Daniel Immerwahr

I found one who said, the screw thread is a simple device, but it ties together the whole mechanical skeleton of our civilization.

Which, on the one hand, seems overblown, but you're like, is it wrong?

I don't know that it's wrong.

And that little thing, the screw thread, is such a potent, hard to notice, but nevertheless deeply consequential symbol of the way in which the United States has remade the world or the world has had to remake itself to accommodate the United States.

When I had grown up, I had known Hoover to be the president who oversaw the Depression.

And I just thought, well, he must have been wildly incompetent.

And, you know, sure, maybe he wasn't a very good communicator or steward of the country's economic fortunes, but he was a really good bureaucrat.

And he was...

deeply invested, I mean, actually sort of ideologically obsessed with standardization.

I mean, at a time when, you know, the economy was not the most stable thing and workers were fighting with factory owners and sometimes that was getting quite violent.

You could be on one side of that and you could support the unions.

You could be on another side of that.

You could be for the bosses.

And Herbert Hoover was like, no, no, no, no, no.

No, everyone's screwing this up because we can actually just get a much more efficient economy and squeeze much more juice from the lemon

If we just make the objects more efficient.

So it's what a weird technocratic strategy, but like, he's like, oh, like all of these arguments are just about slight profit margins and we can get far larger ones if we can get everything to be more efficient.

And the way to do that is to just draw manufacturers into a room and get them to agree to do things the same way.

Because once that happens, everything speeds up and all the friction in the economy goes away.

That was his big, big calling.