it’s a corporate leader demanding the labor and not, you know, a farmer
Its Kropotkin and a guy with an Ivy League MBA arguing over the pyramids actually being built, so I get the sense that this is more in retrospect than real time.
But it’s much more accurate to say that the rhetorical justification for the construction project was the will of the previous pharaoh and their status as a deity.
Like a lot of EC work, its a very naive and superficial take on a philosophical conversation. The relative success of Egypt as an early empire came in no small part from the economic cycles that these large construction projects produced. Egyptians could buffer against agricultural sector downturn by hording farm produce in the bulk periods and paying it out again in the lean periods. The Pharaohs became a cult of personality used to justify why they had control over the surplus and the benefits of surplus labor. But the system of pyramid building was useful in so far as it established economic incentives to do a kind of proto-Keynesian economics while other nation-states were at the whim of feast and famine.
The system endured for multiple millennia as a result. And it feels a bit shortsighted to wave that off as MBA bullshit by using a naive Kropotkin on one side and a smug anonymous MBA on the other. FFS, they could at least have used Milton Friedman or Gary Becker as the stand in.
EC isn't infallible, far from it, but I really think you're taking the comic too literally. The pyramid here is a stand-in for "Bullshit Jobs" in the sense of labor that ultimately isn't oriented towards an end that helps society (because it's a giant gravestone). It's more about the wasted labor in corporate spaces towards accomplishing something the workers give zero shits about intrinsically.
It's like, uh, that play Rhinoceros where the phenomenon of people turning into Rhinoceroses is a stand in for the growth of fascism, or Waiting for Godot where the titular Godot is a metaphor for . . . uh . . . well, something like "a silver bullet for existential problems" that the cast have pinned their hopes on but need to learn to navigate without.
Its Kropotkin and a guy with an Ivy League MBA arguing over the pyramids actually being built, so I get the sense that this is more in retrospect than real time.
Like a lot of EC work, its a very naive and superficial take on a philosophical conversation. The relative success of Egypt as an early empire came in no small part from the economic cycles that these large construction projects produced. Egyptians could buffer against agricultural sector downturn by hording farm produce in the bulk periods and paying it out again in the lean periods. The Pharaohs became a cult of personality used to justify why they had control over the surplus and the benefits of surplus labor. But the system of pyramid building was useful in so far as it established economic incentives to do a kind of proto-Keynesian economics while other nation-states were at the whim of feast and famine.
The system endured for multiple millennia as a result. And it feels a bit shortsighted to wave that off as MBA bullshit by using a naive Kropotkin on one side and a smug anonymous MBA on the other. FFS, they could at least have used Milton Friedman or Gary Becker as the stand in.
EC isn't infallible, far from it, but I really think you're taking the comic too literally. The pyramid here is a stand-in for "Bullshit Jobs" in the sense of labor that ultimately isn't oriented towards an end that helps society (because it's a giant gravestone). It's more about the wasted labor in corporate spaces towards accomplishing something the workers give zero shits about intrinsically.
It's like, uh, that play Rhinoceros where the phenomenon of people turning into Rhinoceroses is a stand in for the growth of fascism, or Waiting for Godot where the titular Godot is a metaphor for . . . uh . . . well, something like "a silver bullet for existential problems" that the cast have pinned their hopes on but need to learn to navigate without.
I mean... probably. The ahistorical nature of the take rubs me the wromg way, even if it is purely metaphorical.
I saw that play and I was not impressed.