Historical Egg Conundrums On a trip to Ireland back in 2019, I stayed for a few days in an apartment above a village pub near Limerick. Each evening I traipsed downstairs for the Guinness, the music, and a bit of craic with the locals. I promise, this story has eggs in it.
I wrote this a few years ago when the shelves went bare; I share it here in full because I've since sunsetted that blog and have not reposted it.
A Can of Tomatoes, May 12, 2020
A friend who hasn’t been out in two months asked me why people are finding the grocery store so upsetting. I have attempted a response, as follows:
If the mammoths didn’t show up on the hunting grounds, early man didn’t just say, “it’s okay kids, we’ll have aurochs instead!” He intuited that something had disturbed the ecosystem and that the entire structure of survival was upset, aurochs or no aurochs.
When people in the wealthy West go to the store and the shelves are empty, they are hunters on a wasted, barren plain. They may not have the words for it, but they feel it. It’s terrifying, and the store is full of that energy right now. “How am I going to feed my family? Is the world falling apart?”
I’ve always kind of enjoyed going to the grocery store – when I first got my license, the deal I had with my parents was that I could use the car if I did all the shopping. I guess it’s that basic human urge to hunt and gather, to harvest, to put up stores. I’ve long had a sense of the abundance it represents, and I know how fragile it is.
We call the store the “store” because it represents the storehouse. Once humans triumphed over the immediacy of “berries today, gods will have to manage tomorrow” and “oops, tiger ate my offspring,” they were on the path to saving, storing, and the division of labor, allowing for increased leisure or productivity depending on need and preference. These things constitute capital investment and hedge against risk, which is a huge piece of what makes our systems so sophisticated vs., say, chipmunks, who don’t contend intellectually with any of this and just stash nuts and try not to lose them while making as many more chipmunks as possible.
The reason good economists can’t make friends at parties is that their job is to point out how things work and what the consequences are, not to argue with gravity if people want their apples to fall up this week because it would be more convenient. To paraphrase a trope, we can ignore economics, but economics won’t ignore us.
People often think of economics as money, or as something secondary to what matters most, but economics is all of human action; literally every single thing that people do in an effort to satisfy their individual needs. It’s not a construct; it’s a description. It’s not invented, it’s discovered.
The laws of economics are just the observations of the aggregated actions of billions of people over millennia as they contend with the absolute physical reality of resource scarcity, included in which is time and physical dimensionality.
It’s everything from the mammoth hunt to the first bone flute to Chartres to Sartre to Walmart to walks on the beach.
The native state of humanity is abject poverty; naked and afraid. And from those soft and scared beginnings in the trees, we have pitted our intellect against the problem of resource scarcity (a physical law of nature over which only humans, of all animals, have attempted to triumph). Our brains and creative capacity have grown in direct dynamic response to this recognition.
Just as it takes hundreds of years to build the few inches of rich loam that a flood can wash away in minutes, it takes many generations to build a sustainable and vibrant network of wealth-creating enterprises, which is the framework for the entire expansion of creative endeavor beyond basic needs. Like the viruses and bacteria that stimulate the growth of our immune systems (which is part of the tempering and strengthening of our brains), scarce resources have been the anvil on which our creative genius has been forged and burnished.
Human creativity is the supreme gift of our species, the reason life is worth living, the love-born challenge to entropy. It is entirely a result of the sublime constraint of scarcity, and our tenacious refusal to succumb to any limitation of our potential as a result of it. This is what distinguishes us from other animals.
Few people understand wealth creation, in its mechanism, its importance, or its fragility.
The flood that washes it away does not take it to replenish poorer soil; it is literally destroyed.
I’ve spent much of my life fascinated and appalled by second world authoritarianism; with the way the destruction of economic liberty grinds people and cultures into gray shadows of former glory, clinging to the ragged remains of what used to be. Perhaps it is because the second world is the places where people built wealth and achieved some level of bourgeois comfort and social cohesion, and then saw it destroyed and debased by tyrannical forces of control, always in the name of false safety and phony justice. Third world dictators don’t pretend very hard, or at least no one believes them. But the slide into second world status is often accepted willingly by people who don’t recognize the price to be paid.
I suppose I’ve looked for it around every corner, fearing it and aware of how close at our heels that wolf snaps and slavers.
Do people understand that right now, our great great great grandchildren’s futures have been mortgaged by tax claims against their earnings (if spending stops today) and the only escape is the collapse of the dollar and the decline of the US, (which isn’t exactly a pleasing path to peace and prosperity)? I’m not hearing it.
