Month: November 2025

What have unemployment, outsourcing, immigration, asset bubbles, and so-called populist politics all got in common? They’re all the outcome of one of the central dynamics of capitalism. Karl Marx got a lot of things wrong, but this is one thing he got right. One of the spectres that has haunted capitalism from the beginning is that profits always fall. The second-order effects from that dynamic have driven much of Western politics for the last two hundred years. Since we are going through one such crisis right now, it’s worthwhile understanding how it works.

To show why profits always fall, let’s run through a thought experiment. We start with a stable, mostly agrarian society with full employment. Everybody in that society needs clothing. Therefore, the market for clothing is stable, and there exists a skilled workforce who have secure employment.

A capitalist invents a machine that facilitates an order of magnitude improvement in the productivity of clothing manufacturers. He now produces clothing at a far cheaper rate than the competition, and he can undercut them on price. At the beginning, however, he doesn’t need to offer the lowest possible price to the consumer because he has a competitive advantage. Therefore, he will set the price that maximises his profit, just far enough below the competition to win the market.

The capitalist’s competitors must either adapt or die. Many will go out of business. Some will figure out how to copy the new technology. They will now lower their own prices and start to eat into the profits of the first guy. He has no choice but to match it. Profits begin to go down, as does the price of clothing. Prices and profits continue to fall until the new equilibrium is reached.

Because fewer workers are required to make the same amount of clothing, unemployment occurs at the beginning of the cycle. That might sound like a bad thing, and initially it is for the workers who get fired. In the long run, however, the price of clothing goes down, and everybody benefits. Consumers will have more money to spend, and new industries will pop up to hire employees.

The sweet spot for capitalist production comes during the high-profit part of the cycle. Producers who have adopted new technology are flush with money but still have a level of protection while competitors scramble to catch up. My favourite example of this is the post-war pop music industry. The technology to produce recorded music was very expensive, but consumer demand was also very high. The industry was obscenely profitable, but its success was predicated on producing music that people wanted to buy. This created a huge demand for songwriting and musical talent, which hit its peak in the 1960s and 70s, certainly the golden age of pop music.

One of the main causes of the collapse of the industry was that recording technology became cheaper and cheaper over time. Alongside the internet’s destruction of the distribution monopoly that record labels had, profits began to tumble and have ended up at just a fraction of what they once were. As for the quality of the music, well, even AI-generated slop is now competitive.

All this is exactly what Marx had noted about how capitalism works. Profits fall over time due to competition via technology. Capitalism commodifies everything, and the commodification process always entails replacing humans with machines. Next thing you know, you’ve got computers making music instead of people.

We can sum up the cycle of capitalism like this. A capitalist employs new technology and takes profits by making workers redundant. Competitors catch up and take a share of the profit. The price falls, and profit returns to baseline. It’s easy to see that the workers are the ones who feel the brunt of this dynamic because they lose their jobs at the beginning of the cycle. Only later on, once they have hopefully found new work, can they benefit from the lower price of the good they once produced.

Because workers get the short end of the stick at the start of the cycle, it’s no surprise to find that they go looking for ways to protect their interests. That process has been ongoing since the start of capitalism. One of the main ways it began to manifest in the 19th century was through the rise of democracy.

This brings up one of the things that Marx got wrong. He correctly diagnosed that parliamentary democracy in Britain was originally dominated by the bourgeoisie. In fact, the rise of parliament represented the supremacy of the bourgeoisie against the remnants of the feudal aristocracy. In a parliament dominated by the bourgeoisie, the workers’ interests would not be represented. However, Marx underestimated the extent to which universal suffrage would bring about real change.

In fact, when you look at the main themes of democratic politics in the 19th and 20th centuries, programs to alleviate the second-order effects of the cycle of capitalism were fundamental. Democracy became a battle between capitalists and workers. Another way to say the same thing was that democracy became a battle over the cycle of capitalism and who should bear the costs.

Per Marx, capitalists always face the falling profit dynamic. There are a number of ways they can respond to it. One is to extract more value out of workers by requiring longer working hours. This was the favoured approach in the 19th century. Capitalists demanded twelve-hour workdays, and, because workers faced the prospect of unemployment, they had no choice but to agree.

