 So to get started, I want to talk about what kinds of governance have been historically observed in most societies that we've studied. And this is going to be kind of a cross-chart. We're going to look at each of these types of governances and then ask specific questions and see how they answer these questions. So the types of governances that we have are totalitarian, autocratic, charismatic, democratic, and consensus. And to give you an idea of what these are about, let's take a look at the central way they govern. Totalitarian government is usually a dictatorship. It is a very top-down form of government. It may have a centralized committee instead of one single person, but the centralized head of state is the basic former of all the rules and laws that are followed underneath the dictatorship. Autocratic is similar except that instead of having a dictator, you have a royal or central head of state that is there due to tradition. Dictators are not necessarily familial, meaning that you don't pass on your dictatorship to your son or daughter. But autocratic government does. There's usually a line of succession. And that line of succession is usually familial, blood-related, with a lot of existing rules around it that people generally follow. Charismatic governance is with a central populist leader. Again, charismatic could be totalitarian, it could be autocratic. It could just be somebody who is sort of a major pain in the butt of the government. There are charismatic leaders who choose not to be inside politics, but choose to be holding those in power to the test. The thing that makes it charismatic is because the central leader is inspirational. People feel an emotional attachment to a charismatic leader that they may not feel towards an autocratic or totalitarian leader. The next is the one that we're most familiar with, and this is the idea of democracy. For our purposes, we're only going to be talking about what is known as representative democracy, meaning that people elect leadership, and that elected leadership then passes legislation and appoint judges to interpret laws, so they have both a bottom-up and a top-down kind of view to it. And then the last is consensus, and in consensus situation, everybody has to agree, or at least most people have to agree upon the rules, so it's the group that is providing the leadership, not a single person or individual or group of individuals separate from the total group. A good example of consensus governance is juries. When the jury goes to deliberate on a verdict, they have to all agree for that verdict to stand, so a consensus requires unanimous vote or something close to it. Under totalitarian government, there's very little room for discussion. Basically, the rules are made, and the people who are under this system follow the rules or face dire consequences. During an autocratic system, most heads of state under autocratic systems have some sort of court or group of people around them that help them make decisions. They generally have to keep the people happy to a certain extent to stay in power, and as such, there is some room for discussion. If you can warm your way into getting the royal ear, as it were, you might be able to affect changes simply by convincing the head of state that things need to change or convincing the head of state that they need to appease certain parts of their people in order to stay in power and be successful in power. Charismatic also, there's some room for discussion, usually charismatic leaders, because they are inspirational, will interact with the people who follow them and will listen to the people who follow them. It can be very open. Of course, some leadership, especially those who indefinitely elected or dictatorship-type power arrangements may not be as open for discussion as other charismatic leaders. Democracy is supposed to have a formal means for discussion. The whole purpose of having elections is that there is accountability to the people and at least every time an election comes up, there should be some means for telling the leadership what you want done and convincing the leadership that if they want to stay a part of the leadership, they should do what you're asking. And of course, consensus is based upon discussion. It is imperative in a consensus situation that people discuss the issues until everybody agrees on it, so there's always room for discussion. The way that totalitarian governments stay in power is usually through the threat of violence or through actual violence. Both coercive and symbolic violence has a tendency to keep people afraid and willing to do what they're told to do for fear of reprisal. Autocratic is usually based upon tradition. There are specific ways in which the royal or central head of state offers laws, offers policies, and there are traditional ways of petitioning that power and traditional ways of moving that power from generation to generation. Charismatic leaders, the kind of governance they have, is based upon the popularity of their movement, usually thought of as a social movement or a mass movement. So they basically usually govern with a kind of inspirational speeches and rallies and marches and those kinds of things. So we see people like Hitler being considered a charismatic dictator because he would hold these huge rallies and at these rallies people would interact with his speeches to provide support for him and it's kind of a frenzied sort of atmosphere. So Gandhi often had marches and would encourage people to boycott things or to make things or to just sit and refuse to obey things. So the kind of leadership that happens with charismatic leadership is usually some sort of interaction with the leader either following them in what they do or responding to them in what they say. Democratic power gets moved peacefully for the most part and most established democracies through elections. There is an ongoing transition of power and it is set up in such a way both in American-style democracy and in parliamentary-style democracy for elections to take place and transition of power to follow the rules, the rule of law. So consensus, the most powerful person in a consensus is an individual and this is because if you are trying to come to a consensus and you're trying to come to the unanimous vote, one person can veto what is up for decision and that individual's power allows them to work to convince the other people in the room of what they want and very often is the seeds for compromises among people so that one person concedes to the other on something that they don't care as passionately about and vice versa so there is a lot that an individual can do under consensus and you'll very often find that people who want to do social change strive for some sort of consensus because of that individual empowerment. So how are the rules disseminated under these kinds of governances? Of course rules are a big part of having a governance. They are the ways in which people know what to do in response to this governance. Totalitarian are always top-down. In fact you could look at this arrangement