesterday’s allies become “cold war” foes.
This time, the new mercantile form is structured around New York and electricity. It is the second format whose core is in America. It will not be the last.
From 1945 onward, electrification, family allowances, and housing aid produce a mass demand for household appliances invented in 1920, reviving the world economy much more effectively than major public works.
In the twenty years from 1945 to 1965, and thanks to the electric motor, New York becomes the world’s greatest metropolis. The price of household equipment falls fivefold, while production increases by a factor of ten. New consumer appliances intensify the evolution of the market economy in the direction of nomadism (another term for individual freedom). In 1947, the electric battery and the transistor (two key inventions) make radio and record players portable. This is a major revolution, for it allows the young to dance outside the ballrooms and therefore be free of parental supervision — liberating sexuality, opening them to all kinds of
Similar Books
