Slashdot Mirror
New Explanation For the Industrial Revolution
Pcol writes "The New York Times is running a story on Dr. Gregory Clark's book 'A Farewell to Alms,' which offers a new explanation for the Industrial Revolution and the affluence it created. Dr. Clark, an economic historian at the University of California Davis, postulates that the surge in economic growth that occurred first in England around 1800 came about because of the strange new behaviors of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours, and a willingness to save. Clark's research shows that between 1200 and 1800, the rich had more surviving children than the poor and that he postulates that this caused constant downward social mobility as the poor failed to reproduce themselves and the progeny of the rich took over their occupations. 'The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages,' Clark concludes. Work hours increased, literacy and numeracy rose, and the level of interpersonal violence dropped. Around 1790, a steady upward trend in production efficiency caused a significant acceleration in the rate of productivity growth that at last made possible England's escape from the Malthusian trap."
It's hardly coincidental that coffee and tea caught on in Europe just as the first factories were bringing in the industrial revolution.
/.'er wouldn't exist.
The widespread use of caffeinated drinks helped transform human economies from farm to factory. Boiling water helped decrease disease among city workers. And caffeine kept them from falling asleep over the machinery.
In a sense, caffeine is the drug that made the modern world possible. And the more modern our world gets, the more we seem to need it. Without that useful jolt of coffee--or Diet Coke or Red Bull--to get us out of bed and back to work, the world of the average
Finally I understand why I'm always running out of food in my kitchen...
www.purevolume.com/martyd
And now, as evidenced by intro of "Idiocracy", we have a trend in other direction...
One that hath name thou can not otter
In lots of societies, the rich reproduce faster than the poor. A counter example would be societies with polygamy. In that case, many men can't marry because the rich have all the women. Those single men don't reproduce at all. By TFA's logic, those societies should have outstripped us long ago.
Try again dude.
I can see how one may come to his conclusion. It is certainly not unreasonable. I do have another thought that is in line with this thinking.
Would the better literacy and general education not yield more technology which would result in increased production? Sure longer working hours contribute, but generally speaking, if you have more educated people, you have more people thinking constructively. I tend to think that the longer hours were a not large contribution, but rather, what people were able to do in those hours was the bigger issue. So really, the better education allowed people to develop ways to produce more by changing how the labor did something instead of just doing something for longer.
Just a thought really, I hope that came through as I intended.
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
A falling boat lifts all tides.
It's odd that Clark says that institutional change had nothing to do with it. So there was no point in Adam Smith back in 1776 writing the Wealth of Nations arguing that the laws should be changed to promote capitalism? Or what about China, which did poorly under Maoism but since then has enjoyed remarkable growth under a more capitalist set of laws?
"Thrift, prudence, negotiation and hard work were becoming values for communities that previously had been spendthrift, impulsive, violent and leisure loving," Dr. Clark writes.
And so what happens when the reverse hits a culture, and easy credit replaces thrift, prudence, negotiation, and hard work?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
If he is correct in his hypothesis then we're in trouble. If the article post last week about Smart Teens having less sex can be extrapolated to adults then we should see the opposite happen in the US. It already felt like the general populace of the USA is getting dumber this just seems to confirm my suspicions.
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed H
The poor are now having more surviving children than the rich. So are we now going to go back to the middle ages?
I am sure all the stuff the British Empire stole from Americas, India, China had nothing to do with their prosperity and development.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Take a look at the high breeders in your country.... them that start at age 12 and keep popping them out until death or menopause (whichever comes first). Even if you live in a so-called first world country, it is more likely that the third-world element of that country is a growing % of the population. Give it another generation or two and pretty much any first world country has a third-world future.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I could see how a class system in place, and the working class dieing at a higher rate, could support his theory of natural selection help the economic growth. The wealth moved downwards, which in turn turned raised the overall economy. We see this when the working classes started to buy more creating more of a demand and thus the start of the industrial revolution.
And he hits it on the head when he shows how China and Japan didn't have the same factors until much later. China is pushing to create a modernization push at the expense of the health, thus the supporting his 'germ' argument that can still stifle the lower class. (Of course, the new black death could be aids, which china is starting to have issues with the new high level of prostitution and drug use) so it will be interesting to see how it works out for them.
While I'd agree that caffeine was a major contributor to the industrial revolution (and for that matter the French revolution)it seems that Inbreeding also helped prove the way for the industrial revolution. If the well off were more likely to have children that survived, who in the heck did they have children with? I'm guessing their caffeine induced hypertensive cousins.
