The US share of global consumption. Central banks out of step. The history of the forklift & the quicksand society of the Soviet Union.
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Enterrador de Barranca (Gravedigger of Barranca), 2019/ signed in 2021
US consumers account for more than 30 percent of all global consumption
The extreme political polarization of US consumer expectations
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How Chinese growth affects the global economy
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The World’s Central Banks Aren’t Following the Fed’s Lead Anymore
Major economies are in very different places. In the US, the problem for the past two years has been post-pandemic inflation. Europe suffered from the same affliction, made worse by the war in Ukraine, which cut off supplies of cheap Russian gas. In Japan, higher inflation is good news—a sign that its anemic economy may be perking up. In China, the problem isn’t prices-too-high; it’s prices-too-low.
As a result, many central banks are moving at different paces—or even in different directions. The Fed was late to hike rates when inflation surged and late to cut when it moderated. The European Central Bank and the Bank of England started lowering rates ahead of the Fed, as did many central banks in emerging markets. In China, by contrast, policymakers are scrambling to arrest a slow-motion property market collapse and prop up the stock market. As for the Bank of Japan, it isn’t cutting but hiking.
When central bank pathways diverge, strange things happen.
Source: Bloomberg
Beatriz González (Colombian, born 1938) Los papagayos, 1986
The Interwar Period: The First True Forklifts
The period between World War I and II marked the transition from platform-based industrial trucks to forklifts. First, Eugene Clark at Clark Material Handling Company in Kentucky developed the first seated counterbalanced lift truck in 1917 called the “Tructractor.” Although often referred to today as the first forklift, it actually did not have forks. As Clark was dealing with heavy truck axles at the time, the Tructractor was initially developed for movement within his plant. But soon, visitors to their plant began requesting variations of the model for their own use. And in about two years, Clark started to export to foreign markets. Around this time, there was also demand for a way to stack materials on top of one another. The reason was that warehouses were eager to fit more material in less space, which allowed them to save money. This led to Yale inventing the first electric truck with forks and a mast in 1923. In terms of design, it resembled modern-day forklifts. And as such, it could properly be considered the first forklift.
Who Invented the Forklift?
Unfortunately, there’s no real consensus on who invented the forklift. That said, the following could be considered the inventors of the first lift truck: (1) Yale, with their 1923 electric forklift complete with forks and a mast. (2) Clark, with their 1924 modified Duat tractor with forks and a chain-supported mast
The truck worked by using a ratchet and pinion system instead of a tilting platform like in earlier designs. This was a breakthrough in the sense that the mast could be elevated above the height of the truck for the first time ever. And consequently, warehouses could take advantage of vertical space by double-stacking loads. A year later in 1924, Clark contributed another major advancement in forklift technology. This was the Duat tractor, which became the first internal combustion forklift.
While the design of 1920s forklifts was revolutionary, there remained a significant limitation on their usefulness: There were no standard pallet sizes. Because of this, pallets were often either too small or too large for fork trucks to handle.
By the late 1930s, engineers solved this problem by standardizing pallets. In fact, it was only after making pallet sizes uniform that forklifts truly went mainstream. Since forklifts were now being designed to carry pallets, the entire warehouse storage process was simplified. Not only could pallets carry more weight, but operators could more easily stack them. Now, this begs the question: Who invented the pallet?
The first patent was submitted by Howard T. Hallowell and approved in 1924. The modern-day pallet was invented by George G. Raymond, founder of the Raymond Handling Concepts Corporation. This concept consisted of a sturdy top face to support the load and a bottom face to rest on the load below. And this design allowed warehouses to store even more materials in the same amount of space by double-stacking.
By the 1940s, forklifts looked close to what they look like today. And they became even more popular during World War II. With a massive increase in the need for load handling, businesses needed forklifts that could run for a full work shift.
The demand for ways to increase warehousing efficiency accelerated in the post-World War II years. One of the key strategies for this was expanding vertically as opposed to outwardly. By doing so, warehouses could better use available space and save money in the process.
Source: Conger
A Post-war ‘Quicksand Society’?