that I have on the page is probably based mostly on how much rules are top-down versus bottom-up so we're going on a continuum with totalitarian being the most top-down very often rules are made in secret in secret meetings and so forth and a lot of times people don't know that they've broken the rules until they break the rules and they're arrested or punished in some way. Autocratic rules are generally top-down but of course because there is a court and there is the possibility of relatives taking your power away from you there can be some bottom-up to this it's usually not that deep in other words the autocratic ruler is usually responding to the people just underneath them who have some power you know lords and barons and so forth to use European examples so but for the most part the king or queen's word is the word unless they're in a monarchy that is connected to democracy. Charismatic it's generally top-down because we have a central leader that we're very much enamored with and are interested in what they say rules are not necessarily outlined as rules from charismatic leaders they sometimes are outlined as basically doing what the leader wants rather than what they have to do. Democracy rules are both top-down and bottom-up bottom-up in the sense that we elect our officials and we put in power the people who rule over us but they are pretty top-down otherwise because we have police forces and military and other government and courts and so forth and other government entities that regulate us and tell us what to do so you know and it's a very long process to have that changed because we have to get rid of the leadership and power sometimes in order to change those rules and consensus is always bottom-up because again you have to have that unanimous agreement or near unanimous agreement in order to get anything done so it's pretty much what individuals feel and how they interact with each other from that emerges whatever rules are going to be obeyed and then finally we've got to ask how stable these systems of governance are and that stability is usually dependent upon a characteristic within the governance totalitarian stability depends on violence and as such it makes it a very unstable form of government most totalitarian governments are toppled within a few years to a few generations it's it's just not a very easy type government to keep and that is because there's not much buy-in by the people underneath it so you have to have more coercive violence involved and you know and there are also other power hungry people who are just waiting to take over and so you have a lot of coups and a lot of intrigue and that kind of thing that happens with totalitarianism so totalitarian you know is not is not a very stable form of government autocratic on the other hand is extremely stable in fact it's kind of hard to get rid of it's usually has taken you know look at Russia Russia still has oligarchs even though they got rid of their autocratic family over a hundred years ago and the only way that they managed to end being ruled by kings or Zars in this case is to wipe out the entire family of the Zara power and even with that they still tend towards the centralization and there's some who are arguing that Putin is the new czar so the stability is very strong it there are lots of examples of autocratic governance is going on for long long periods of time Great Britain is another example of this they you know have had a form of democracy for four or five hundred years now but depending upon how you score it but they still have a monarch and they have a very delicate balance delicately balanced system between autocratic and democratic rule and they're always arguing about whether or not they should get rid of the get rid of the royalty there is a movement afoot right now arguing that Queen Elizabeth ought to be the end of the line and that they should do away with monarchy after this but there still is a higher support of the monarchy about 52 to 55% versus those who don't want a monarchy anymore and of course the British monarchy doesn't just rule over England or Great Britain there is a commonwealth that claim the royal family as well so it could be very messy if they decided to end the autocratic well in the monarchy but on the other hand to call it an autocratic form of governance now is very iffy because it's more symbolic now than it is actual governance and one probably would look at most of the commonwealth as democratic now and not autocratic charismatic governance depends upon the leader and that's why most charismatic leaders get killed because the easiest way to end a charismatic rule is to either kill them or discredit them and so there is always some sort of intrigue afoot to get rid of a charismatic leader and it's very rare that charismatic leaders remain in charge for long and of course we know that the definition of stability from the point of view of group stability is how well it outlives the members and of course of killing the leader kills the movement then it's not a very stable group because it doesn't outlive the leadership democratic democratic stability rule depends upon how well people adhere to the rule of law and that is why some democracies have come and gone because people who have been elected into power refuse to give up that power and refuse to obey the law and it can devolve into a totalitarian type circumstance very quickly and if that happens on the other hand there are plenty of democracies that have outlived their their citizens and their leaders and decisions that have been made so if if the democracy continues to obey the rule of law and continues to have peaceful ongoing transitions of power then it can remain pretty stable so it it's a fairly new type of democracy of governance rather especially democracies that are have universal or near universal and franchisement meaning most of the people who live there can vote so some of these democracies may not be as stable as we hope and time will tell consensus is very unstable because individuals have such power they tend to break up very quickly we have hung juries almost every day in the country there are ways in which you know consensus sort of ensures that the group will not be a stable group and this is why I've repeated in class a number of times that group stability may not be as lofty a goal as some people suggest because the extent to which the group is stable is the extent to which individuals lose power and the extent to which individuals have power is the extent to which groups lose stability so consensus because it is based upon individual power is generally a fairly unstable form of governance though not necessarily a bad form of governance so in thinking about these kinds of governance is you can see that certain kinds of economies work better with these governance and you can also see that certain economy certain types of economies call for certain kinds of governance is it's a very interactive kind of thing and so you will hear people talk about either political economies or sociologists prefer the term sociopolitical