Beer, being boiled water, kept people from disease for centuries (millenia?) before.
:)
I wouldn't want to be operating machinery though.
Just as well I won't be operating any after going to The Great British Beer Festival tomorrow
he's basically barfed up the morlock and eloi, 800 years before rather than 800 years hence. what eugenics bullshit is this? does anyone take it seriously? except for the racists and phrenologists amongst us of course
HG Well's offspring should sue this crackpot for copyright violation. if copyright law is as retarded as it seems to be: no protection expires, they probably have a case. and so maybe some equally retarded asshole 800 years from now will write that it was the copyright holders and intellectual property law that led to the internet and information revolutions of 1950-2350
that idea should seem antithetical to you. just as antithetical as this social darwinist's caste-system-divines-all brainfart
pure aristocratic bullshit
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Actually I'd say the timepiece is responsible in part for the Industrial Revolution.
...that trend has un/fortunately reversed in all first-world countries.
Brilliant idea. Thanks for very interesting article.
Tomasz Gorski
Weather improved after the last big Volcanic explosion at an Asian volcano, and thus food production went up, and that will count for something, along with a switch from alcoholic drinks to minimize bad water quality to coffee and tea as noted by other slashdotters.
General production of more advanced materials started to make a significant difference with cast iron, steel from Bessemer's furnaces in 1850s, and concrete in 1840s and steam engines w/Fulton's steam boat in the first decade of the 1800s, and not the least were steam powered looms just before 1800 which allowed large improvements in cloth and reduction in prices which freed huge numbers of people from subsistence clothing jobs.
Lots of things came together at once to make manual labor less intensive, even with just simple tools.
It's a common misconception that inbreeding is always harmful. Inbreeding extremises traits. If those traits are adaptive, then inbreeding is beneficial. But it's a risky game - it could extremise maladaptive traits too.
It is possible to find societies where the poor out-bred the rich just as it is possible to find societies where the opposite was the case.
The point of the GP was this: you can't blame the Industrial Revolution on the fact that the rich out-bred the poor. There have been many societies where the rich have out-bred the poor and they didn't produce any Industrial Revolutions. In fact, what TFA seems to support is the notion that the rich are superior to the poor. It stinks of Social Darwinism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism (Me stops myself before embarking on full rant mode.)
According to the article, as a result of the rich reproducing more successfully than the poor and replacing the poor in the jobs and communities, says the author, "Thrift, prudence, negotiation and hard work were becoming values for communities that previously had been spendthrift, impulsive, violent and leisure loving,"
In other words, the poor are poor because they are irrational and lazy and passed these values onto their children.
More, he is suggesting not only have these values been passed from rich people in one generation to the next, but in fact that as a result of this period of the rich being overwhelmingly more successful in procreating, rapid biological evolutionary processes have produced genetic advantages in these societies that underscore purely social evolution.
In other words, not only are the poor poor because they are irrational and lazy, but also because their are genetically inferior to their rich masters.
Therefore - and this is suggested later in the article - the reason that today's third world countries have not experienced industrial revolution and modernizations essentially amounts to the following: 1) their peoples are lazy and irrational, and 2) they do not have access to the superior rich genetic lineage that underscored the industrial revolution in England.
Suffice it to say, the primary criticisms of the author's hypotheses by other scientists and historians is the utter lack of convincing and systematic evidence.
Principal: Mr. Madison, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Billy Madison: Okay, a simple "wrong" would've done just fine.
The NYTimes article, not the paper itself, makes this typical leading statement: "For thousands of years, most people on earth lived in abject poverty, first as hunters and gatherers, then as peasants or laborers. But with the Industrial Revolution, some societies traded this ancient poverty for amazing affluence."
...
That is false, at least as far as hunters and gatherers. See, for example:
"The Original Affluent Society" -- by Marshall Sahlins
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html
"Above all. what about the world today? One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an institution. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture. This paradox is my whole point. Hunters and gatherers have by force of circumstances an objectively low standard of living. But taken as their objective, and given their adequate means of production, all the people's material wants usually can be easily satisfied.
The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."
Hunter and gatherers has much more free time than most people today -- and time is also a form of wealth.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
with motivated or socially responsible. Maybe anyway. Just a thought.
Quack, quack.
Sounds fishy to me. As established in many places and times, the poor compensate for infant mortality be fecundity and as things get a little better, they outnumber the rich. I'd need more proof of solid numbers that the absolute numbers of children born to poor is less than the number of children born to the not-poor.
