[HN Gopher] Age of Invention: How the Dutch Did It Better
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Age of Invention: How the Dutch Did It Better
Author : tim_sw
Score : 71 points
Date : 2023-04-07 15:24 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (antonhowes.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (antonhowes.substack.com)
| steele wrote:
| A little known fact of going Dutch history: splitting the bill
| several ways should merit extraordinary tips in places where
| tipping is a necessary component to service worker income.
| Etheryte wrote:
| Tipping is not a thing in the Netherlands, where are you
| getting this idea from? By and large the people who tip are
| tourists who are not familiar with the local customs.
| jtwaleson wrote:
| I always tip 10%-15%. Lived here all my life :')
| tremon wrote:
| _" where tipping is a necessary component to service worker
| income"_ is not part of Dutch history FAFAIK.
| tabtab wrote:
| Something _else_ the Dutch did right.
| WJW wrote:
| We pay our waiting staff a normal salary, tipping is not a
| major thing here.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| (This is a joke about "going dutch", an American colloquialism
| for splitting the bill, that pretends like it would offer
| insight into the origin of the term, but then doesn't)
| sirpilade wrote:
| we might see a similar situation with cryptocurrency-friendly
| countries in the near future
| crote wrote:
| You should probably read up on the Tulip Mania, just to stay on
| topic about the effect of a relevant Dutch invention.
| tabtab wrote:
| Sometimes deregulation is a great recipe for short-term growth,
| but catastrophic crashes. You can surf chaos for profit for
| only so long.
| rajandatta wrote:
| Points 2, 3, 4, 6 .. 13 seem like an excellent set of principles
| and fundamentals for a society or country even today. Verg well
| said. Also helps that the author contrasts them with England.
| Most countries would not meet these standards even today.
| pipo234 wrote:
| > The Dutch councils of state and war always included merchants
| who had experience of trading and living abroad [...]
|
| As eloquently described by Mike Dash in "Batavia's Graveyard"
| most Dutch explorer ships had merchants, sailors, soldiers and
| civilians on board -- ranked in that order. That is, not the
| captain but the bean counter would have final say on important
| matters.
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/128824.Batavia_s_Graveya...
| beebeepka wrote:
| I am not ashamed to say that I am jealous of the Dutch.
| Sometimes I wonder what built the society that is powering this
| genuinely incredible country.
|
| Thanks for the link
| pipo234 wrote:
| The book is in't in Dutch, though. ;-) Incredibly well
| written, historically accurate (for as far I could tell) and
| entertaining to read. Warm recommend.
| melvinmelih wrote:
| > It has been estimated that during the 17th and 18th
| centuries, 660,000 to 1,135,000 enslaved people in total must
| have been transported to the territories under control of the
| Dutch East India Company.
|
| I wouldn't necessarily romanticize the exploitative
| colonialism of European explorers.
| [deleted]
| spyremeown wrote:
| Even more so when the current economic prosperity of the
| colonizing countries is still very much derived from their
| past. Sadly, most people living in said countries today
| don't realize how set back the colonies really were due to
| exploitation and slavery.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "Even more so when the current economic prosperity of the
| colonizing countries is still very much derived from
| their past."
|
| This does not pass the comparison test. Many highly
| prosperous European countries of today (Scandinavian
| countries, Northern Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Germany,
| Slovenia, Ireland) didn't have massive overseas holdings,
| or only for a short time.
|
| Portugal, Spain, Turkey and Russia, four huge empires
| that existed for centuries (one still extant) are on the
| poorer side of Europe. PT and ES got only moderately
| prosperous in the last two generations, after shedding
| their last colonial possessions.
| spyremeown wrote:
| >poorer side of Europe
|
| Which is still much, much wealthier than most of
| colonized nations... except for Russia, due to the
| extreme political decline after the fall of the USSR.
|
| >Many highly prosperous European countries of today
| didn't have massive overseas holdings, or only for a
| short time.
|
| And I never said "colonies are needed for wealth". What
| is your point, exactly?
| hahaxdxd123 wrote:
| > And I never said "colonies are needed for wealth". What
| is your point, exactly?
|
| I think the point is that it's not this simple: "Even
| more so when the current economic prosperity of the
| colonizing countries is still very much derived from
| their past."
|
| Poor countries that were colonized are definitely held
| back by it. The colonial powers left extremely extractive
| institutions that focused on funneling power and profits
| into small groups of people. When they left, those
| institutions and that culture stayed.
