How Vienna produced ideas that shaped the West | Hacker News Reader

How Vienna produced ideas that shaped the West

economist.com

157 pointsmastazi92 comments

"Vienna was the heart of an Austro-Hungarian empire of about 53m people that stretched from Innsbruck in the west almost as far as the Black Sea in the east. After 1867 the empire was divided into two: a Magyar-dominated Hungary, ruled from Budapest, and a heterogeneous, multi-ethnic, multilingual other half, ruled from Vienna."

In all fairness the Magyar-dominated Hungary could be attributed the same attributes, it was multi-ethnic and multilingual, especially in the suburban areas of the kingdom.

Ethnic map from 1910 [1] shows it pretty well (Croatia and Slavonia were left out from the picture).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Hungary#/media/File...

The major difference was that the Hungarians implemented a politics of Magyarization which was one of the main reasons for what happened for them at Trianon. From the wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magyarization#Magyarization_in...):

> The policies of Magyarization aimed to have a Hungarian language surname as a requirement for access to basic government services such as local administration, education, and justice. (...) Between 1850 and 1910 the ethnic Hungarian population increased by 106.7%, while the increase of other ethnic groups was far slower: Serbians and Croatians 38.2%, Romanians 31.4% and Slovaks 10.7%.[38]

This is an oversimplification. Trianon set the borders with neither the interest on ethnicity, nor the wishes of their inhabitants. Cities were cut in half (e.g Komarom and Komarno), families became separated, there are people who had 5 different citizenship without leaving their villages. After the WW1, there were only two census (Balassagyarmat and Sopron, both had to fight for this right, with weapons), both voted to stay in Hungary.

For the diversity of the key positions, you can check the list of barons and counts:

https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magyar_b%C3%A1r%C3%B3i_csal%C3... https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magyar_gr%C3%B3fi_csal%C3%A1do... List of Jewish nobles: http://mek.oszk.hu/04000/04093/html/szocikk/13568.htm

One of the most powerful family was the (possibily Croatian) Grassalkovich which once had the duke title as well.

I don't deny there was an ethnic tension which hadn't been resolved. But this was a 100 years after the Ottomans were defeated after 300 years of permanent war that drastically changed the ethnic demographic. Check the Balkans and see how big the issue was.

There was also an underlying religious divide that was barely solved in the last decades before their downfall: Orthodox, especially Romanians, were almost completely excluded from political life. You list actually serves as a counter argument to your own point from this regard since I could barely find any Romanian names on that list (no "escu" as in Popescu or Ionescu for example).

And that was for 3 million out of 20 million in the Kingdom of Hungary.

Trianon was a simple solution to a complex issue but the fact that the borders have been kept despite more wars kind of points to the fact that they were a decent compromise (and also kind of emphasizes the amplitude of the harm done by the previous "historical" borders).

True, there was not much Wallachian (Romanian, that time) names, but Wallachian was one of the many ethnicities. The old word oláh (“vlach”) was used not just for Wallachians, but Cumans as well. In the wikimedia list you might find “Radó” (Radu in Romanian), which was one of the oldest noble family in the Hungarian Transylvania.

You are right, the religion, common values and culture mattered more than ethnicity. This is quite a standard among the nations, Wallachia and Moldavia was no exception. There were not much tatar, cuman, bolgar or pecheneg among the boiars.

You're moving the goal posts.

There were 3 million Wallachians in Hungary (15-20% of the total population) at the time and barely a handful of Wallachian nobles in Hungary. Meanwhile in Wallachia and Moldova Tatars, Bulgarians were just a handful, most likely less than 1%. Cumans and Pechenegs were long assimilated in 1800-1900.

My point is that the previous poster was right: magyarization was the downfall of the multiethnic Hungarian state. Hungarian nationalism couldn't accept that >50% of the population in the Kingdom of Hungary wasn't actually Hungarian, they tried to forcefully assimilate groups which had no problems with Hungarian rule as long as they were left alone. The assimilation attempt backfired.

Trianon was a political action with a solid social backing.

The Hungarian nationalism did accept the multi-ethnic Hungary. You possibly know in the 1848 uprising against the Habsburgs was led by 13 generals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_13_Martyrs_of_Arad) you can barely see Hungarian names. The poet's, who wrote and read the proclamation and started the uprising had the family name Petrovich (Petőfi in Hungarian). One of the general was called Josef Bem, Polish. The finance minister was Ferenc Duschek (sounds a Czech to me) and justice minister Sava Vuković (sounds Serbian) in the new government. Yes, there was no Romanian, but neither Cumans, Jassic, Rusins, Saxon, Schwab or Armenian either. In the uprising, prime minister Lajos Batthyány was initiated a negotiation about reforms with Brătianu (https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=VtKypkRfLtUC&pg=PA102&lp...). In fact, Hungarians in the state capital (Budapest) was in minority that time.