The ideas taking hold, on the other hand, have been noticed before, but I agree with the old-fashioned historians who say religion was responsible for that. The power of the state to enforce religious values all the way from the top to the street created a new culture, even among the poor. The king or government's incentive? A less violent population is less likely to cause problems later. Encourage the idea of non-violence in the poor and turning the other cheek, and you can avoid usurpers rallying an army or peasant-lead revolts. Encourage the ideals of hard-work to get more value of the land you own. Saving money by using the church owned banks.
Eventually, society learns to depend on the state instead of family bonds for their security and to enforce contracts, and you start to see a modern world of high mobility and capital flow (you no longer HAD to marry the miller's daughter to get the miller to invest in your factory).
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
They are responsbile.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
That's not all. On average, people carry between 5 and 10 recessive traits which, if expressed, would kill them. People related to each other are far more likely to have the same recessive traits, which are rarely expressed elsewhere, but often expressed in closely related populations.
I used to carry a bottle of whiskey for snake bite. And two snakes. -Nefarious Wheel
This gives a whole new meaning to "trickle down economics"...
The Industrial revolution was accompanied by untold misery to the world.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
If the lifespan of the average hunter gatherer ended at 2 or 3 decades, I suspect we have gained in the free-time bargain despite our seemingly endless workweek.
'the rich are better people and work harder'... wow. i guess i should throw out 90% of the direct observation i have made of human nature over the course of 30 years of my life. and forget about that whole 'eugenics' thing that caused the deaths of tens of millions of people.
The article presents the choice of either "institutions" or "genetic adaptation" being at the heart of it - yet the book reportedly argues more strongly that there is an evolutionary component than that the evolution is in the medium of genes. If we grant that behavior changed more than institutions did, and furthermore that there was a drift of behaviors evolved for upper-class niches into the lower classes as children of the upper class moved down in society, then we should consider media of behavior which are susceptible to something like evolution, yet which are not genes. One popular at /. is "memes." But memes seem too contagious for the explanation required here, since they don't explain the growing 1st World-3rd World gap, even though 1st World memes can be found in the strangest corners of the 3rd World.
... well ... true? Are there aspects of human character, transmitted through culture and family, which fit the general folk concept of spirits? If there are, it could even turn out that they - like other environmental factors - affect gene expression, and thus alter the balance of the cerebral and hormonal systems in a way which could look superficially like - but not actually be - a rapid evolution in the fundamental genetics.
Another explanation could be one that makes sense in our folk language, but gets zero contemporary respect in academia: spirits. This wouldn't be spirits of the ghost-in-machine sort, but spirits in the same way we still know what it means to talk of the spirit of a city, or a country, or a people; or the difference in spirit between two authors, or two musical performers, or two dancers. It is a truism, of course, to say that the Medieval upper class had "gentler spirits." But could that truism be
If so, then this book would really be about spirits of the upper class fanning out into positions in the rest of a class-based society. That could also account for the British success at colonial administration - that when you took middle class Brits and sent them abroad, they generally had the right attitudes to run things passably well.
There's another implication here: That the spirits of the upper class, when spread through the other classes, lift the whole society in terms of wealth. A society which ennobles everyone should come out far ahead of one which tries to make the mass of people take on the spirits of sheep, herded, unthinking, obedient, and scared of the Musl^H^H^H^Hwolves.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Anyone advocating screwing, for reproductive purposes only (of course), between the rich and/or presumably smart, is AOK in my book: otherwise we'll be overwhelmed by the masses, who screw (and reproduce) just for the hell of it.
Come to think of it, screwing just for the hell of it, is AOK in my book for anyone....
i cant believe all these people who froth at the mouth about the pointless waste of time that 'liberal arts' is will find such interest in posting dozens of comments to a threat about a liberal arts topic. economics is not engineering, history is not engineering... and yet, they seem drawn to it strangely, like a young man first hitting puberty... unable to understand his urges.
For laws to be changed to be more capitalistic people have to become more capitalism-minded.
Maybe China saw a good case for capitalism (the USA). Then after a generation or two the rulers had a new mindset. One that allowed (and even promoted) capitalistic values. And guess what has happened economic growth in China has exploded.
If there are no capitalists in a nation you can change the laws all you want. But people will still highly prefer to trust their income to their employer or to the government.
My friends feel sorry for me because I don't own a house here in New Zealand. What they really mean is that they are mystified as to why I don't feel like very slowly buying a house from my bank, a several hundred dollars a week at a time.
Most of my friends can barely make the interest payments on their debt, yet they continue to urge me to "invest" in property, "before it's too late".
The house I rent costs me NZ$600 per month. It's a very nice place, with a huge yard full of mature trees for my kids to play in.