economies rather than discussing the institution of governance and the or in the institution of economics separate from each other there have been some questions in recent years as to whether or not these are as deterministic as a lot of people suggest that they are so for example China is a totalitarian central committee government has been for quite a while now probably about 60 or 70 years and yet they are playing very well in free market and so-called free market economies on the world stage and there is some revisiting the idea that to have a free market you have to have democracy because it seems that China is finding a way to create free markets under a totalitarian rule it's also kind of questioning what exactly is communism what exactly is socialism and what exactly is capitalism so with the human mind sort of the things that help shape political economies and why they come into existence one of the things has got to do with where they are you know it's much easier to build certain kinds of political economies depending upon the geography and we'll talk more about that in a minute resources not just natural resources but also historic resources and the talents of the particular people who are involved the cultural resources that exist belief systems attitudes except etc and practices all kind of shape society and help create unique cultures you remember in our last module we talked about social institutions as being a series of questions that have to be answered and these questions are answered in multiple ways so they help create you know huge variations among cultures and those answers to those questions are shaped by these things like geography and history and cultural practices and of course you know historic events have a lot to do with why a certain political economy exists in a certain place at a certain time and this of course also has to do with technology technological advancement is easier to do in some areas where there are resources and harder to do and in some areas where resources are more scarce and finally we're about ready to give you a list of different political economies and this list that I'm about to give you is going to be in a particular order and that order is historic meaning that if we're looking at Western socio-political economies they have moved through these different political economies to get to where we are today and where we're going tomorrow oftentimes this gets discussed as if it is predetermined or linear that is if you are a hunter-gatherer eventually what you will start doing is planting things and then become agrarian and if you become agrarian then you'll start having division of labor and therefore you'll become you know more feudal etc etc and I mean Star Trek is the worst at this with their classification of planets being in particular stages of evolution I don't want you to get the idea that what I'm describing is an evolutionary process it just happens to be the history of Western economies Western political economies so keep that in mind don't see this as one thing has to lead to another and I will talk more detailed as we go along about some of these things still existing today even though we think of them as our past so let's talk about the first kind of political economy this used to be a dominant form of political economy among human beings and up until about 10,000 years ago one might argue it was the only form of human political economy and that is hunter-gatherers hunter-gatherers occur societies occur in places where there is food so if you have forests where you can hunt and forage for food then that's a good place and then planes also where there are vast fields of grass and different kinds of animals that feed off of those grasses you are not going to find hunter-gatherer societies in a desert there's just not a lot of stuff here to to gather up or to hunt to keep a group of people away from starvation and generally it's a hunter-gatherer political economy anthropologists will tell you if you're about three days out from starvation so at any given moment the group of people do not have enough food to last more than a few days so they've got to start thinking about where they're going to have food again so of course what they're going to do is follow where the food is and seasonal variations and over hunting an area or over picking an area might lead them to go to other places so basically most hunter-gatherer societies are very nomadic meaning that they wander around chasing the climate chasing the food and so forth so if there's a drought in an area or if there is a lack of food in an area then they most likely are going to move somewhere else and this means that they don't carry a lot on them because they need to be able to move quickly so housing structures clothing gathering of poor possessions are very minimal and also that they can move from place to place so the biggest event that ended this political economy was the agricultural revolution that occurred somewhere between nine and ten thousand BCE and this happened in an area that's called the fertile crescent this area is fairly deserty now we're talking about the Middle East places like Iran and Turkey and the reason that they're deserty is because early agricultural attempts pretty much took all the nutrients out of the soil so you have climate change and you have humans affecting climate change in that area over thousands of years but this is definitely you know where humans first stopped running around trying to find food and started actually creating food either through having animals that they kept there was some nomadic parts to that and when they started taking animals and and rearing them in order for food and then also planting food so you have a little bit of variation on this but basically when when animals started being domesticated and food started being harvested you had a major change in the way that power occurred you had a major change in the way that people interacted with each other most of the time before the agricultural revolution or in current hunter-gatherer societies and some still exist today you have a form of governance that has been called tribal and what this means is that either everybody it's pretty much consensus-based in the sense that most people are a small group of people who rise to be in that group either because of their competency in hunting and gathering or because they are of a certain age usually come together and interact with each other to make decisions of course decisions are not that complex in this situation either because most of the decisions are centered around around food as well like where are we gonna go who's gonna hunt who's gonna gather who's gonna prep that kind of thing but tribal is definitely the form of governance that most hunter-gatherer societies had and still have today all right so we mentioned the agricultural revolution what this led to is a political economy that will call agrarian sometimes it's also called peasant economies we'll talk about why peasants in a minute okay so the place for this obviously is places that