In the longer term, workers figured out that they needed to band together to counteract the power of the capitalists. This led to the formation of unions which led the demand for reduced hours of work. Here in Australia, there was a famous strike in the middle of the 19th century carried out by the stonemasons in Melbourne who demanded and received an 8-hour workday. It took many decades more before all other workers would win the same, but eventually this became the standard.

Of course, passing laws to reduce working hours did not solve the problem of falling profits, it just removed one of the options available to capitalists. That led to the pursuit of a second option: immigration. If you couldn’t extract more value from workers, you could drive down their wages by increasing the supply of labour.

In countries like Australia and the USA, it was immigration which kickstarted the economy in the first place via the indentured servitude that came from willing or unwilling transportation. (Individuals who had no money could have the cost of their ship fare paid by agreeing to work a certain number of years as an indentured servant on arrival).

Once the economies of both nations became established, however, free citizens began to see that the continued importation of indentured servants was suppressing wages and job opportunities for themselves. A big part of the political pressure to abolish the practice came from these economic considerations. However, once slavery and indentured servitude were outlawed, capitalists simply turned to the next option: free immigration.

In eastern Australia and California, there were numerous Chinese who followed the gold rushes. In the north of Australia, Pacific Islanders were brought in to work on farms. In the colonies of South Africa, immigrants from India worked the sugar plantations. All of these practices allowed the capitalists to drive down wages at the expense of the local workforce.

It should be no surprise, therefore, that immigration became a political hot topic, with the parties representing the working class being most opposed. Here we see an interesting divergence between the USA and most other Western nations. Because the US lacked a firm federal government, it had less ability to control its borders.

In fact, there was a period of out-of-control immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe at the beginning of the 20th century. So large were the numbers of people coming in that the wages of the working class were suppressed for more than two decades until finally legislation was passed in 1924. Of course, this was all very much in the interests of the capitalists who profited from reduced wages.

The disruption in America did not go unnoticed internationally. Here in Australia, an immigration bill was passed in the early years of the 20th century. The then prime minister, Alfred Deakin, praised the bill to parliament by stating that it would prevent a repeat of the American debacle.  It’s no coincidence that Deakin was the leader of the Labor Party and therefore represented the economic interests of workers.

With working hours fixed and immigration off the table, capitalists only had one option left to counteract falling profits, they could make workers redundant. It does seem rather coincidental that the Great Depression followed shortly after immigration restrictions were enacted. In most Western nations, one-third of the workforce found themselves out of a job.

Once again, it was left to the parliament to solve the problem. The eventual solution was unemployment benefits and the welfare state more generally. It should be noted that these kinds of programs had already been put in place in the 19th century by unions and mutual societies. The government was copying a model that had already been proven to work.

More generally, what occurred at this time was that the state intervened in the cycle of capitalism by taxing the profits of capitalists and redistributing them to workers via unemployment benefits. This reduced the burden that workers bore at the start of the cycle but also reduced the payoff to capitalists. Once again, democracy had intervened to alleviate a problem caused by the inherent falling profits dynamic of capitalism.

Putting it all together, we can see that it was through parliamentary democracy that the workers were able to protect themselves. Of course, the democratic solutions only came after long periods of suffering, but better late than never. By contrast, countries which did not have the tradition of parliamentary democracy were not able to mitigate the second-order effects of the falling profit problem, including Italy and Germany.

All of this is directly relevant to the world we live in because the iron law of declining profitability did not go away. All that has happened is that we have found new and ingenious ways to try and mitigate it. One of them is the arbitrage that comes from outsourcing work to nations who are happy to depreciate their currency. This gives capital what it always wants, cheaper labour. In this case it is entire nations which have their wages suppressed. That is what China is currently doing, but the model had already been established by both Japan and Germany in the post-war years.

Unemployment was always one of the problems caused by the falling profit dynamic. If you go by the official statistics, we have very low unemployment these days. Look a bit closer, however, and you see a different story. In most Western nations right now, somewhere between 20% and 30% of the working-age population is not in the labour force, meaning they are not counted as unemployed. We still have lots of unemployment, we have simply re-categorised it in the hope that nobody will notice.