Do people understand that if one shook down all the “1%” for everything they have, we’d each get a few hundred bucks once and then the world would basically descend into a dystopian battlefield as people scrabbled for what was left (if history of where this has been done is any indication)? If things feel uncertain now, just imagine what it would be like to discover, as so many small business owners have, that the majority, or even a powerful minority, can just demand that you sacrifice everything you’ve worked for, all you’ve built for yourself and your family and your future, on basically a whim of fear? And then smear you with epithets for protesting?
“Celebrities spell out ‘we’re all in this together’ in yachts in Cayman”-the Babylon Bee nailed it.
Every single can of tomatoes on the shelf is an altar; a divine revelation of the human capacity for creativity. All wealth is a manifestation of this trait made concrete. I want to fall on my face in gratitude every time I’m confronted with the bounty that all the humans of time immemorial, billions of them, living and dead, statistically all of them indifferent to my existence, have created for me. They were not content to remain pelt-clad in damp caves, but struggled and strove for more; to see their young survive more winters, to feed their elders and infirm even in times of famine and strife, to trade, to plant, to build, to play.
To deliver unto me a can of tomatoes in Maine in April.
So when I go into the store, one microscopic point on the fractal of the ineffably complex and astounding web of human interaction over space and time, and the fabric is torn, I feel a great choking cry of fear and grief for the squandering of a sacred birthright.
I feel an existential loss. I feel a loss of things that will never be, for people who have not yet been born. I feel civilization on the brink, because it is ignorant of its responsibility. I weep for the venal and corrupt and self-aggrandizing pontificators, self-appointed masters of the universe in their banal evil, destroying themselves and bringing everyone else with them.
At least that’s what I perceive. I could be wrong. It could be that everyone really thinks they might die of COVID. It could be the feeling of steeping yourself in the energy of masked strangers walking around suspecting themselves and each other of being deadly Typhoid Marys.
But basically, it’s this deep surge of terror and it’s very, very in your face when your grocery store starts to look like whispers of Venezuela or Cuba.
Did I bring this on all of us with my fear? Did I invite this because I had to face it for myself?
Anyway, I’m going to stick to ordering online for now.
As a fellow chicken enthusiast, I second your opinions. One of the ways I've rationalized the cost of feed over the last few years is that I'm paying for resilience; if the trucks stop coming, I'll still have eggs for my family. Those who depend on the grocery store won't be able to find eggs at any price. Of course, I don't like to go too far into that thought experiment, because it winds up with me having to defend my flock against desperate, hungry, chicken thieves.
I wrote this a few years ago when the shelves went bare; I share it here in full because I've since sunsetted that blog and have not reposted it.
A Can of Tomatoes, May 12, 2020
A friend who hasn’t been out in two months asked me why people are finding the grocery store so upsetting. I have attempted a response, as follows:
If the mammoths didn’t show up on the hunting grounds, early man didn’t just say, “it’s okay kids, we’ll have aurochs instead!” He intuited that something had disturbed the ecosystem and that the entire structure of survival was upset, aurochs or no aurochs.
When people in the wealthy West go to the store and the shelves are empty, they are hunters on a wasted, barren plain. They may not have the words for it, but they feel it. It’s terrifying, and the store is full of that energy right now. “How am I going to feed my family? Is the world falling apart?”
I’ve always kind of enjoyed going to the grocery store – when I first got my license, the deal I had with my parents was that I could use the car if I did all the shopping. I guess it’s that basic human urge to hunt and gather, to harvest, to put up stores. I’ve long had a sense of the abundance it represents, and I know how fragile it is.
We call the store the “store” because it represents the storehouse. Once humans triumphed over the immediacy of “berries today, gods will have to manage tomorrow” and “oops, tiger ate my offspring,” they were on the path to saving, storing, and the division of labor, allowing for increased leisure or productivity depending on need and preference. These things constitute capital investment and hedge against risk, which is a huge piece of what makes our systems so sophisticated vs., say, chipmunks, who don’t contend intellectually with any of this and just stash nuts and try not to lose them while making as many more chipmunks as possible.
The reason good economists can’t make friends at parties is that their job is to point out how things work and what the consequences are, not to argue with gravity if people want their apples to fall up this week because it would be more convenient. To paraphrase a trope, we can ignore economics, but economics won’t ignore us.
People often think of economics as money, or as something secondary to what matters most, but economics is all of human action; literally every single thing that people do in an effort to satisfy their individual needs. It’s not a construct; it’s a description. It’s not invented, it’s discovered.
The laws of economics are just the observations of the aggregated actions of billions of people over millennia as they contend with the absolute physical reality of resource scarcity, included in which is time and physical dimensionality.