My friends (and most everybody else in New Zealand) barely seem to keep up with the interest payments on their mortgages, exist permanently in overdraft and seem to spend most of their free time cutting up credit cards.
If they're correct and their debt eventually turns to bags of purest gold, I'll be very happy for them, because they are my friends.
But right now I have no intention of changing my life to suit their ideas. Why take on a massive debt burden, especially when all of the indicators and pundits are suggesting an impending economic downturn?
A large percentage of my salary is saved every week and it's very nice not owing anybody and having money in the bank.
Couples probably had sex just at much back in the mideval times as they do now. When an entrepreneur got a big contract or had a great profit for the year guess what he'd go home and do. Yup, make a baby.
Now, the rich and the capitalists use birth control to limit the number of children they have. After all children are expensive and hurt the bottom line (so to speak). So now, with the advent of birth control, the successful are having less children. And the poor are doing the only thing they can do for free anymore. Have sex and more babies.
If what Dr. Clark (and Darwin) is saying is true, natural selection is promoting the stupid and unsuccessful traits since the successful people are only having a small number of children compared to those who can't afford birth control (or are too stupid to use it).
But in this context, are smaller families good for a nation?
The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages
Everyone would have 2^n ancestors if no one ever interbred, but obviously that's not the case. My guess is that what really happened is enough people married across class, in combination with people choosing important sounding surnames for themselves, to make it appear as if a majority of English have upper class ancestors. A whole lot of people can be descended from royalty; all it takes is one or two horny princes or princesses to spread the royal genes far and wide. The poor people's genes are spread far and wide too, it's just that no one made up any fancy genealogical charts saying they were directly descended from Bob Shaftoe, mud worker in 1329. So all the evidence is selectively chosen to point to the most well known ancestors.
I could be wrong, and maybe they somehow found all the original upper class DNA in a vault somewhere and did a conclusive study to show that most people in England share some of it, but my guess is that their result is just an improper interpretation of the fact that almost everyone is descended from almost everyone else's ancestors if you go back far enough.
its a controversial statement that had very shake evidence to support it, and whole mountains of evidence that do not support it.
Some asian countries have the highest savings rate in the world, and asian culture is some of the most disciplined culture on the planet. This goes against the premise that Euro's progress was genetic. A key factor between England and most asian cultures, however, is the strong ties to elderly authorities in Asia. England's culture was more likely to challenge established authority figures, speeding progress.
Table-ized A.I.
I don't buy this. At all. The methodology of reviewing old wills to glean data of child survival rates, in particular, seems quite specious and misleading.
The decline of interest rates is better explained by a move to urbanization, move to a specie economy, and away from interest measured in bushels of grain and 2 extra chickens in the spring. The Reformation and a move away from Papal decrees against usury had a lot more to do with fractional banking and declining interest rates than sudden "thrift". I just don't buy this at all.
Upper middle class values behind hard work? Or was it just that the only work available was in a dark satanic mill and there were no other options to avoid starvation - save leaving it all behind and heading off to the bogs and wilds of America or Canada where the saving grace was that the slaves had it worse than you did? No way. I'm not buying it - and moreover, I doubt this author has much of an acquaintance with hard physical labor. What - the medieval peasant was a layabout and the industrial middle class was hard-working? Bullshit.
How about this explanation?
England had unique advantages. It had an evolving class system that still made room for urban capitalists and a parliamentary and burroughs system that advanced their interests, relative to those on the Continent. It had significant geopolitical advantages with the English Channel, which allowed it the luxury of developing a superior Navy, and better navigators, explorers - all of which allowed it to increase and exploit merchant shipping - without having to be Napoleon and try to field a massive army at the same time (Which Napoleon, to his credit, almost pulled off).
And how about this?:
England had wrested control of the less immediately valuable land away from the French in 1759, and because it yielded beaver pelts and tabacoco - but no Treasure Ships as Spain's massive holdings supplied - England had to PLAN for Mercantilism to make any of its new holdings worth it in the long run. England's only plan was to make it grow - while Spain's land made it the Superpower of the world for 250 years. England enslaved millions of Africans to work in America - and dumped its own poor and huddled masses in North America, Australia and New Zealand during and thereafter to provide it with more economic breathing room - and Lebenseraum.
I'd say THAT played a far greater role in escaping the Malthusian Trap than the migration of upper middle class values of "hard work". Moreover, a dumping ground for Les Miserables allowed England to progress in its political institutions without the out-and-out class based revolutions, which consumed the energies - and capital - of the French, the Hapsburgs and Prussians. Winning the Napoleonic War and thereby controlling the world and its Oceans for the next 99 years didn't hurt either.