The massive asset bubbles of recent decades are also predicted by Marx’s model because both falling profits and wages are offset by relative growth in capital assets. One of the solutions that was enacted to solve that was to ensure that the general public owned assets, most notably real estate. That measure is also disappearing fast, meaning that the general public is no longer sharing in the accumulation of wealth.

Finally, we have the capitalists’ old trick of using immigration to drive down wages. That issue had been put to bed for the first half of the 20th century but got re-opened on the back of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. As a result, it is now filtered through the lens of the culture wars, meaning that anybody who objects to having their job taken by a low-wage foreigner must be a lazy, stupid racist. This moralising tactic has been so successful, especially in the US, that blatant immigration fraud has now become standard business practice.

In short, we are living through a period where capital is once again doing its old trick of pushing the costs of falling profits onto the general public. This is the logical outcome of the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s, which were basically a laundry list of the old capitalist demands for immigration, asset bubbles, labour arbitrage, unemployment, etc. We gave capital whatever it wanted and the results have been entirely predictable.

Part of what made it hard for the average person to see what was happening was that the neoliberal agenda was implemented by the parties that had traditionally represented the workers (Democrats in the US, Labour parties elsewhere). Why that happened is an interesting question. It does seem that the fall of the USSR led to an ideological collapse among the elites of the West. It was concluded that capitalism really was the superior system. History was at an end, and a capitalist utopia was now upon us.

The absurd irony is that this kind of utopian thinking was what had motivated the Marxists in the first place. Furthermore, the capitalist ideologues made the exact same mistake as Marx in discounting the extent to which parliamentary democracy had kept capitalism from self-destructing. That’s why they collapsed into a screaming heap once Brexit and Trump showed up. Democracy has returned right on cue to spoil their little ideological fantasy.

Long-time readers would know my love of etymology. I like to think of it as semantic archaeology. You dig down into the deeper meanings of words and discover old truths long since buried.

One of my favourite examples is the etymology of the words “history” and “story”. Both originally come from the Latin “historia”. “Story” is just the shortened form of “history”. Once upon a time, they meant something like what we these days call a “narrative” and could denote both fictional stories and factual histories. Even in modern times, most European languages use a variation on “historia” for both meanings. Modern Italian uses the shortened form “storia”. German uses “Geschichte”. 

By themselves, these facts are mere curiosities. What’s important is to think through the implications. For most of Western history, people did not feel the need to have different words to demarcate fictional stories from factual histories. This made sense because they had a worldview that we might call mythological or spiritual. In that worldview, the distinction between fact and fiction was far less important. By contrast, the reason why we need a hard distinction between fictional story and factual history is because we have what is sometimes called a demythological worldview.  

Our worldview first arose during the Enlightenment. However, the specific change that occurred in our understanding of history has a more concrete origin. Our emphasis on historical facts arose from innovations in the scholarly study of history that occurred in Germany in the late 18th century.

Thus, the changes in the meaning of the words “history” and “story” are not accidental but are tied to a major upheaval in our worldview, the one that still dominates in our time. It was this same upheaval that led to a similar shift in the meaning of the word “culture”, which is what we will be discussing in this post. If anything, the new concept of culture that arose in the late 18th century has even more relevance to our time since practically all of modern politics revolves around what is called the “culture wars”.

Because of the centrality of “culture” to our modern worldview, it is quite startling to realise that seemingly no thinkers of importance paid any attention to it prior to the 18th century. Plato and Aristotle never discussed culture. The word does not get a single mention in the Bible or any of the works of Shakespeare. It’s as if, all of a sudden in the 18th century, we started to think about culture for the first time.

Of course, that’s not true. What was really going on was a different understanding of what culture is. We can elucidate that by doing a little semantic archaeology on the word itself.

Like “history”, “culture” comes from Latin. “Cultura” meant to cultivate land in preparation for crops. Its primary meaning was what we would nowadays refer to as agri-culture. That was true in the ancient world all the way through the medieval era.

Let’s think about what it means to cultivate something. In last week’s post, we talked about sourdough “starter”. This is a culture (there’s that word again) of microorganisms that must be deliberately nurtured by a baker in order to produce high-quality bread. To cultivate a sourdough culture, you must understand something about what the microorganisms need in order to thrive. Like all living things, they need food, water, a certain temperature range, etc. A sourdough baker must create the conditions in which the right microorganisms thrive and the wrong ones do not.