you can grow food or that animals can graze and and or I should say because some did both some did one or the other so if you can imagine a map right now the agrarian political economy is essentially was spread across the more moderate temperatures that have four seasons so not too far north not too far south and not very much in the southern hemisphere because if you look at a globe the southern hemisphere has got more water than it does land and so the land tends to be closer to the equator or closer to cold climes than it does in this kind of moderate four season climes so we have a tendency nowadays to call these small towns that kind of work with the season as and have mostly farming and agriculture we would call them rural and we still of course have rural areas that are mostly farms and so forth and around the world but for the most part most people live in cities most people do not live in rural areas nowadays and this was a fairly dominant way that people live for a long period of time you even if you look at some place that is considered civilized like you know a civilization like Egypt it was basically an agrarian economy it had a lot of wealth from that and as such it began to differentiate into a more hierarchical system than an agrarian economy would suggest but it still was basically centered around the Nile centered around the food that could be generated and the seasons that helped generate that food and you know I've mentioned seasons several times seasons become very important at this point now seasons were important to hunter gatherers because seasonal changes meant you needed to go somewhere the seasons are a little different under the agrarian political economy because now you have to do things locally to prepare for these changes in season and this includes things like when you plant how do you facilitate and care for the crops while they're growing or the animals where they're growing and also how to harvest or slaughter animals when the time comes and of course most of these places have some form of winter and winter is a time when you know you needed to have planned to store up food because it's very rare that you can have big grazing lands or big planting during the winter time so the winter season is based upon how good you were at storing your meat in your brain in order to make it through the winter and then of course the other thing that becomes very important now is land most hunter gatherer societies do not think of land as something that you own and most agrarian societies start looking at land ownership as being an important part of of their economy and with land comes a couple of things one is mathematics because you have to be able to figure out where the borders are and also you have a hierarchy between land owners and people who do not own land and you also have inheritance you have people who want to make sure that when they die their family receives that land and nobody else does so you start having some power tensions at this point so ownership is very important and you'll see that most hunter gatherer societies ownership is not a concept that's thought about much but with agrarian societies we start thinking about who owns what who owns the storage who owns the animals who owns the plates who owns the land and so forth and you have the beginning of a hierarchy because you have division of labor because you do not have everybody having to be in the in the job of creating food the way you do in a hunter gatherer society so you start having status you start having different levels of power it's not I think unusual that you also start having monotheistic religions monotheistic religions mean the belief in one God over all or one God who is God of the gods and if you look at most agrarian societies that develop into civilizations that have religious beliefs most of these religious beliefs center around either a single monotheistic being that is overseen overseeing everything and from that monotheistic being those who lead us have their power or you have panacea of God that there is one God who is over all the other God see we have ownership in this idea of land coming into and this idea of rank you know status so it seems to be reflected in the belief systems of the people as well and very often the deity are the is the one or are the ones who give validity to the owner to own thing probably legitimacy instead of validity would be a better word so the term to know here is feudalism feudalism is a system of ranking feudalism has occurred throughout Europe throughout Asia a small amount throughout Africa and a small amount in North and South America basically feudalism is a system whereby those who own the land are essentially the rulers of the people who live on the land there's usually a class after a class of owners there is a class that I will call the security class these are the people who defend the borders and help keep the people who are underneath the owner in keep them contained and make sure that they don't try to steal stuff or take stuff you know that they obey the rules and then you have a class of artisans these are the people who create the tools for for telling the land for taking care of animals and so forth these are skilled laborers and then underneath that are the peasants sometimes called the serfs they're other words for them as well but these are basically the people who work the land and they are and in fact you can see that the closer you get to working that land the lower your status is and a feudal society and these categories are the structure of the political economy and they determine normative behavior they determine things like who you marry how many kids you have what you do every day of your life all of those kind of things are determined by which class you were born into of course there are some feudal systems that are got more classes than the four that I've outlined but there are not any I think that have fewer than those four classes those classes are kind of necessary to keep the system going so so you may be wondering how do we move from feudal Europe to what we have today and this went through some changes especially after say 1400 or so that kind of led up to the Industrial Revolution I call it cottage capitalism but there are other people who have other terms for it but it's basically bringing us to a political economy that is based upon individual ownership of businesses and farms rather than the feudal system so how do we get there well for one thing we started building cities so basically as we began to become more enlightened began to believe in a central church the Catholic Church being the ruler of Europe began to explore the world all of these kind of things were going on in the 1400s and 1500s we began to build cities and cities meant that people had a concentrated area where they needed goods and services and there were people who as feudal city-states broke up you had people who were formerly artisans who began to create guilds and create businesses based upon those skills and you have laborers who no longer were working the fields