Grand Theories of politic-economic hegemony are hard. I'm interested enough to buy his book - but from the NYT's summation, I don't think this author is collecting the right data, interpreting the data he does collect correctly - or giving plain old dumb-luck geography, technology and institutions their due.
.Robert
What's this? A scholarly explanation of the Industrial Revolution that ignores the influence of the 16th century Christian Reformation on the attitudes and behaviour of people in the Protestant countries of Europe that made the Industrial Revolution possible. Isn't there at least some possibility that the influence of Reformed Christianity may go some way towards explaining the so called "strange behaviour" of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours, and a willingness to save.
And the parent post shows you what happens after going through both.
"Let's face it, it's a good story. Accuracy would kill it."
Dr C.C. Quack, yes, I have heard of him it is reasonable justification (by him) to slaughter the poor/middle class, which would provide more lands for peaceful productive development with a robotics labor-pool, reduce the large population of recidivist criminals, improve the quality of all the survivors, and a much better environment by reducing the main cause of pollution (over population). Expanding the downward mobility policy beyond the middle classes into include the lower and middle-upper classes is a sure fired way to save everything important to humanity [well it will surly save the greedy, wealthy, weak, and stupid for progressive devolution]. With a robotic house servant factory laborer you can even evade taxes and write off robot depreciation. Mexicans can fill the gaps until robotics advancements can take-on the workload for USAll. We may want to keep a few for pool cleaning and weekend adult/child entertainment services.
... genetics in the lower classes of society the world and USAll would be far better off. Next time Bill, George, Hillary remember the purpose of fornication is procreation not greedy selfish pleasure. It is better for you to be pedophiles, then spill your precious seeds upon the ground for a BJ/fudge packing.
I means, it appears to prove that if there were more Chaney, Kennedy, Nixon, Bush, Clinton
Ain't America Wonderful?
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
without debt you will never have nothing. when i have paid off my mortgage i'll be sitting pretty while you will still be poring youre money down the drain on rent. if i sell before i have paid my mortgage off then i will make a profit and can use the moeny to pay off the mortgage and by a better house. i can keep doing that until i own a hell of a house or maybe a bunch of them and you will _still_ be paying rent with nothing to show for it. thats why renters are loosers. i can rent my houses out to suckers like you who will be paying off my mortgage for me while i live it up. see now you no why youre friends feel sorry for you.
I think Max Weber's attribution of the rise of Protestantism bridges the gap between the author's belief and yours.
forget it.
Clark's research shows that between 1200 and 1800, the rich had more surviving children than the poor
Well professor if you look at statistics from ANY time period, for ANY country in the world, the rich ALWAYS have more surviving children than the poor. Lack of squalor, better access to sanitation and the best available medical facilities is something the rich have always had over the "have not"'s.
Also I'm surprised that an "economics historian" thinks you can "save" your way into an economic boom. Perhaps he also thinks he can "save" enough to retire a millionaire. Yeah good luck with that. Let's totally disregard the fact that the industrial revolution meant that the same or less quantity of workers could produce more, higher quality, and standardized products. Maximizing available resources (time being an important one) and reducing waste. THIS is where the economic growth came from.
Why should I read this document if dear Dr. Crank doesn't even realize this?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
What it really stinks of is a disturbing lack of evidence. It reminds me of the kind of bunk we used to come up with after we'd had a half a bottle of rum and thought we were super-bright prognosticators. The difference was we would sober up and realize we were talking bunk.
The Industrial Revolution's roots are reasonably well known. After a series of a few centuries of upheaval starting with the plagues and ending with the Golden Revolution (which ended the final bouts of disunity and civil unrest that had plagued England since the Civil War), England found itself in possession of an enormous global empire, a upwardly mobile population and attracting some of the brighter minds of Europe. Advances in agriculture saw the country liberated from having to maintain a substantial labor pool, which pretty much assured that the first industrialists had a lot of cheap labor to utilize.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Nice academic babble from that guy, but the historical record shows us something else. The broadest segments of the population rose up against the aristocracy, and that new wealth and recklessness allowed the industrial revolution.
This focus on the external, denying the inner world, is what defines modern society. We conquered nature with the internal combustion engine, the assembly line, interchangeable parts, and now digital electronics. We assume that humans act like these devices as well. We assume that democracy, individual freedoms, humanism, and material comfort will make us into ideal people like metal poured into a mold, stamped and assembled by machines. Yet machines do not have personality or the different mental abilities that define human individuals.