Cultivation implies an understanding of the outcome you are trying to achieve. A farmer decides what crops to grow and then cultivates the soil accordingly, adding whatever fertiliser works best for the specific plant, and tweaking other relevant variables.

Therefore, cultivation implies both an understanding of the desired ends and the means to achieve them. That is what people understood by the word “culture” (cultura) prior to modern times. But when we think about culture in this way, we can see that some of the greatest thinkers in the Western canon were very much concerned with culture in the sense of cultivation.

The reason why Plato and Aristotle never talked about “culture” was because their discussions were carried out using the concepts of ethics and politics. This makes perfect sense because, in Greek, the word ethics meant character, habit, or disposition. Ethics was about defining virtue; the end goal of cultivation.

Because man is a social animal, the cultivation of virtue can only take place through the institutions of society. In Athens, this was the polis. Therefore, the means of attaining virtue had come via politics. Putting it all together, we see that the cultivation of virtue was a combination of ethics (defining the character, habit, and dispositions that were to be desired) and politics (how to achieve them).

Thus, the ancient Greeks were very much concerned with “culture”, they simply used different words to talk about it. Since Aristotle’s philosophy dominated all through the scholastic period of medieval Europe, these matters were always discussed using the concepts of ethics and politics. That’s why nobody talked about “culture” prior to modern times.

In summary, what we can call the classical approach to culture was concerned with the cultivation of virtue. Now that we know that, we can compare this way of thinking to the new concept which arose primarily in Germany in the late 18th century. What we find is that the new approach was almost an exact inversion of the classical one.

The first major difference was that the classical approach to culture was about the cultivation of excellence in the individual. One of the ways this manifested was that the writings themselves were usually composed for specific persons. For example, Aristotle’s two major works on ethics are called the Nichomachean and Eudemian, both referring to the intended recipient. Lord Chesterfield’s letter was to his son. Machiavelli’s treatise was for the Duke of Urbino, Lorenzo de’ Medici, with whom he was hoping to obtain employment.

The classical approach was also normative in the sense that it laid out a positive vision for virtue and then how to attain it. By contrast, the modern approach is descriptive. It finds a culture as it is and sets about illustrating its customs, practices, institutions, etc. This follows from the fact that the modern conception was born in university settings, including the fieldwork that occurred when scholars travelled to foreign lands. A scholar visiting a strange country is not going to have need of a normative vision of culture since he or she is not a member of that society.

Another major difference is that the classical approach appeals to reason. That is why it was subsumed under the discipline of philosophy. The underlying assumption is that virtue can be achieved by analysing it and disseminating information about it. The promise that Machiavelli makes to Lorenzo de’ Medici in the forward to The Prince is that he has spent much time studying politics so that the Duke may learn from his efforts. Since reason is seen to be the highest virtue in classical thought, the exercise of it is inherently good.

Appeals to reason were necessarily targeted to the elites of society since classical philosophy assumed that the general public was incapable of using it. The body politic was usually characterised as a rabble who were guided by emotion and base instinct. The exercise of philosophy, on the other hand, required an education, something that the average person did not have and was assumed to be incapable of attaining.

For all these reasons, the classical approach was concerned with exceptional individuals capable of attaining the highest possible virtue. By contrast, our modern conception of culture focuses on what can be said in general about the cultural practices of a collective. It is concerned with the average, not with the exceptional.

Another way to think about it is that the modern conception of culture is about the relationships between individuals and not with the individuals themselves. Because it is descriptive and not normative, it makes no value judgements about what it finds. This was one of von Ranke’s main precepts for history, i.e., that every epoch has its own value independent of any others (an idea that would later form the basis of Spengler’s comparative history, but not Toynbee’s).

From these qualities, it’s easy to see why a golden age of anthropological research followed in the wake of innovations that had taken place in German scholarship. Scholars trained in these ideas were far more objective than their predecessors, and although many of them still carried inevitable biases in their analysis, they did an excellent job of describing foreign cultural practices without passing moral judgement.

Furthermore, because of the deprecation of logic and reason and the incorporation of the practices of the average person, the new approach was able to identify a whole host of material that had been deliberately omitted from the classical schemes. For most people throughout history, the cultivation of culture did not happen through reading and reasoning but through doing.