|
| But isn't it difficult to say that Spain or Portugal's
| "wealth" today derives from colonial holdings years and
| years back? What did they extract that lasts today? In
| those 400 years, did they not spend most of their
| extracted silver and gold on things that are trivialities
| today (porcelain, tea, etc)? Or waste it buying arms
| during civil wars and dictatorships? I mean there was
| mass starvation during Franco's regime.
|
| It seems to me likelier that their wealth comes from the
| things they have in common with prosperous countries that
| never were colonial powers (Taiwan, South Korea, etc).
| Educated populace, functioning capital markets, property
| rights, rule of law, etc.
| SanderNL wrote:
| I'm curious. What is so incredible about it?
| jacquesm wrote:
| That by rights this country shouldn't exist, and that if we
| aren't careful soon it will stop to exist.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| By rights it should exist because the Dutch made it so.
| They have done so for hundreds of years in a period when
| the sea level was rising slightly and will most likely
| continue to do so, especially seeing how as modern
| technology makes it much easier to keep the polders
| (reclaimed land) dry.
| namaria wrote:
| It certainly is an energy and compute intensive country
| and it shows. I mean, they are the sole providers of the
| top machinery for making arguably the most valuable
| commodity ever, microchips. And the second exporter of
| agricultural products with an area similar to Maine to
| boot...
| jeremyw wrote:
| Any recommended material to learn about fragility in the
| Dutch system?
|
| You've made a number of comments in this vein. Do you see
| it as apart from the cycle of the successful? Wherein we
| slowly relax the effort is took to make success. And then
| deny these efforts altogether, and create fantasies of
| what _really_ brought success.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I'm writing this from ~sea level, and there are large
| parts of the country around me that are below sea level,
| some more than just a little bit, think 2 to 3 meters and
| in extremes more than 6. As the sea level rises the risk
| of storm surges increases quite a bit. We have
| essentially barricaded the country against the sea up to
| a certain point. But beyond that the country would flood
| much like a bathtub would and even if all those barriers
| are closed the rivers will pour in water from the other
| side.
|
| Managing all this is tricky in the short term, difficult
| in the mid term and quite possibly impossible in the
| longer term if the sea level rise is more than
| anticipated when these defenses were built. And you can
| only raise them so much, if rivers no longer flow out
| then you'll end up flooded anyway.
| WJW wrote:
| I think jacquesm means that rising sea levels (due to
| climate change) is a particular problem for a country
| where much of the land is below sea level.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yep.
| withinboredom wrote:
| I moved here in 2018, it truly is an incredible country.
| Imagine the romanticized '60's-70's in the US ... but with
| technology.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| There was quite a lot of genocide that it was built upon:
| https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/10/dutch-colonial-
| history-...
| boplicity wrote:
| Interesting that the article, subtitled "A refusal to
| confront colonial atrocities persists in the Netherlands,"
| lead to you getting downvotes.
|
| Coincidence? I think not.
|
| The so-called "civilizing mission" continues to this day,
| with glorification of Dutch ideas and ideals, even though
| those ideals indeed led to mass atrocities. Such atrocities
| were often cited as "necessary," in order to impose
| "improvement" upon the victims society.
|
| This "civilizing mission" is often seen as worth it -- it
| includes many good ideas, after all. Even to this day, the
| respect for "civlizing" ideas remains, while the
| acknowledging of mass atrocities is often ignored, or
| covered up. Even worse, many of the people who committed
| atrocities are thought of as heroes.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The same kind of sentiment goes for all of the colonial
| powers of old, it's a real problem. Some part of society
| finds it impossible to admit that they are where they are
| today because of crimes from the past. The Germans are
| the only country that I'm aware of that have successfully
| absorbed lessons from their history, but at the same time
| not _all_ Germans and not all of history. This is a huge
| problem and is likely going to be the root cause of some
| of these lessons having to be learned all over again.
|
| Today there is human trafficking and slavery in pretty
| much every country on the globe, just more or less of it.
| And yet, nobody really lifts a finger to the point where
| we will be able to once and for all ban this out.
|
| Reparation payments, which would be one way to deal with
| all this (because obviously you can't undo history) are
| opposed because the people that live here today do not
| see themselves as complicit even if they are the
| beneficiaries. Hardly any Western European country has
| clean hands, and I highly doubt we will ever be able to
| move on from this in a way that satisfies everybody.