Our society judges us not by who we are, but by what roles we play. It rewards not higher behavior but obedience and conformity, and a willingness to respond in Pavlovian twitches to the rewards of money and social prestige. This is the false reality created by our theory; it is what our best thinkers call thin or partial intelligence, which is the ability to focus well on details while being ignorant of the system at large.
This system at large cannot be perceived by attention to details, or even context, but can be analyzed by its design: how the whole fits together so that it functions. To look at civilization on the level of design is to see its actual motivations, behind the facade of smiling faces on television or grand speeches full of positive-sounding words like "freedom" and "progress." When we look at design, we see that by denying our inner world, we have made the external world a cloak for corruption at our core.
Read the rest at this anti-globalism site.
Anti-Globalism
...a very lassie-faire government. That's right, the time period in which the government was minimal was also the same time in which an economic boom, actually an economic revolution, took place.
This is why all governments should aim to be as minimalistic as possible. When the free market is allowed to flourish, it can do amazing things to a nation's economy and infrastructure.
Libertas in infinitum
A theory for the industrial revolution is the _other_ thing every economist has.
A wizard did it. C'mon... can't go wrong with magic.
Tell me something...it's still "We, the people"... right?
OK, the guy covers Japan, and sneers about the lack of uppercrust genes making their way downward to the hoi-polloi of Japanese society.
Yet he somehow fails to mention they went from medieval backwater to global Superpower in about the same amount of time it takes a Skyline GTR to go from zero to sixty. Just ask the Russians - they might still have Czars if the Japanese hadn't kicked the crap out of the mighty Russian Imperial Navy, a scant half-century after the Black Ships arrived. They're still a global superpower, in terms of industrial, scientific and economic influence. They were in the "Malthusan Trap" because the nobility liked it that way, and could get away with it until the advent of the steam engine. No other reason.
So, in short, the book's crap, and just another excuse for right-wingers to justify spreading colonialism the globe over, as some sort of natural gift given to them for being better bred than the mud-people.
SoupIsGood Food
then you 'upper crusters' will 'look' helpless too. it is said that the greatest fear of the 'rich' is that the poor will one day rise up & eat them. phewwww.
meanwhile:
better days ahead?
as in payper liesense hypenosys stock markup FraUD felons are on their way out? what a revolutionary concept.
from previous post: many demand corepirate nazi execrable stop abusing US
we the peepoles?
how is it allowed? just like corn passing through a bird's butt eye gas.
all they (the felonious nazi execrable) want is... everything. at what cost to US?
for many of US, the only way out is up.
don't forget, for each of the creators' innocents harmed (in any way) there is a debt that must/will be repaid by you/US as the perpetrators/minions of unprecedented evile will not be available after the big flash occurs.
'vote' with (what's left in) yOUR wallet. help bring an end to unprecedented evile's manifestation through yOUR owned felonious corepirate nazi life0cidal glowbull warmongering execrable.
some of US should consider ourselves very fortunate to be among those scheduled to survive after the big flash/implementation of the creators' wwwildly popular planet/population rescue initiative/mandate.
it's right in the manual, 'world without end', etc....
as we all ?know?, change is inevitable, & denying/ignoring gravity, logic, morality, etc..., is only possible, on a temporary basis.
concern about the course of events that will occur should the corepirate nazi life0cidal execrable fail to be intervened upon is in order.
'do not be dismayed' (also from the manual). however, it's ok/recommended, to not attempt to live under/accept, fauxking nazi felon greed/fear/ego based pr ?firm? scriptdead mindphuking hypenosys.
consult with/trust in yOUR creators. providing more than enough of everything for everyone (without any distracting/spiritdead personal gain motives), whilst badtolling unprecedented evile, using an unlimited supply of newclear power, since/until forever. see you there?
What it really stinks of is a disturbing lack of evidence.
RTFA. Then RTFB when it comes out. A number of experts in the field express reservations about the theory -- especially, the Darwinian elements. But they concede that it is a well-argued and exhaustively documented thesis that answers a question that hasn't been satisfactorily resolved. Which is a surprising sign of progress in the humanities (I note as a humanist). Usually, these kinds of unsettling ideas get greeted with pies in the face.
Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime... -- Machiavelli
Of course, all that free land had nothing to do with the American economic boom, right?
There isn't any mystery about why some countries prosper and others stagnate. It's all about whether the economy is based on individual rights and property rights, or not. Those economies that respect and enforce rights, thrive. Those that do not, stagnate. It happens over and over, with country after country. Even China has started to prosper rapidly in the last few years. What changed? The country started respecting property rights.