In the medieval Western tradition, that job fell primarily to the Catholic Church, which was the predominant influence on the culture of the general public, whose cultivation as good Christians happened not through reason and logic but through ritual. The appreciation of these irrational aspects of culture came to play a major part in our modern understanding.

It’s no coincidence that these new ideas should have arisen in Germany in the aftermath of the Protestant rebellion. One of the things the Protestants rejected was the awkward compromise that the Catholic Church had made to try and synthesise classical philosophy with Christian teaching. The Protestant theology was faith-based and therefore irrational.

This had a major influence on subsequent German scholarship. Thus, even though von Ranke insisted on rigorous objectivity in the collection of facts, he nevertheless believed that each historical epoch and culture was independently motivated by the divine. (Once again, the later influence on Spengler is clear and can be contrasted with Toynbee’s more Darwinian perspective).

With the rejection of the classical viewpoint, one of the things that has disappeared from our modern conception of culture is the idea of cultivation. Each culture is believed to receive its character from an irrational source (God, instinct, nature). Therefore, it is all but immutable and there is no point trying to improve it, certainly not by the mechanisms of reason and logic.

That’s also why there is an implied fatalism in the Germanic notion of culture which played no small role in the events of the 20th century and which still haunts us to this day. Cultures are born whole and they die whole. They are either lively and rising or decaying and doomed. No adaptation is allowed. (Again, this is one of the main differences between Spengler and Toynbee).

The classical conception of culture as the cultivation of virtue still lives on in our time, although in rather degraded form under the guise of “self-help” or “self-improvement”. The implied individualism of these terms is something that Aristotle and the Greeks would have found difficult to understand. For them, the cultivation of virtue was inherently a political matter.

This is not to say that the new conception of culture does not play a role in modern politics. On the contrary, almost the entirety of our politics is now carried out via the “culture wars”. Culture once belonged to the realm of philosophy, but philosophy is all but dead in our time. Any public figure who even tries to define a conception of virtue can count on being howled down by a screeching mob.

Meanwhile, the inherent irrationality in the Germanic concept of culture has made our politics borderline hysterical. Public figures are no longer expected to make sense, only to have great conviction. Our politics has become “faith-based” in a way that is very much in keeping with its Protestant origins. Of course, mild-mannered scholars such as von Ranke would be horrified to witness it, and Aristotle and Plato would also be shaking their heads since it’s the exact mob mentality they warned about two and a half thousand years ago.

Still, there is no doubt that the new conception of culture opened up new truths that were previously concealed. One of those is tight correspondence between the concepts which a society foregrounds and the political and economic structure that dominates. In fact, the change that occurred in the meaning of “culture” is a direct example of this because it came into fashion at just the same time that the feudal economic and political structures were in terminal decline, taking the old aristocracy with them.

Meanwhile, the modern collectivist understanding of culture was a perfect match for the growing dominance of the bourgeois institutions of capitalism and democracy that arose in the late 18th century. We shouldn’t forget, however, that this dominance was not just ideological in nature. It was won with the pointy end of guillotines and gun barrels.

A few weeks ago, I was at a restaurant for lunch and we ordered a serve of sourdough bread as an entrée. It turned out to be the best damn bread I’ve ever eaten (a generous helping of delicious whipped butter may have tilted the scales in its favour). It got me ruminating on the difference between traditional and modern breadmaking. As is often the case, the most fundamental things contain the most fundamental truths, and it can barely get more fundamental than bread. So, let’s talk about sourdough.

This seemingly simple and innocuous change from natural yeast to pre-packaged yeast altered breadmaking from what, in systems theory, is called a complex process to a simple one. Making a sourdough loaf is complex. Making a modern commercial loaf is simple.

The difference between a simple and a complicated process is just the number of steps involved. The more important point is that a fixed number of steps produce the same outcome every time. This is, of course, the basis of reductionist science. If you’re running a science experiment, you must control the variables. More than that, you must reduce the number of variables to ensure a specific outcome. Isaac Newton was the original reductionist genius, and he inspired generations of scientists to apply the same method elsewhere. Eventually, that method made it into the general culture. Modern breadmaking is one such example.