| WJW wrote:
| It's much more complex than that of course. First of all
| it is practically impossible to determine what percentage
| of Dutch prosperity is due to slave trade, how much of it
| was due to income from selling natural gas and how much
| came from the Dutch people being clever merchants and
| light-bulb-builders and chip-machine-designers and
| whatnot. Not to mention that putting a definite price on
| the enslavement of your ancestors is likely to be pretty
| insulting. "Sorry we enslaved your great-grandfather,
| here is 5000 euros and let's call it even" is probably
| not going over well, even if that was the inflation-
| adjusted profit realized.
|
| Secondly of all the damage to local institutions we've
| done has often caused corruption to be normalized so much
| that reparations payments would merely enrich the ruling
| elite further. We can't just send over a few billion to
| soothe our conscience and hope everything will be OK.
| It's not really like everyone in the victim countries
| were innocent either, many tribes were all to happy to
| sell some of their rival to the westerners.
|
| Not everyone has documentation to prove anything either,
| precisely _because_ their ancestors were slaves.
|
| Finally, how far are we going back? Do the Dutch have the
| right to claim reparations from German occupation? From
| Napoleonic occupation? From the descendants of the
| Romans?
|
| I don't dispute that there is a debt of honor to help
| everyone on earth towards a more prosperous state, but
| reparation payments have so many issues that they might
| create more problems than they solve.
| boplicity wrote:
| > Finally, how far are we going back?
|
| This is such an ignorant question. It completely _erases_
| the living people who are victims of colonialism _right
| now._ But whatever, apparently there were also atrocities
| hundreds of years ago that we can ignore too.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > It completely erases the living people
|
| In what way are they erased?
| paganel wrote:
| Of course you're getting downvoted for stating out the
| truth related to a colonial and criminal country. But, hey,
| the Dutch are funky and cool!
| crote wrote:
| That's what history is like, unfortunately. And it is
| probably what the future is going to be like too.
|
| The Dutch Republic itself, as it existed in the 1600s, was
| created out of an extremely bloody revolution against the
| Spanish (the Eighty Years' War) - in which the Spanish
| committed quite a bit of genocide against Dutch cities too.
| Look into the Spanish Fury at Mechelen, for example.
| Despite being the recent victims of it, they went on to
| commit similar acts only decades later.
|
| Genocide has been _extremely_ common in pretty much all of
| history, and it is only quite recently that _most_
| societies have at least been pretending to be explicitly
| against it. We should definitely remember the atrocities
| that have been committed, but thinking of it as an explicit
| "victim vs villain" on a country-per-country base doesn't
| really help with that.
|
| Pretty much every single country has committed atrocities,
| and pretty much every single country is able to commit them
| in the future. We in the Western world pretend to be all
| modern and civilized, but recent history in the Middle East
| has shown that we haven't learned a goddamn thing. Pulling
| down statues at home of long-dead oppressors isn't going to
| do shit if we just keep on committing the same crimes _in
| the present_ without even batting an eye.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, there was a lot of that. Our colonial history is
| nothing to be proud of. But Dutch engineering prowess _is_
| something to be proud of. The whole country is essentially
| a giant machine and if we collectively stopped maintaining
| it within a surprisingly short time large chunks of it
| would cease to exist.
| dekhn wrote:
| I've told lots of people the US should get prepared to
| pay the dutch to build the Great Atlantic and Pacific
| Seawalls. We should probably get started soon...
| jacquesm wrote:
| A decade ago or so... it's going to get terribly
| interesting in the next 20 years.
| skrebbel wrote:
| This is because they weren't explorer ships. They were trading
| ships first and foremost, owned by a large public for-profit
| corporation. It's more like Maersk than like a navy.
|
| Exploration, or conquest, was not a goal. If it happened, it
| was just a means to an end.
|
| Thing is, trade is the most profitable when you get monopoly
| contracts with suppliers, especially when those suppliers are
| the only (known) suppliers of $THING. How do you get a monopoly
| contract? You make the supplier an offer they can't refuse. All
| that fighting and fort building was only to enforce monopoly
| contracts, not empire building. Basically, to make sure the
| Portuguese didn't get their hands on those spices, so the price
| could stay high.
|
| Sometimes suppliers broke those deals and the Dutch took out
| the guns, and that's what the soldiers came along for. Eg in
| the Travancore battles linked in another comment. They lost
| that one, but often they did not: For example, one day the
| people of the Banda islands, then the only source of nutmeg in
| the world, broke the monopoly deal they had made with the Dutch
| and sold nutmeg to the British too. The Dutch went in fully
| loaded, killed everybody (the entire archipelago population),
| and replaced them with Dutch settlers to farm the nutmeg.
| Problem solved, monopoly restored! No hard feelings, it's just
| business.