who came to the city looking for ways to work and some of the things that helped with the changes in this is that because you have a city you have what are called local markets that means that people start trying to figure out how to exchange good and good and services you know under a feudal system you really didn't have an exchange system per se because it was so top-down now you have less of a top-down so people have to figure out how to barter with each other how to exchange things we have the rise of banking during this time banking is an important aspect of this because and it's interesting because you can see how things change because of the unexpected consequences of certain things that people decide to do a good example is the rise of banking basically you have a Catholic Church that was concerned by the fact that the Muslim Empire was expanding and it expanded into parts of Italy and into Spain and had taken over much of what we think of as the holy land in European societies and as such the popes began to draw from the security classes of their feudal lords usually knights right and asked that they send these people to fight crusades against the Muslims and these crusades essentially gave people who had never been past it two miles square area and their entire lives a chance to see the world and see other cultures and a chance to enrich themselves because in most of the time these armies were paid for by looting by allowing when they took over a town or won a battle to take the wealth out of that town and and they brought a lot of stuff back home and then they get called out on another campaign and they've got to figure out how to take care of the stuff back home so that it will not become become looted while they're gone so this is how early banking work it provided a place where you could put your particular stuff and safekeeping and of course you know this happened under feudalism to a certain extent too but in banking under feudalism was generally among the elite class what you now have is banking from this kind of mobile class that's coming and going into the way from the land and back to it and of course they brought knowledge and they brought other practices other cultures and it became revolutionary so in this weird way the Catholic Church trying to keep a hold of its power in fear of the the Muslim other ended up losing its power because of the ways in which the unexpected consequences of having a class of people seeing you know other parts of the world and gaining some upward mobility and some wealth of their own so by the 1415 hundreds you have people who have a start thinking it is possible for me to die in a class different from the one I was born into higher than the one I was born into and so this is the source you know this is what cities why cities grew they grew with people looking for their fortunes and this is also how we got the so-called new world because a number of people who came to our hemisphere to the Western hemisphere from Europe came here seeking wealth seeking a chance to move up in the world from their traditional class in Europe and so I mentioned the crusades and banking is being a major part of this change a major part of this upward mobility I will mention one more thing about banking and that is that we start seeing the rise of currency during this time most of the time in the past banking was a banking was a matter of coinage and you know raw materials that banks began to give certificates out in the form of notes at the value of the material that you put into the bank and that's where currency began you also see a number of people who begin to find ways around being financed by the rulers of there and and as such they begin to self-finance some of what they did so this idea of mercantilism is kind of a transitional period from feudalism to capitalism mercantilism at first was the way in which royalty began to expand you know feudal lords began to expand their wealth was to finance expeditions first to India and China and places like that and then also with the advent of Christopher Columbus who by the way had backing from one of these feudal lords Isabella and Ferdinand King and Queen of Spain so the backwards Queen and King of Spain provided the financing for Columbus to go off and find a Western route to to China or to India and this was a mercantile ship it is a mercantile ship because all of the provisions for the ship were paid for the Isabella and Ferdinand and then they also turned to a bank for financing and financed this in part with a loan from the Medici so Columbus goes he discovers this new land and this opens the floodgates for European countries to head west looking for more money and look in at first this was for for the feudal lords of Europe for the royalty of Europe they were the ones who were financing this they were the ones who were giving legitimacy to these expeditions but what you see in 15 and 1600 is the rise of stock markets and what this is is self funding by investors instead of turning to leadership to fund these things they things like the Dutch India Trading Company started looking to people who have gotten rich from earlier expeditions putting money into new expeditions so that they can increase their wealth and so you have the first stock market in which people actually you know were they invested in one of these expeditions and they were given a stock a piece of paper saying to them your investment is worth so much money and then you know most of these expeditions took years to come and go so if you needed the money that you put into it and the anticipated wealth that you are going to receive you basically could trade money for that stock in order to to get your profit now rather than waiting until the expedition came back and when that happened people began to begin to have exchanges places they you know started out kind of in the back of a pub somewhere but it eventually became what we think of as the stock market today so so mercantilism slowly moved its way into corporations and into stock markets it's important to understand this because mercantilism and this idea of the stock market is not what you would call free market economy it's still a very top-down kind of thing and that's why most corporations today still need to have some sort of legitimacy from a government a license or something like that in order to be in existence because these traditions of how corporations work and how stock markets work were set up not in a period of industrialization and not in a period of free markets but in a period that was very close to feudalism and it has some of the characteristics of feudalism still showing up in the way that we do this business today so that brings us to the industry the industrial revolution and industrialization now one could argue that industrialization sort of started in the 1600s with the invention of the spinning Jenny but basically most industrialization occurred in the late 18th century and in the 19th century the place that we associate with industrialization believe it or not is the suburb and the reason