In relation to breadmaking, the reductionism occurs with the transition from natural yeast to pre-packaged yeast. When you make a sourdough starter, you are creating a living ecosystem that contains a heap of different fungi and bacteria. It is the presence of bacteria in the natural yeast which gives sourdough its distinctive and unique flavour. Commercial bread yeast, on the other hand, contains only a single strain of fungi, which gives no flavour to the bread. Therefore, the end result depends entirely on the quality of the flour and any other additives.

The modern method makes the process faster, more predictable, and more reliable because it makes it simpler. Rather than dealing with the living organism that is natural yeast, the baker is only dealing with a specific type of fungus which is in dormant state via dehydration. Combined with a second innovation that arrived in the 19th century – new milling techniques that removed the germ from the flour – you get a bread that is quick and easy to produce. Of course, it lacks the flavour that comes from the bacteria in natural yeast, and it lacks the vitamins and minerals from the germ. The tradeoff was taste and nutrition versus speed and predictability.

Eventually, science figured out how to put some of the vitamins and taste back into the bread. Once advances in HVAC technology allowed the temperature and humidity of the baking environment to be tightly controlled, commercial breadmaking was born. It relies on teams of experts to manufacture and maintain the HVAC equipment, produce the purified yeast, mill the grain, etc.

Commercial breadmaking is a complicated process but not a complex one. There are a lot of moving parts, but all those parts are standardised so that the end result is produced with certainty. The end result is itself standardised, repeatable, and reliable.

By contrast, traditional breadmaking is a complex process. There are limits to the temperature and humidity extremes that a natural yeast can tolerate, but the yeast is already selected from the local environment anyway. As a living organism, the yeast is always reacting and responding to that environment, changing with the arc of the seasons or other stimuli provided by the baker.

Traditional breadmaking is evolutionary in nature. It involves a series of feedback loops between the baker, the yeast, the grains, and the environment. Every loaf is its own feedback loop and the lessons from one loaf carry over to the next. The skilled baker learns the more abstract principles of the craft and how to use them to obtain a certain effect. All this makes the art of sourdough breadmaking a complex process.

As a result, there can be no such thing as a recipe for sourdough bread. It is not possible to define the steps exactly in advance because conditions are never the same. It is up to the baker to use their judgement. That judgement is not based on fixed, immutable rules but on heuristics. Heuristics are fallible guidelines.

The practical effect of all this is that the taste of the bread will change over time. Sourdough aficionados will tell you that the starter improves the longer you use it. In truth, it is not just the starter that improves but, more importantly, the baker. To say it again, sourdough breadmaking is a living process where the baker, the yeast, and the grains are in an evolutionary relationship that grows and develops over time.

By contrast, modern breadmaking aims never to change. It’s always the same fungi in the same amount added to the same consistency flour in the same environmental conditions. With these variables fixed, skilled human practitioners can be replaced with machines and the engineers who maintain them.  

Why would we want to replace skilled humans with machines? Well, the standard argument is an economic one. Modern breadmaking is quicker, more efficient, and doesn’t require any oversight from a baker. Therefore, it frees up people for more important jobs like Human Resources Manager, Senior Strategic Advisor, or Vice President of Innovation.

Of course, some traditional bakers who have been made redundant might go on to play a role in the new breadmaking process by becoming HVAC engineers, biotech lab workers, grain millers, etc. Notice that they are no longer in control of the process but are only one component of it, and their role is to produce the standardised outcomes that make the overall procedure work. It’s like changing jobs from being conductor of the orchestra to violinist. Of course, the conductor role is made redundant since every performance will now be exactly the same.

Sounds boring, doesn’t it? The price we pay for standardisation and reproducibility is that we have to eat bread that tastes objectively worse. Skilled breadmaking produces better-tasting bread, and it’s not even close. Once you’ve tasted the difference, it’s very hard to go back to eating supermarket slop.

But taste is also a proxy for nutritional value. Thus, we can surmise that sourdough bread is also healthier than its commercial counterpart. Here we hit upon an issue that probably plays a much larger role in current society than we know. What is the health impact of consuming standardised foods made with purified yeasts instead of yeasts from your local environment? Wouldn’t our microbiome become less well adapted to its environment?