I find it pretty hard to believe that there was some sudden evolutionary change in the Chinese brain that affected a billion people overnight.
Imagine the population explosion if India ever introduces decent sanitation.
They *already* are a peoplewulf cluster. India has 1/4 the world population.
Table-ized A.I.
when people are hungry, they compensate with sex
Um, those are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Table-ized A.I.
Of course maybe the world economy will never again falter. Perhaps all the many, many other times that has occurred after a long run of good times were simply unexplainable anomalies. Or, as the GP suggested, experts are warning of a looming economic backslide because they've seen all this happen previously and unlike you have learned the lessons of history. And you know what happens to those who haven't learned those lessons.
If I understand it correctly, this theory is that natural selection in England killed off the lower classes and replaced them with descendants of the upper class from 1200-1800AD. These descendants had new values such as hard-working and thrifty (that the lower classes didn't have), and these new values in the population reached critical mass around 1800 in England--leading to the Industrial Revolution.
I won't bother to try to dispute the details of this theory, but it doesn't seem to explain the prosperity of other nations. Other countries other than England became prosperous "first-world" nations--and not all were populated by English descendants. So the theory appears to have a big stumbling block showing causation, when it seems clear upper-class English descendants could not be responsible for prosperity in other countries.
I like the general theory described in the book Birth of Plenty that it's the following institutions that lead to prosperity: property rights, efficient transportation, fast communication, and one or two others I've forgotten. A society with the right institutions will become wealthy. What I like about this theory is that it helps explain why some modern countries are more prosperous than others--USA/Japan/Europe all are similar in the necessary institutions, while "backwards" societies lack them. And it's usually property rights that modern third-world countries lack since transportation and communications are mostly solved technological issues.
Property rights includes the following: buying and selling of land is "easy" and not unduly restricted; your land and wealth are generally protected from others by the state and its courts; the state is not confiscating your land. In short, basic capitalistic principles (but not necessarily capitalism) where you keep most of what you earn, so that you have incentive to earn more.
My opinion is: the Industrial Revolution of England (and other countries, such as the USA) were primed by advances made during the 1700s--technological advances were required to break out of the Malthusian trap, and some place had to be first. A number of secondary factors led to England being first and becoming so prosperous in the 1800's. I think the existence of colonies as new places for investment and new resources (which are not really considered significant in "Birth of Plenty"), a common law legal system, a general peace (in England itself--foreign wars aren't as big an economic issue--sometimes they can be profitable even), and the encouragement of efficient capital markets are key factors in why England became prosperous first.
However, modern prosperity seems to come down to institutions. To avoid wealth as a nation seems to require active effort to suppress people's natural initiative. Unfortunately, this seems to be fairly easy to do, even unintentionally. As a small example, I'm reminded of a recent article by an African academic begging the West to stop giving them free stuff--it's destroying their economies. And then there are the obvious train wreck economies where the government confiscates foreigner-owned land, etc.
That theory is bullocks, because of nonviolence is a ridiculous explanation for advancement. If this theory did hold true Switzerland would be one of the most advanced places in the world, Now compare this to the United States that has been in countless military conflicts and is significantly more advanced than neutral places.
And Allah will be THE God.
I take great offense at the insinuation that we Shaftoes do not take pride in the contributions of our humbler ancestors.
Signed,
Arnold Q. Shaftoe
The US frontier drew away labor from Great Britain and raised its value to the point that automation became more vital.
Seastead this.
Thanks, Captain Obvious!
Interpersonal violence is on the rise.
Working hours are getting shorter (in some countries).
People are spending like crazy and loaning to cover their asses.
Good education is hard to come by around the world.
So are we headed for a collapse of epic proportions?
One of the significant developments occuring just after 1800 was the high pressure steam engine (Trevithick in the UK and Oliver Evans in the US). The decrease in size and increase in efficiency allowed for many new applications of steam power, notably in transportation - steamboats and railroads. Before 1800, a lot of advances in low cost transportation were being made in the UK, primarily canals and plateways (forerunners of the railroad).
The symptoms you describe are features of such a system. I call it "the winnowing". The inevitable sorting of people into debtors and creditors.
Read up on debt based monetary system and fractional reserve banking.
You can thank Richard Nixon BTW. 15th August 1971 the financial world altered completely. The USA declared bankruptcy and haha, nobody cared or noticed.
The advice you get from parents and grandparents about money is probably wrong, they grew up in a fundamentally different monetary system.
