Comment on When did humans stop creating wonders?
HeHoXa@lemmy.zip 6 days ago
I’d think the reason we stopped engaging in national scale single focus construction projects is that nations that relied on national scale conscripted labor didn’t prosper as well as ones that didn’t.
*Note: I don’t pretend to be educated enough to actually back this up, nor do I have any underlying political point. Just thinking with my thumbs.
HK65@sopuli.xyz 6 days ago
Flevoland was a national scale pseudo conscript construction project on the scale of the Great Wall. Bit more useful though.
The Dutch in the 70s oil crisis told all their freshly unemployed people to grab a shovel or they don’t get unemployment, and now their country is a tenth bigger.
HeHoXa@lemmy.zip 6 days ago
Yeah, I’m not sure it really holds up. I initially wanted to say “slave labor”, but that gets tricky compared to chattel slavery, which mostly was not what built the wonders.
I’m surprised to learn just now that the conscription rates compared to population are much lower than I would have thought, 1.5-2.5% during pyramids area, just double modern US military service.
But the mortality rates performing the labor are 100x modern US military service, which helps my point about it being slavey.