There’s also a more direct way in which traditional bread affects our health. Sourdough takes longer to ferment and, as we have discussed, includes a more complex variety of fungi and bacteria to do the job. The result is that the starches in the bread get broken down more, and this makes the bread easier to digest. How much of the explosion of “gluten sensitivity” in the last few decades is a result of eating commercial breads and other manufactured foods?

It turns out that standardised food does not just result in a non-evolutionary process for the breadmaker, but also for us as the consumer. Standardisation is deliberately non-adaptive. It freezes one specific type of outcome in place and says that this is the truth in all times and places.

Putting it all together, we see that the modern breadmaking process mirrors the underlying philosophy of our society. We want standardisation, control, reproducibility, and automation. We want to remove skilled human practitioners and replace them with autonomous processes that run on fixed rules overseen by teams of “experts”. In order to get that outcome, we simplify reality by reducing the number of variables, denying the processes of evolution, and disconnecting ourselves from our local environment.

To reconnect with the evolutionary process of life is to open yourself up to the potential for failure. That’s why the catchphrase of the modern system is “safety”. There’s no need to risk failure for yourself. The experts will keep you safe from such difficulties. Let them deliver your daily bread. Yes, it will be tasteless and bland, but it will be reliably tasteless and bland.

I had to chuckle recently at the meeting between Australia’s Prime Minister and the US president. It had been postponed several times, and the only real news story to come out of it was a piece of bluster from the White House that an agreement had been reached about getting Australia’s superannuation funds to invest in the United States. Clearly, there was nothing of importance to talk about. Nevertheless, sometimes even political bullshit can be revealing, and what was revealed was something about the Australian superannuation system.

For overseas readers, Australian superannuation is a mandatory savings plan that forces employers to pay 12% of an employee’s earnings into an account which can only be accessed at retirement. It’s kind of like a private pension plan. It was introduced in 1992 and has grown to become one of the biggest in the world.

Although the system is mandatory, individuals theoretically have a choice of numerous superannuation providers and can pick the one which provides the best returns. In reality, however, all the options are basically the same. As the holder, you don’t get to choose individual investments, you just get a pick of several broad types of plan. Since all the profits and losses get averaged out anyway, nobody really pays attention to their super account, except in the rare event that a superannuation story makes the news.

As it happens, the super fund that I am with, called Australian Super, hit the headlines about a year ago after losing a lazy billion dollars investing in a US education start-up. In a proper free market, consumers such as myself would punish the company by taking our money elsewhere. But, in reality, they’re all investing in the same kinds of thing, and if it’s not an education start-up going broke, it will be something else.

Another important fact about Australian superannuation is that the system is deliberately set up to make it costly and inconvenient to manage your own money and make your own investment decisions. They really really really want you to just give it to a fund and let them take care of it.

I was too young to understand superannuation when it was first introduced back in 1992. As an adult, however, I now realise that it was part of the same package of neoliberal reforms that represented a massive transfer of power from the general public to our so-called “elites”.

Think about it. The superannuation system takes 12% of the earnings of all Australians and funnels it into opaque and, for all practical purposes, unaccountable institutions where investment managers get to do whatever they want with it. The money then gets used to fund various boondoggles whose profitability is almost irrelevant since there is a guaranteed next round of money coming in from the wages of the general public anyway. The whole thing is a Principal-Agent problem on steroids.

Another feature of the system was that the then Labor government ensured that Australia’s unions were in a prime position to get a piece of the action by starting their own super funds for their members. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the unions have all but disappeared as a meaningful operator in Australian politics since then. They’ve all grown fat and lazy on super profits. Since those profits come from investments all around the world, unions are no longer solely reliant on local members for financial support. It was a quid pro quo to buy off the union leaders and make them acquiesce to neoliberalism.

That’s why the meeting between Trump and Albanese was wryly amusing because it revealed what superannuation really is: a slush fund for our elites to play with. Albanese admitted as much when he said in a speech at the Australian embassy in Washington that super was a “resource” and “we want to use it”.

Of course, the announcements about new investments were all hot air. Australian super money has already been flowing to the US and will no doubt continue to do so. One can only hope that some of the money is actually being invested here in Australia. After all, there must be some local entrepreneurs capable of driving a billion-dollar education start-up into the ground. If not, I hereby declare myself willing and able to give it a shot. I’ve never tried before, but how hard can it be? Anybody got a billion dollars they want to give me?