In reaction to the stresses brought on by rapid industrialization, Russia turned into “a country of vagrants” and a “quicksand society,” in the words of historian Moshe Lewin.[i] The Second World War brought on similar dislocation, and the Soviet population remained in flux well into the post-war period. As Nazi Germany invaded and as the front moved in the first years of the war, millions were evacuated to the east. Life in evacuation was challenging, to say the least, and evacuees often had few resources left to draw upon as they returned home in the late 1940s. Once there, they often discovered that their homes were destroyed or occupied, their possessions had been stolen, and their loved ones were nowhere to be found. Wounded veterans—“invalids of the Great Patriotic War” (invalidy velikoi otechestvennoi voiny) in the parlance of the time—often spent extended periods of time in hospitals, sanatoria, and boarding houses (internaty) recuperating from their injuries far away from home. Upon being released, they too returned to disappointment and indignity, and often took off in search of better prospects. As the countryside reeled from the war’s damage and as a famine struck in 1946-1947, many rural citizens turned to their traditional reaction to crisis and fled. Countless socially marginal citizens also wandered the country for no reason in particular. As Mark Edele argues, nomadism was a feature of Soviet society from the 1930s into the early 1950s; their itinerancy thus continued trends established long before the war.[ii]
Source: Kristy Ironside in Peripheral Histories
On the Postcolonial and the Universal ?
It all comes down to translation and the translatability that Kwasi Wiredu talks about. There is no universal language of enunciation. Paraphrasing Umberto Eco who famously said that the language of Europe is translation, it could be said more globally that the language of the universal is translation. To acknowledge that is to abandon the assumption that the exploration of a supposed universal grammar of the Logos needs to be conducted in the silence of the empirical languages that humans actually speak, while some of them, the European ones, especially ancient Greek and German according to Heidegger, can appear as its realization, in some respect. Maurice Merleau-Ponty is one of the first philosophers to have articulated this notion of translation as the task of caring, in a postcolonial world, for the universal. He insisted on the importance of a tiny piece by Husserl insisting that it be included in the collection of his works. That piece is a simple letter that Husserl wrote to Lucien Levy-Bruhl, dated March 11, 1935, as a reaction to his reading of the ethnologist’s Primitive Mythology, published that same year. What makes that letter so important according to Merleau-Ponty is that Husserl admits in it that the philosopher could not have immediate access to the universal by reflection only, that he could not do without the ethnological experience of the diverse or construct the meaning of other experiences and cultures by simply varying, in the imaginary, his own experiences. [18] In a word, there is not an already constituted universality, with the stability of a telos overlooking, from its own self assured exemplarity, anthropological proliferation and fluctuation (Levinas’ saraband of innumerable cultures). 1935: the same year as the Vienna lecture.
Merleau-Ponty has formulated for the postcolonial world the task of caring for an universal of translation: The universal is not any more the prerogative of a language, it is to be experimented and maybe ‘acquired’ through the lateral process of translation. The postcolonial universal, the non imperial universal is precisely that: lateral. Merleau-Ponty establishes an important distinction between the two figures of universality in the following terms: “the equipment of our social being can be dismantled and reconstructed by the voyage, as we are able to learn to speak other languages. This provides a second way to the universal: no longer the overarching universal of a strictly objective method, but a sort of lateral universal which we acquire through ethnological experience and its incessant testing of the self through the other person and the other person through the self. It is question of constructing a general system of reference in which the point of view of the native, the point of view of the civilized man, and the mistaken views each has of the other can all find a place—that is of constituting a more comprehensive experience which becomes in principle accessible to men of a different time and country.” [19]
It is important, and this will be my final remark, to note that if lateral universal is to be considered as translation, that does not mean transparency and identification. On the contrary this is incessant testing, says Merleau-Ponty and the co-presence of many different views, in addition to the “mistaken views about each other” are clear indication that the task cannot be to aim at a universal grammar or to an operation of reduction to the same. The open ended process of translation that lateral universal requires, because my point of departure is the language that I speak which is one among many, demands that we avoid both fragmentation and reduction to the One. That way of caring about the universal in a world liberated from the assumption of a universal grammar and the narrative of a unique telos is the Chaos-monde we have to deal with to end with a concept of Edouard Glissant.
Source: Souleymane Bachir Diagne in Cairn Info
Carpintería insólita II, 2022
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