“China has developed not just by building factories, but by building people who know how to buuild and work in factories. Work and meaning and profit cannot be separated,” says Curtis Yarvin.
We are encountering another mistake of the last decades. We have come to believe that profit can be separated from work. We have come to believe that activity, even if it is not honest work, is meaningful if it brings profit. It doesn’t work.
Psychologists confirm it. When people do something meaningful, they feel good and their abilities grow. There’s no getting around it. If someone is advertising to import refugees or pushing financial products on people, they can tell themselves that it is actually honest work. But they don’t grow skills other than shilling, and in the end they don’t even feel good. Many years ago, a senior executive at the monopoly power company CEZ told me in a weak moment that she dreamed of having her own little cafĂ©. Every time she would bring coffee to the table, she would know that the coffee was delicious, that she was nice and that she delivered impeccable service. That would be a different life than freeloading on the board of a power company that has been living off old investments for a generation.
When mercantilists from the 17th century onwards tried to encourage domestic producers and restrict imports, they believed that this would bring a lot of gold into the country and that in gold lay wealth. And it worked. Not because of the piles of gold, but because domestic productive capacity grew and because the population’s skills grew. We’re back to something that can’t be replaced.