|
| So yes! I concur! There's just so much to learn from the Dutch
| East India Company! Who cares about all the genocide, we even
| have a VC fund[0] named after them, that's how proud we are.
|
| [0] https://voccp.com/
| jahantaila wrote:
| learn how to code in a fun and engaging way: codera.app
| sn41 wrote:
| A little known fact of history: there was an Indian kingdom,
| Travancore, which defeated the Dutch in a naval battle in 1741
| [1]. (This might be the only major naval victory of an Asian
| kingdom over European navies until the Russo-Japanese war of
| 1905.) The Dutch never recovered, and did not colonize India.
|
| The king of Travancore then used the captured Dutch commander,
| Eustachius De Lannoy, to modernize the armed forces [2].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Colachel
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eustachius_De_Lannoy
| Someone wrote:
| Are you sure that was a naval battle?
|
| Reading Wikipedia ("The Mukkuvars Played a major role in
| defeating the Dutch East India company entering into colachal
| port", "As the Dutch approached the shore, the Travancore army
| had made a retreat, and the locals fled the area. It was not
| enough for the Dutch to bombard a place and then barge in. To
| continue the war they required fortifications, trenches, and
| make-shift sheds and storerooms.", "On 5 August, a cannonball
| fired by the Travancore army fell into a barrel of gunpowder
| inside the Dutch garrison"), it looks like a failed invasion.
| umeshunni wrote:
| Yeah - most sources (e.g. https://books.google.com/books?id=o
| NekDAAAQBAJ&pg=PT183#v=on...) state it simply as a battle and
| the victory as a 'decisive victory' rather than a 'naval
| victory'.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Fun fact, the De Lannoys share their surname with the Delanos,
| as in Franklin Delano Roosevelt (although not the only
| presidents related to that family, and the original Delano is
| not related to the nobility)
| azepoi wrote:
| Delannoy is a relatively common name from northern France,
| Lannoy is a commune, or more commonly a place (modern french
| l'aulnaie) planted with aulnes (Alders). Same meaning,
| different graphy, for Delaunay, as in Delaunay triangulation.
| d_burfoot wrote:
| The modern equivalent of the Netherlands is Singapore. SG has
| better public policies, in every area, than any Western country.
| As a result they are much richer, have far less crime, better
| education, incomparably better infrastructure, better health
| care, etc, etc.
|
| Countries by PPP per capita (131K vs 75K for US):
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...
|
| Countries by homicide rate (0.2 vs 6.5 in US):
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
|
| PISA rankings by country (SG tops all categories, far above US):
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...
|
| Life expectancy by country (83 yrs vs 77 for US):
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...
|
| Countries ranked by infrastructure quality (SG tops):
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/264753/ranking-of-countr...
| axlee wrote:
| Singapore is a city, let's not pretend we can compare it with
| countries proper. If you compare it with affluent cities, it's
| great but not as great as the stats would say. And when it
| comes to governance, let's not forget that Singapore is a
| dictatorship.
| riversflow wrote:
| I'd rather not live in a police state, and I think I speak for
| many Americans when I say that. Singapore can kind of get away
| with it because it is so small, but we can see what it looks
| like when scaled to a large country by looking at Modern China.
| I'll take some crime and something less than stellar education,
| as a national average, than have to contend with a government
| who welds people in their apartments, creates "reeducation
| camps" for minorities, and disappears business leaders.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Has Singapore government evwr welded people on their
| apsrtments? What is thw basis for this comparison?
|
| Why would providing better education in America lead to
| people being welded into their apartment? Is freedom only
| possible with incompetwnt governance?
| detourdog wrote:
| In college I had a friend from Singapore. After graduation he
| felt his plight was that he wasn't an American and he was no
| longer Singaporesse<sp?>. He was unable to land a job in
| America and had to go back to Singapore. He was sad.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| > Encouragement for inventors of new products, techniques, and
| import trades, who received rewards from the state, and not just
| temporary monopoly patents.
|
| I think we should explore this one. It's better to solve a
| problem permanently than to create an industry around solving it
| temporarily. I'd happily pay into a fund that rewards people for
| doing so if it meant fewer subscription-type relationships and
| more now-I'll-never-have-that-problem-ever-again moments.
| contingencies wrote:
| We've tried using the state and other authorities as the
| arbiter of value. It hasn't turned out so well.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| It hasn't? Who decides where to build highways? The state
| does. How do they decide? By judging where they provide
| value.
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(page generated 2023-04-07 23:00 UTC)