for this is that you now could live away from where you work as you industrialization is about mass production it's about producing more than you can sell locally so this mass production was done in a central location and this central location had to have factory workers and these factory workers did not have to live in the factory before this and cottage capitalism people lived where they worked you either lived on the farm if you were a farmer or you live near the small family business if you were in the city but we now have the ability to move away from where we work and you see suburbs beginning to grow throughout the 19th and 20th century in part because of the industrialization of most of Western Europe and the United States and Canada so there's several events that are important in understanding industrialization I'm gonna go over these individually and all together the first is that towards the end of the 19th century early 20th century you have the invention of the assembly line so a lot of people think that Henry Ford invented the car he did not what he invented was a way to build the car and that required specialization and essentially an assembly line is repetitive work done over and over again so it's done really well kind of mindlessly and it just does a little part of the end product so up until an assembly line most things were manufactured from start to finish by a single person or a small group of single people you know acting and doing everything that was needed in order to build the thing with an assembly line you have a large group of people each of which have a small part in the final product but nobody seeing the final product from the beginning to the from the beginning of collecting the resources on the way to the end of creating the product assembly lines are everywhere now it revolutionized the way that we think about the world around us we do a lot of things via assembly line that we don't even think about like you go see a movie at a centiplex that has nine movie theaters or and you go into the ticket you get in the line for tickets and then you move to the line for refreshments and then you move to the theater and then from the theater you move to the bathroom and then you go out a different door than you came in your experience is encountering people along the way who do just one thing to ensure that you get to see the movie right one little part of your experience is provided by a group of people who do not provide the entire experience that a plexus or assembly line education is a simply line you go to your sociology class your sociology teacher teaches you nothing but sociology and then they sort of you know open your head up pour in knowledge put your head back down and they send you off to history class and in history class and you do you know the history teacher does the same thing so if you were to look at from afar the way people are moving in a high school or in a college you would see in fact a kind of assembly line going on where education used to be a kind of especially college education used to be a kind of mentorship in which you would work with one professor during the entire time of your education who would then you know suggest different experiences books to read lectures to and that kind of thing in order to create a good education for you we now have this kind of assembly line mentality in the way that we do things so I promise you now that you know about assembly lines you will be seeing them everywhere because they are everywhere we we consider this in our culture an efficient way to do things and as such a lot of businesses see this as the best way to set up their business and of course in the last module we talked about how this machine thinking has led to machines actually doing our work and most true assembly lines that is assembling something manufacturing nowadays are machine-driven not human-driven so this has some implications for the way we do things in the future you judge about suburbs becoming possible because of industrialization one of the major milestones in this is the creation of Fannie Mae in 1938 and the story goes like this Nelson Rockefeller Nelson Rockefeller sorry I can't remember the father's name anyway he goes Rockefeller goes to the Department of Commerce the head of the Department of Commerce and says this is in the middle of the Great Depression and says I'm really worried that we are going to have a whole bunch of people a bunch of workers who are going to have a communist revolution remember this is just 20 years from when Russia saw it Bolshevik revolution so what can we do to prevent this and so it was decided that basically if we could convince people that they had private ownership of their homes they would not want to become communist because the government would take over ownership of their home and to facilitate this they created Fannie Mae which essentially guaranteed a 30-year mortgage to the banks because a 30-year mortgage is not a good investment it's not a good investment for the individual who's taking the mortgage because that individual is going to pay probably about three times what their property is worth their property is not going to go up in value over that 30-year period to the point where they're going to get the interest back that they're paying on the home and there are a lot of people in 2008 with the big crash who figured out the truth of this that they don't actually own their their property banks own their property but the other part of this is that it's not a good bet on the bank part because the bank is betting that you're going to be able to have a steady job with a steady income without any interruption through sickness or children or anything other things for 30 years that doesn't happen before this most people took out mortgages for only about four or five years and they took out mortgages on assets that produced money so their business their farm that kind of thing so just buying a house that you're going to live in and paying for over a 30-year period is really a bad financial bet on both sides but because of Fannie Mae it becomes a good bet because through Fannie Mae your owning a house was cheaper than renting a house that used to be true it's not as true as it was but when Fannie Mae was created mortgage payments were less than rental payments and also Fannie Mae had you know there is this great cultural campaign of this sort of American dream of ownership now you see the date on this 1938 this is pretty late in the Depression and pretty early and what became World War two so you don't really have a lot of people taking advantage of Fannie Mae until post World War two and at that point you have the GI Bill so the GI Bill helped keep help make a down payment for these 30-year mortgages the GI Bill gave returning soldiers a chance to go to college and to have a higher-paying job or what became calling the term became going to white collar job through studying professional knowledge rather than technical or skilled knowledge so you have a lot of people who become executives to become attorneys to become