I do understand your emotions and as I stated, the matter of ethnic discontent was not handled properly. But try to put this into the context with the rest of the world politics. In such context, the 19th century Hungary seems pretty open-minded to me. Just read the text of the proclamation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_points_of_the_Hungarian_Rev... . It claims equal rights regardless the religion, end of serfdom and general taxation. Too bad the revolution has fallen.

The article mentions “Red Vienna” in only one sentence. But the last 80 years of progressive politics in Vienna was a huge success. Social housing, public transport, social welfare, security, education etc. and therefore the quality of live are exceptional in that city because of progressive politics. https://www.wien.info/en/lifestyle-scene/most-livable-city

As long as you have an influx of other people's money to spend, progressive policies do "exceptional". What the progressive narrative fails to recognise (and actually cares to hide) is that it was a previous huge free market period that allowed to build the pre-conditions that they used.

The "pre-condition" for Austria was being on the loosing side of WW2, after that the economy was only 60% of it's pre-war size.

free markets also require huge amounts of other people's money while they waste resources in competition before a solution is found.

And centrally planned systems don't find a solution to many problems at all (e.g. new low cost innovations). Without competition, there is no incentive to improve the efficiency of anything that meets the bare minimum requirements.

Planned systems are doomed by design. They destroy the information that prices carry and end in self-destruction/collapse. Even communist China knows better than that.

You seem to be confused about the meaning of "other people's money". You see, in a free market, you have voluntary contracts and transactions like in people deciding on how their money is used, put a risk, etc. which is ethically perfect. Progressivists societies, on the contrary, can do nothing without the use of coercion. Then they put their bunch of bureaucrats to vote on how to use the money that they have taken from you at gunpoint.

There is no coercion and no gunpoints because the government in Vienna is elected by the people.

So "elected by 50%+" means absence of coercion?

yes that is how democracy works.

Ah, so minority rights don't matter any more? By your standards even Hitler was democratically elected. That doesn't make his actions moral.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law

Hitler was appointed, not elected.

Coercion is entirely orthogonal to any form of state.

In practice, all forms of state use coercion. Try resisting arrest by the police for a crime you are suspect but didn't commit.

There are much worse examples that polarize much more.

How can individual's rights and possessions be protected without coercion? These are fundamental to any society.

Empirically, when the state is dissolved, it is quickly replaced by equally coercive (or worse) warlords.

You're comically unaware of the tyranny of the majority. Ever heard of Idi Amin?

>ethically perfect

Being a proponent of free markets I would love to see them as not just necessary and useful for some purposes but also as "ethically perfect".

But I can not.

Free markets, based exclusively on voluntary agreements, lack a crucial element to be fair: Equal opportunity.

Extreme inequality of wealth causes extreme inequality of opportunity. This is the core dilemma of free market liberalism.

There is no plausible definition of meritocracy that has a place for inherited wealth. Place of birth isn't very meritocratic either.

We will also have to account for the possibility that luck may play a much bigger role in success than we like to think.

If we want to keep the good parts of free markets and voluntary agreements, we will have to do better than declaring every form of redistribution of wealth to be coercion at gunpoint.

Any alternative to voluntary agreements would inject noise in the feedback that the humans involved can use to improve themselves and, ultimately, the species. You can't have equal opportunity. It's an impossible goal. It can't possibly exist. What should be possible is to have some kind of Fair Opportunity by optimizing it somehow but never equal. You need that constraint loose in the system so it can create wealth. Pursuing equality is only pre-authorize coercion and will converge in totalitarianism (because victimists will always bug you ad-infinitum to achieve their claims of lack of equality).

>You can't have equal opportunity. It's an impossible goal.

I never said we could have completely equal opportunity. But by implication, the outcomes of our voluntary agreements are never perfectly ethical or completely justified.

Redistribution of wealth makes up for the fact that the playing field is never completely level. Rejecting all social processes that lead to peaceful redistribution of wealth or to more equal opportunity is both unpragmatic and unethical.

Also, extreme inequality distorts markets massively. It's much more than just noise. Markets break down completely if too many participants are forced to sell or buy at any price just to survive.