It’s everything from the mammoth hunt to the first bone flute to Chartres to Sartre to Walmart to walks on the beach.
The native state of humanity is abject poverty; naked and afraid. And from those soft and scared beginnings in the trees, we have pitted our intellect against the problem of resource scarcity (a physical law of nature over which only humans, of all animals, have attempted to triumph). Our brains and creative capacity have grown in direct dynamic response to this recognition.
Just as it takes hundreds of years to build the few inches of rich loam that a flood can wash away in minutes, it takes many generations to build a sustainable and vibrant network of wealth-creating enterprises, which is the framework for the entire expansion of creative endeavor beyond basic needs. Like the viruses and bacteria that stimulate the growth of our immune systems (which is part of the tempering and strengthening of our brains), scarce resources have been the anvil on which our creative genius has been forged and burnished.
Human creativity is the supreme gift of our species, the reason life is worth living, the love-born challenge to entropy. It is entirely a result of the sublime constraint of scarcity, and our tenacious refusal to succumb to any limitation of our potential as a result of it. This is what distinguishes us from other animals.
Few people understand wealth creation, in its mechanism, its importance, or its fragility.
The flood that washes it away does not take it to replenish poorer soil; it is literally destroyed.
I’ve spent much of my life fascinated and appalled by second world authoritarianism; with the way the destruction of economic liberty grinds people and cultures into gray shadows of former glory, clinging to the ragged remains of what used to be. Perhaps it is because the second world is the places where people built wealth and achieved some level of bourgeois comfort and social cohesion, and then saw it destroyed and debased by tyrannical forces of control, always in the name of false safety and phony justice. Third world dictators don’t pretend very hard, or at least no one believes them. But the slide into second world status is often accepted willingly by people who don’t recognize the price to be paid.
I suppose I’ve looked for it around every corner, fearing it and aware of how close at our heels that wolf snaps and slavers.
Do people understand that right now, our great great great grandchildren’s futures have been mortgaged by tax claims against their earnings (if spending stops today) and the only escape is the collapse of the dollar and the decline of the US, (which isn’t exactly a pleasing path to peace and prosperity)? I’m not hearing it.
Do people understand that if one shook down all the “1%” for everything they have, we’d each get a few hundred bucks once and then the world would basically descend into a dystopian battlefield as people scrabbled for what was left (if history of where this has been done is any indication)? If things feel uncertain now, just imagine what it would be like to discover, as so many small business owners have, that the majority, or even a powerful minority, can just demand that you sacrifice everything you’ve worked for, all you’ve built for yourself and your family and your future, on basically a whim of fear? And then smear you with epithets for protesting?
“Celebrities spell out ‘we’re all in this together’ in yachts in Cayman”-the Babylon Bee nailed it.
Every single can of tomatoes on the shelf is an altar; a divine revelation of the human capacity for creativity. All wealth is a manifestation of this trait made concrete. I want to fall on my face in gratitude every time I’m confronted with the bounty that all the humans of time immemorial, billions of them, living and dead, statistically all of them indifferent to my existence, have created for me. They were not content to remain pelt-clad in damp caves, but struggled and strove for more; to see their young survive more winters, to feed their elders and infirm even in times of famine and strife, to trade, to plant, to build, to play.
To deliver unto me a can of tomatoes in Maine in April.
So when I go into the store, one microscopic point on the fractal of the ineffably complex and astounding web of human interaction over space and time, and the fabric is torn, I feel a great choking cry of fear and grief for the squandering of a sacred birthright.
I feel an existential loss. I feel a loss of things that will never be, for people who have not yet been born. I feel civilization on the brink, because it is ignorant of its responsibility. I weep for the venal and corrupt and self-aggrandizing pontificators, self-appointed masters of the universe in their banal evil, destroying themselves and bringing everyone else with them.
At least that’s what I perceive. I could be wrong. It could be that everyone really thinks they might die of COVID. It could be the feeling of steeping yourself in the energy of masked strangers walking around suspecting themselves and each other of being deadly Typhoid Marys.
But basically, it’s this deep surge of terror and it’s very, very in your face when your grocery store starts to look like whispers of Venezuela or Cuba.
Did I bring this on all of us with my fear? Did I invite this because I had to face it for myself?
Anyway, I’m going to stick to ordering online for now.
As a fellow chicken enthusiast, I second your opinions. One of the ways I've rationalized the cost of feed over the last few years is that I'm paying for resilience; if the trucks stop coming, I'll still have eggs for my family. Those who depend on the grocery store won't be able to find eggs at any price. Of course, I don't like to go too far into that thought experiment, because it winds up with me having to defend my flock against desperate, hungry, chicken thieves.