law who become medical people that kind of thing and so after and with a no down payment on a house you know that down payment being financed by the GI Bill you start having people sort of taking a hold of this American dream of household or how our home ownership this has some very profound effects on family life on cities on workplaces and so forth one of the things that it did is it reinforced and actually made more solid the idea that a woman's placement in the home now it must be understood that before World War two only higher middle-class women and upper-class women thought of themselves as the head of their domestic domain and that their husbands were in charge of the work domain most people lived in extended families and had family businesses or family farms and women worked at these just as often as men did and in fact women were the ones who first went into the factories because they would supplement the income of their families by providing that extra income from the factory but by mid 20th century this this had all shifted around and what you have in the 1950s it's the right late 40s and early 1950s as these men got out of college through the GI Bill you have them moving to suburbs and what you have then is a company called Levittown the Levitt brothers who create these kind of cookie-cutter suburbs that we have now so what they did the first one that they did was on Long Island this was three or four floor plans for the housing these were you put certain certain money down you get a finance through Fannie Mae you are the GI Bill puts down money for you you create the single family house dwelling in which parents and children lived mother stayed home father went to work you had neighborhood schools and you had this whole sort of separation of work and family that occurred and these very strict gender roles now a lot of people think that we have always had nuclear families as the dominant family system that we have always had women working in the home and not working outside the home and the dominant idea of work and this is just simply not true only with these events the Fannie Mae GI Bill and Levittown do we have the beginning this this myth of the American dream and this being home ownership and this myth of the nuclear family being the basic family unit so you can see how industrialization changes quite a few things it changes the way that cities are composed where work is in the city but life living is outside the city of you're in the middle class it changes the way women and men interact with each other it changes the way we spend money it changes the way we invest money it changes the way that we live our lives in our workplaces before this if you were a lawyer an accountant or some sort of business person you probably went into business for yourself after this after the GI Bill you have so many college graduates what you have is the emergence of offices where people go and work for a large company you have a corporate version of these professions the right mills coin the term white color and what this is talking about is a group of workers who have intellectual jobs rather than jobs that they do with their hands not so gives us a term blue color blue color being those skilled jobs that you do with your hands so we also have during this time because you can see that a lot of this was in reaction to socialism so the terms that you want to think about are socialism communism and oligopoly socialism and communism we need to distinguish in sociology socialism is referring to a kind of economy in which goods and services are distributed on the basis of need rather than the basis of income or what you can spend money on we have socialism in the United States it's called a library called a fire department there are lots of ways in which some goods and services are distributed on the basis of when we need it not on the basis of whether we can afford it communism is a is a political economy that made the government the centralized overseer of distributing those goods and services on the basis of need and of course because it became very totalitarian very centralized there were a lot of problems that came up with communism and as we mentioned earlier it became very difficult to stabilize and sustain because it required so much in the way of of oversight and violence in order to keep it together but that's not to let capitalism off the hook here because what happens in industrialization is that there are a few players in each industry who who do it better than everybody else who amass wealth beyond everybody else and they begin to sort of buy up their competitors and you have monopolies and oligopolies and these are hurtful to to what was thought of as capitalism which was supposed to be a free market of exchange we had a lot of competitors so industrialization while it gets connected to capitalism quite a lot many sociologists argue that it was also the kind of end capitalism because it created this rise of oligopoly so what's the future where are we going now well a lot of people are arguing that especially in Europe and in the United States and Canada we live in a post industrialized world we live in a world of cyberspace now the place is not you know so much connected to geography it's you know because you can interact and have economies that are dependent upon each other globally and you can interact and communicate through cyberspace and through the web and in virtual ways rather than just through mass production and through industrialization the resources for this global world is electronics energy the grid what becomes the most important resource is whether or not you have the energy to keep electric you know to keep your batteries charged to keep the electricity flowing because electronics require that energy and that's why as the post industrialized world has emerged you have more and more emphasis on how we get energy you have this in the industrialized world to a certain extent but as in the industrialized world for a while invention created the possibility of more efficient use of energy but now we use energy not to invent things but to actually live our lives to work and so we are basically beginning to run out of some of the in the energy that we started using in the industrialized period and it's creating the possibility of a lot of problems some of the events that we're looking at here and it's first of all the information highway the fact that we now you know the currency of today is more information than it is actual physical things that we can hold when banks in the feudal age and in the capitalistic age had money that was flowing back and forth that money had gold behind it that money had stuff behind it now that money is just basically binary ones and zero right I mean your wealth is more electronic than it is physical even when you're talking about currency that currency is not as not representative of all your health all your wealth most people if they of all of their wealth is in what they can carry in their pocket in the way of currency then they probably are not very rich the wealthier