(2012-03-09) Rao Halls Law Industrialization Gilded Age

Venkatesh Rao posits a Halls Law as analog to Moores Law during industrialization. The unsung and rather tragic hero of the story of interchangeability was John Harris Hall (1781 – 1841), inventor of the Hall carbine. So I am naming my analog to Moore’s Law for the 19th century Hall’s Law in his honor. The story of Hall’s Law is in a sense a prequel to the unfinished story of Moore’s Law. The two stories are almost eerily similar, even to believers in the “history repeats itself” maxim... Hall’s Law: the maximum complexity of artifacts that can be manufactured at scales limited only by resource availability doubles every 10 years... I believe this law held between 1825 and 1960, at which point the law hit its natural limits. (Note this covers 2-3 Technological Revolution-s in the Technological RevolutionsAndFinancialCapital model.)

He provides 16 points of comparison between the 2 laws/periods.*

• 5. The newer, younger “DigitalNative” tycoons, starting with Mark Zuckerberg, map to the post 1890 3rd generation innovators who were native to the new world of interchangeability rather than pioneers, similar to the early 20th century automobile and airplane industry tycoons...
• 7. Each era enabled, and was in turn fueled by, new kinds of warfare...
• 10. The Internet and Cargo Container shipping taken together are to Moore’s Law as the railroad, steamship and telegraph networks taken together were to Hall’s Law. The Electric Energy grid provides the continuity between Hall’s Law and Moore’s Law.
• 11. Each era changed employment patterns and class structures wholesale...
• 13. At the risk of getting flamed, I’d say that Seth Godin is arguably the Horatio Alger of today, but in a good way...
• 14. Hall’s Law led on to the application of its core methods to people, leading to new models of High School and College Education and eventually the perfect interchangeable human, The Organization Man. Moore’s Law is destroying these things, and replacing them with Y-Combinator style education and CoWorking spaces (this will end with the Organization Entrepreneur, a predictably-unique individual, just like everybody else).
• 15. Hall’s Law led to the industrial labor movement. Moore’s Law is leading to a new labor movement defined, in its early days, by things like standardized term-sheets for entrepreneurs ( the 5 day/40 hour week issue of our times; YC-entrepreneurs are decidedly not the new capitalists. They are the new labor. That’s a whole other post).*

He then does a nice comparison of today to the Gilded Age. Hall’s Law created a culture that was initially a layer of fake gloss on top of much grimmer realities. Things were improving dramatically, but it probably did not seem like it at the time, thanks to the anxiety and uncertainty... We are clearly living through a New Gilded Age today, and BruceSterling’s term “FavelaChic” (rather unfortunately cryptic; perhaps we should call it “Painted Slum”) is effectively analogous to “Gilded Age.” We put on brave faces as we live through our rerun of the 1870s. We celebrate the economic precariousness of Free Agency (Free Agent) as though it were a no-strings-attached good thing. We read our own Horatio Alger stories, fawn over new Silicon Valley millionaires and conveniently forget the ones who don’t make it... If the Moore’s Law endgame is the same century-long economic-overdrive that was the Hall’s Law endgame, today’s kids will enter the adult world with prosperity and a fully-diffused Moore’s Law all around them. The children will do well. In the long term, things will look up. But in the long term, you and I will be dead. (Economic Transition, Raising Reality Hackers)