Voluntary agreements are ethical by definition and because they are voluntary.

Curious that you call unethical to voluntary agreements and simultaneously imply that peaceful redistribution of wealth is ethical when you can't do it without coercion which is exactly unethical. Explain how this peaceful redistribution of wealth is any good? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOjvJAfIMSI

> free market

> progressivist societies

Do you realize that in many countries free markets are a progressive thing, and that many right wing parties promote high public expenditure and extensive welfare?

Depending on the semantic stretching yes, you are correct, there are many "right-wing" populist that also do that and use coercion in the same morally problematic way. The point I'm stressing is that some "right-wing" might be for a minimalistic state, while most of the left-wing is all for an all-powerful state

Yes I agree with you that there is a semantic problem (e.g. in the US the adjective "liberal" means "leftie" whereas everywhere else means "in favour of free markets") but that's much less important than the substance so I don't want to focus on words and definitions.

It seems to me that as of 2017 the major threat to free markets comes from protectionism, not from socialism.

The new president of the USA, who is a Republican, has in numerous occasions pledged to follow protectionist policies, and many European right-wing parties, not only in UK, are against the EU single market.

So I would say that centre-right or right-wing politicians who are against free markets are not an edge case any more.

There is no spending but investing. In schools, public transport, social peace. Those investments of the last 80 years come to fruition today for the advantage of everyone.

Before Red Vienna was not huge free market period but a huge lost war, pervasive destruction and a dramatically shrunk country, cut off of his industry (Czech) and agriculture (Hungary).

Before "investing" it got collected by coercion which is immoral. But to follow your hypothesis, can you demonstrate that the output of that "investing" turns out to be ROI positive?

Taxing is not coercion, but a democratic decision to distribute wealth. The return on investment in Vienna's commonwealth is the best quality of living in the world (quality of live is a lot more than private money)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercer_Quality_of_Living_Surve...

Taxing is not coercion Explain how is not coercion that a majority decide democratically to take all your money, leave you absolutely nothing, in the street, send SWAT to your house if you resist and shoot you if you offer any active resistance? PS: also you didn't demonstrate your previous claim has any chance to be ROI positive. Can you do that?

They do not take all of the circulating money (That would be nonsense because the circle would stop) but in Austria approx. 42%. Since national economy is a circle that money is not lost as an expense but is again invested in the economy and is coming back. ROI is a term of business administration and not national economy and therefore not applicable to the economies of Cities.

They don't take all the money, I'm showing you the absurd case so you can explain why would be moral any sub case of it. Can you explain that? So you first start talking that "spending other people's money" is not spending but "investing", I think spending is spending and not "investing" but trying to follow your reasoning I ask for its ROI, then you fail to show that its ROI is positive and then, "because is a city" not show any other alternative that shows that your "investing" has any chance to provide a positive ROI to the people you've taken that money from (at gunpoint). Explain how your immoral "investing" is "good"?

The world is not binary. Between 0 Tax and 100% Tax is a lot. National economy is something completely different than business economy. The main difference is the tax cycle in national economy. A simplified example: If the city of Vienna spends 1 Euro in buying trams, this Euro goes to the company Siemens in Vienna building those. Siemens employs a Viennese worker getting this money. 42 Cent of this invested Euro comes back to the city as tax. And a small part of the new tram. And a better public transport because of this new tram. And a new company settling in Vienna because of it's superior transport system. And another part of the 1 EUR comes back again as tax of this new company. If clever done this cycle does not stop.

Asking for ROI of Vienna's infrastructure investments is as absurd as asking how much tax did a business get back from his investments.

That does not answer my specific questions

As I explained your question is absurd.

It probably doesn't mention the "red vienna", because "the last 80 years of progressive politics" have not much to do with the idea-producing that went on before?

"Red vienna" is a byproduct of that cultural climate prior to 1914. After World War 2 there might have been some isolated blurbs of Vienna's former greatness but even those are just the crumbs of what collectivism and anti-semitism started to grind down before Hitler undid it completely (and long lastingly) when he marched into his home country.

Successful at making them irrelevant in a global economy perhaps. What major innovations and technology are coming out of Vienna now? The best case seems to be that tourism stays busy enough to keep the taxes flowing in to sustain the entitlement programs.

is there any other country with less than 10M people and no natural resources which is more relevant than Austria in the global economy?

Possibly Switzerland, but not by much.

Denmark?

Hong Kong?