you get the more your wealth is expressed in information rather than expressed in in goods that you hold and we can see this in the fact that people now sell money there are people whose jobs consist of looking at exchanges between different currencies and buying you know yins in the morning and selling them for euros in the afternoon and seeing a profit by playing the money markets this had nothing to productivity it had nothing in the way of real you know product to our lives it is just essentially this kind of wealth by symbology right money is symbolic the ones and zeros are symbolic and people still consider this a productive activity when in fact it is producing essentially nothing and in fact there are some people argue that the wealth that we have created in the latter half of the 20th century in the 21st century isn't real wealth at all that is just it's just as good as you know the electronics that keep it there and as such it's a lot of people are predicting that it eventually collapsed and because it is so not connected to what we eat to what we put over our heads you know to our everyday lives and that's in part why we have to keep buying things that's in order to feel like we're wealthy and because we don't have a lot of stuff that creates this wealth and then ironically we also have a world that creates scarcity so you know basic economics is that the scarce or something is the more you can charge for it so because this is more information based than it is material based you have a whole bunch of people who create false scarcity Disney is the best example I can think of it this you know they can reproduce Cinderella onto a DVD or streaming you know for trillions of times far more than there are people on earth far more than there will be people on earth so to tell you that Cinderella is only available for a limited time and this happens but every three years so that the new three-year-olds can you know who have no memory of this happening three years ago can complain and petition their parents to get Cinderella because it's going to go away soon so you know this is a false scarcity and this happens quite often in our economy in the post-industrialized world because we in fact have plenty and and we have so much that in order to feel like we're wealthy we're having to make stuff up and and we do not have a lot of scarcity and developed economies so the fear is that you can't make a lot of profit unless you create this scarcity and this of course also makes us on shake your and shake your ground in terms you want to think about consumerism we live in a time where the health of our economy is not measured by how much we've saved by how much we produce but rather by how much we have spent how much stuff how much goods how much services we have consumed and there are a lot of people who argue that consumerism is not only bad for our economy but it's bad for our culture as well that consumeristic ideas about what is worthwhile what is value is shaping our attitude into much more selfish ways technophily is a concept that you should know about technophily was a book that was written by a man named Neil Postman he is essentially arguing in this book that the way that we think about technology shapes our culture and he argues that we now live in a technophily and the major value that we have is that if we can create it if we can create a technology then we must use it so he points out a few examples in the book one is MRI machines MRI machines are a very wonderful advanced technology it helps people find tumors and other kinds of things sooner than we ever would before it is helping with brain surgery and understanding our brain it's helping with research in ways I haven't before but there are places where there are too many because we have a for-profit medical system too many MRI machines for the pot for the surrounding population Gainesville Florida is a good example of this where I lived for a while when I went to school Gainesville Florida when schools in session there's about a hundred fifty thousand people in the town it's a very small town if in the summertime that population goes down closer to 80,000 because students have gone home and they had eight MRI machines in town and nobody was making a profit at using their MRI machine because they had too many machines per capita so what do they start doing they started encouraging doctors to send people to MRIs for things that a simple x-ray or other kinds of detecting detection would work and so this is a perfect example of what Postman is talking about because he's saying because they ate MRI machines existed they were there they had been built the doctors were pushed to use them more often and this happens quite a bit and this can be very scary because if you think about the the military industrial complex it is a very high technology we have all kinds of war tool toys now that are high-tech war toys and we are living in like the 16th year the 17th year of the war in Afghanistan in part because there is this you know desire once we've created these war toys to then create war and there are many who argue that we are in perpetual war now because we have these technologies so the question is do we build technology in order to make our lives better and to in order to get the things that we value or is our technology making us value things and what things going green is another aspect of this of course if we're talking about energy being the main resource then you have a lot of people who are now claiming that their businesses are green businesses and this creates a a lot of questions about whether or not whether or not something is truly green you hear a lot of arguments one way or the other an example of this and why this is so difficult is fast food restaurants so there are many who would argue that we would be utilizing our energy resources much better if we were to do away with paper all together and if you went to fast food restaurant they gave you a plate and utensils to eat your meal the problem with this is that once that is done it has to be washed and washed in a dishwasher and dried out and so forth with heat in order to ensure that germs are killed and all that kind of stuff and so there have been people who have pointed out that if we use recycled material to create the paper waste that is created from fast food that we actually are using less resources than we would if we reuse the utensils in the plates and the packaging for these fast food so it looks like you're going green when you're not utilizing a lot of paper but in truth you would be going green less by utilizing some kinds of paper than you would if you were demanding that places washed their dishes on a regular basis so where we're going in the future is this post industrial age is difficult to predict we certainly are in a time of transition and our political economy we have forces that are trying to centralize us and forces that are trying to decentralize us and one would argue that you know sociological knowledge is going to be very helpful as we go through these big transitions