An Aesthetic World Relies on Cheap Labor
An ending of beautiful things as we know them
I recently visited the Biltmore Estates in North Carolina. It struck me that this was a literal castle of the gilded age; The Vanderbilts were pure American royalty in all but name.
But what struck me most was the sheer craftsmanship and quality of the main home. There was incredible stonemasonry and glasswork all around it, above it, and underneath it, for a 175,000 square foot home built in the late 1800s. The home itself was stuffed with priceless artifacts, like pottery from the emperor of China 500 years ago. Workers have their bags checked by security to leave the building.
It also struck me that the Biltmore simply could not be built today. Vanderbilt had an entire train line built for the sole purpose of hauling materials to the remote build site in the Carolina hills. He had over 1,000 workers working on building it; many of them he had trained by specialists – many were also recently freed slaves.
It is often lamented that things are not what they used to be.
A milkman doesn’t deliver a carton of milk to your house for a quarter anymore, the cars are no longer made of polished heavy steel, and the new washing machine no longer lasts 20 years.
What we’ve had over the last 50 years is a kind of qualitative and aesthetic hollowing-out. Many things have gotten incredibly cheaper, but their quality is often worse, their aesthetic is usually cheapened.
At the same time, our civilization has somehow managed to meet the industrial demands of a global population more than doubling to nearly 8 billion people from 4 billion people in that same time span.
We have had to content with improving people’s quality of life, while keeping costs low.
This is, perhaps, one of the most important untold stories of the Biltmore, and many of the unbelievable aesthetic monuments of old Europe: they relied on cheap labor.
On the tour, they kept bragging about how all the laborers were paid. Mind you, construction started decades after slavery ended, and in a northern Union state. Regardless, the pay, adjusted for 2024 dollar value, was $84 a day for the most skilled stonemason. It was $24 per day for the less skilled laborer.
And that’s the crux of what I’m getting at. The aesthetic beauty of the old world was built on incredibly cheap labor, with the expectation for a low quality of life for the common person. A skilled stonemason hand-chiseling limestone back then was making much less than a high-schooler McDonalds cashier makes today in real dollars.
This was one of the big post-WW2 changes; Quality of life began to improve significantly for most people, and expectations for what life could be began to change.
For a while, goods were handmade or done with some manual labor in America. Eventually the need to reduce labor costs to reach wider markets forced an increase an automation and an outsourcing overseas.
I think this removal from putting our hands on the goods we ourselves were selling was a factor in the reduced aesthetic quality of modern goods. When you’re putting your handiwork into something, you want it to look good. You might’ve ensured tighter tolerances, or had feedback to higher-ups in the company. This feedback loop is disconnected during outsourcing.
Quality reduction didn’t end there though; companies still wanted to increase the bottom line, so we witnessed an endless reduction of parts quality. Wherever something could be replaced with plastic or a cheaper metal, it often was.
There’s also the aspect here that all the easiest-to-access raw materials from the natural world that have been closest to manufacturing sites and distribution centers have been mined out. Miners are needing to travel to further mine sites, dig deeper, ship further, and refine more, adding more costs to better raw materials along the way.
So we’ve got a big old plastic world, and everyone is stuck complaining that everything breaks all the time and looks cheap and plain.
There’s something happening that might turn this around, but I suspect it won’t be the same as what people are hoping for.
Manufacturing is returning to U.S. shores; investment in domestic manufacturing is the highest it’s been in half a century. Quality of life in China is improving and it’s no longer economical to outsource manufacturing there.
This reshoring isn’t going to look like it did a half-century ago though. This manufacturing will be entirely automated and robotic. In a sense, it is a final cost reduction; it will be cheaper to manufacture domestically and skip the global shipping costs.
There’s another interesting thing happening within this: The automation of beauty. There’s a company called Monumental Labs creating robots to automatically carve stone pillars and statues in the same style of those from ancient Greece and Rome.
Part of the magic of these stone statues for me was that whoever made them, had to work on them and with them intimately for months or even years. When a machine is doing all of that, that magic is missing. Yet, there’s no denying that beauty in our surrounding environment affects us, no matter its source.
Regardless, I’d like to think it is possible we will see an aesthetic and qualitative renaissance in our lifetimes. Perhaps beauty will be everywhere, yet automated.
After all, the old world has always relied on cheap labor; the full automation of beauty is a final realization of that reliance, without sacrificing an aesthetic attribute of the old world, or relying on an underpaid worker chiseling at a stone who could have more impact elsewhere.