One could argue that having on of the world's best ports near the world's #2 economy counts as a natural resource :)

There are so many obvious counterexamples to your claim as others have pointed out. Mongolia was and is a tiny nation but had one of the largest empires the world has ever seen.

The best level of living in the world is the best innovation I can think of.

"You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

-- Orson Welles' monologue in The Third Man. Which was set in post-war Vienna.

But didn't 'Red Vienna' lead to a blue(rightwing) Austria?

Considering the red wonderland painted here in the comments, the strong shift to the right of the rest of the country suddenly makes sense. We shouldn't forget that an alliance of ALL Austrian parties, including the consevatives, were barely able to defeat the right wing candidate.

I see no relation from Red Vienna to right wing. Rising of right wing is a global emergence now. In Vienna the right wing candidate had a massive debacle in the last election.

The rise of the Austrian right wing predates the 'global emergence' by quite a bit. And you can probably connect it to 'Red Vienna' although not directly as a response to progressive policies.

Correlation is not causation :)

The Austrian right is far more popular in the countryside than the cities - which is not a new thing, non-urban areas have historically been more right-leaning.

It's the same problem we continue to see in other countries - progressive cities and conservative regions.

That said, because progressives have been so successful in Austria, even the right wing is very socialist in some ways. It's just that they want all those benefits for Austrians only.

>It's just that they want all those benefits for Austrians only.

Interesting - can you elaborate on that?

National Socialism is by definition Socialism.

Unfortunately the right is also popular among former voters of the social democrats in urban areas.

For those of you that enjoy pre-1800 European History, I highly suggest picking up a copy of Europa Universalis 4 on Steam. Wonderful strategy game that ends up teaching you an awful lot about history from 1444-1821

This may reveal my age/lack thereof, but Europa Universalis 3 is what originally sparked my interest in history and also programming. It's a game that allows you to explore 'what if' scenarios in a fairly historically accurate context. It's by no means a simulator, but it does a great job of making the era feel right.

It got me into coding due to my curiosity with exactly those 'what if's. The vast majority of the game data is easily editable, and the dev console is great. Some of my first coding projects were just mods for EU3, which revealed to me that there's really nothing special that goes into making software if 13-year old me could do it.

Highly recommended.

Great suggestion! Of course, if you want to go back even further, you can pick up Crusader Kings 2 with the Charlemagne expansion, and start all the way from the year 769.

1913: When Hitler, Trotsky, Tito, Freud and Stalin all lived in the same place

Not mentioned, bust also:

- Ludwig Boltzmann, the father of statistical mechanics.

- Richard Reti, the author of hypermodern "Reti Opening" in chess.

Nor Kurt Gödel

This. Most other figures from the article will be remembered in history books. But Gödel's results will be remembered and learned for as long as people do mathematics.

- Eric Voegelin, austro-american philosopher, one of the greatest of the century.

- Otto Maria Carpeaux, austro-brazilian essayist, literature and music critic, one of the few intelligent voices in the second half of the century in Brazil.

Also Peter Drucker (at least he was from Vienna originally).

A former boss had shared this inspiring article (by Drucker) with our team in a company where I worked:

[ My Life as a Knowledge Worker:

http://www.inc.com/magazine/19960515/2083.html

"The leading management thinker describes seven personal experiences that taught him how to grow, to change, and to age--without becoming a prisoner of the past." ]

Joseph Schumpeter, economist, is also mentioned in that article, in an interesting anecdote or two.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Drucker

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Schumpeter

I've read some of Drucker's books and like them. Very pragmatic.

The BBC recently broadcast a three-part series on Vienna for those interested. Unfortunately, it's only available to watch for those in the UK:

Vienna: Empire, Dynasty and Dream

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p046dkrd

Obligatory Karl Kraus describing Vienna as an "experimental station for world destruction".

Let humanity fester and "sperm is in the air" (Zweig). I'd move to the next one in a heart-beat.

Where is the modern Vienna?

Still doing great [on the Quality of Life Index].

Online Start-Up wise quite good. There is VC money, grants, tech talent, meetups and the will to try new things.

But los of overall creativity still stifled by bureaucracy, mediocracy and latent rassism.

Also we have something called SVA and "Sozialpartnerschaft" which hurts a lot. The one takes most of young founders money, the other makes sure the curtent old-white-male elite stays in place.

SVA has also an superior service and is not more expensive than other health insurances. Sozialpartnerschaft ensures balanced politics and is a foundation of Austrias post war success.

Franze, it seems you are short sighted. The Sozialparterschaft currently helps to keep the startup cargo cult in check which primarily seeks to create work for three years just to be swallowed by a bigger company, most of the time because the startup was getting a nuisance and not because it created substantual value. The Sozialpartnerschaft also guaranteed many years of slow but steady growth and the culture of belonging and equality many countries in the world search for.

It's because of such short-sighted longings like dooming the Sozialparterschaft why values like equality and solidarity are increasingly falling to peaces, reduced workforce protection, going ill to the job etc.

You are right that one state social security system would probably be enough instead of more than a dozen.

I'm on of those "young founders" here and have zero issues with the SVA. They take at most 20k/y from you for health care and pension, and I'm fine with that. And just because you don't want to pay your potential employees a living wage (which are low in the IT collective bargaining contracts) doesn't mean the Sozialpartnerschaft is bad. On the contrary, it keeps those stary eyed "young founders" from fucking over the people that help build their potential future fortune.

This sort of sentiment explains why socialist Europe will never be able to build successful companies like Google/FB.

Or maybe they're building smaller, useful, and profitable companies and don't need to be the next Google or Facebook?

Can you elaborate more on what "SVA and "Sozialpartnerschaft" is? My cursory English search isn't bearing much fruit. Cheers.

Take it with a grain of salt, but it has been ranked first for six consecutive years in the Mercer Quality of Living Survey.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercer_Quality_of_Living_Surve...

What's the grain of salt?

As in, the place where the ideas and ideologies of tomorrow are born? What we're looking then for is a place where intellectuals and free thinkers go to meet. Certainly SF makes a good case, but it's mostly about business as far as I can tell. NY or London are multicultural enough, but I don't hear much out of either, possibly because the high rent force people away from creative endeavors. Berlin has a lot of art and radical political movements, but the latter seem mostly like the aftershocks of yesterday's battles and the former rarely matter that much. Does anything happen in Paris these days? Beijing/Shenzhen would be somewhat safe bets were it not for the repressiveness of the Chinese political system. India is still worrying about nutrition and toilets, but maybe Mumbai is worth considering?

It's hard to tell, really. These things can only really be seen in hindsight.

I don't disagree, but would add for anyone reading this who's drawn to ponder the question further that a city's artistic/intellectual energies cannot flourish without a cost of living affordable on "creative" salaries. Prague was the cool place for a while because of that.

Vienna ideas didn't shape anything in particular. They were just standing on the shoulders of the giants. The west was shaped by the thousands years of European's history and wars.

And not only Christian Europe, but also the centuries of work by Muslim scholars all over the Middle East and Asia.

I don't think that statement is true.

Muslim scientists contributed to many fields, including philosophy[1], astronomy[2], medicine[3], mathematics[4], and chemistry[5]. It was very common for scholars to make contributions in multiple fields, so you'll see a lot of repetition.

One of the key contributions that in my opinion influenced the Renaissance greatly was the work by numerous Muslim translators on the translation of Greek works to Arabic. In the process, many of the works of the great Greek thinkers and philosophers were preserved for future scholars. Also, Muslim scholars were responsible for bringing works from the East (China, India, etc.) back to Baghdad, making them more accessible to the West.

Arabic was so widely used that it was the lingua franca for most of science for a period of time (~12th century). European scholars who wanted to learn more about the latest discoveries and inventions had to learn Arabic at one of the large learning centers (Baghdad, Damascus, Granada, among others). Sicily[6] was another place where East and West combined for the sake of learning.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Muslim_philosophers

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Muslim_astronomers

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Muslim_doctors?wprov=s...

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics_in_medieval_Islam?...

[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemy_and_chemistry_in_medie...

[6]: http://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/197806/muslim.sicily.ht...

I don't mean to lessen the output of muslim scholars, but if their contribution was so significant, then why did the renaissance blossom in Florence, instead of a ME center, e.g. Baghdad? I don't think that preserving existing knowledge is a huge contribution, given there would be no need of preserving without the muslim conquest. And what happened to muslim science since their golden age?

Please see my other comment in this thread. And who said that Muslims scientists only preserved knowledge? I just listed a number of fields that Muslims significantly contributed by the way.

The Islamic world peaked in the 15th century, then began to slowly decline. The current lack of output from Muslim scientists is in my opinion primarily due to petty internal religious conflict, poor unity due to conflicting interests, the colonisation of most of the larger Muslim countries which led to them skipping the more critical periods of scientific development and education, the lack of interest in innovation, and the lack of freedom to innovate because of perceived religious contradictions.

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