Deleted
The problem with people trying to understand why there was no industrialization in 1100 as opposed to 1800, is that we all tend to take a lot of things for granted that are only true _today_. And miss a lot of real limiting factors.
E.g., earlier they simply needed 90% of the population working in agriculture, so that simply didn't leave enough people to build an industry with. When you realize that the other 10% were the army, clerks, clerics, etc, and a few craftsmen, that was all your population accounted for.
During most of the middle ages, for example, agricultural production was about 2 to 7 grains harvested for every 1 grain planted, which is piss-poor. They had a unit of surface for how much land is needed for a peasant family to subsist on, and support 1/5 of a knight, the "hide". It was 60 to 120 old acres, or 15 to 30 modern acres, or 6 to 12 hectares, depending on fertility. You needed that freaking much land just to feed a family and pay 1/5 of one knight's fee.
(And if you didn't pay that knight, someone else would come who had knights, and take your land and your crops. Getting more craftsmen and less soldiers was just not an option.)
You just couldn't _feed_ a horde of industrial workers earlier. You had a cap on how much population you can feed, and everyone over that limit would just starve. That they died of plagues was just as well, because the alternative was to die of starvation anyway.
Boiling the water wouldn't have solved much, because you'd just have more population to starve instead.
Violence? That was the reason for violence right there too. When people's only choice is to starve or mug someone, they'll mug someone. Well, not always the vulgar robbing one in a dark alley, but also the organized mugging a state by another, a.k.a., warfare. Or raids across the border motivated by just hunger.
You can see what happens when more population survives than you can feed, because that was the Viking invasions. As only the oldest son would inherit the farm, there were a lot of sons kicked on the street with exactly no means of subsistence. And that farm just couldn't feed more than a family, locally or in the city. If not enough people died of disease, that was a lot of population who had to work as mercenaries, guards, or pirates. ("Vikings" was what they called the pirates.)
A lot of people there simply _had_ to raid and loot, because the local economy couldn't support them. It wasn't a fun life. They were dirt-poor desperate people whose whole belongings fit in the small box they sat on when they rowed the longship. They had a choice to die painfully in battle or die slowly of hunger, and they chose the former.
The whole belief in the warlike Aesir gods wasn't as much the cause of violence, but the result of _having_ to be violent to maybe survive a little longer. Damn right you had to believe there's a sense to it all, and that there's some reward awaiting you for that shitty life.
That's really what would have happened if they started being healthier sooner. They'd just have produced more people that the economy can't feed. And they wouldn't have started a great industry, simply because industrial workers need to eat too. If the agriculture doesn't support them, that's it.
That's, of course, one of the factors that armchair historians miss, but it will have to do as an example. The industrial revolution didn't start earlier, simply because a lot of things weren't there to support that kind of a society. You can't go and say, basically, "oh, I know, it's because they didn't boil water" or "oh, I know, it's because they were too bigotted and violent", when other things (e.g., agricultural production) weren't there to support larger urban populations anyway.
Other surrealistic ideas I see thrown around, some even in the summary, include that somehow it took a culture change to get people to work long hours rather than stay poor (they worked long hours earlier too) or that only now they realized they should save money t
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
A very interesting read. However, in a lot of the Western world it now seems the reverse is happening population-wise - that rich, or at least upper middle class upwards, people are having fewer children, if any, and poorer, or at least lower class people, are having more. Not that there is the abject poverty as widespread as during the revolution, but there is still a clear class divide.
Will this cause the reverse effect, as society struggles to cope with such a change in demographics, and we will end up with a society spending more to maintain itself, and less able to innovate?
Not only do the lucky debt-free bastards with savings not have interest payments, but they also earn interest on their money.
I thought buying a house was the smartest thing I could do and everybody agreed but man, I'm not so certain now. The costs are crippling, as you pointed out.
The bank owns me now. Before I could strut in and start making demands from them because they'd been looking after my money for years. I had a ton of savings for a young guy like me and a great job and income. Then I bought this fucking house and it just seems as if I won the anti-lotto or something.
No way can I go out like I used to. No more junkfood. (Which is probably a good thing, but still!) I haven't bought a DVD or CD in ages and can't afford a decent broadband connection. I'm wearing the same shitty freebie t-shirts I got from the last Novell seminar I attended.
Every dime I earn goes into the mortgage and it is hard to keep up. The interest seems to increase daily and the county and taxes are like fucking werewolves on the roof.
A buddy I used to kid about being a dumbass for not buying property buys me lunch whenever we catch up. He just bought himself a really nice new home theater system and a new PC and it didn't really make a dent in his savings at all. I'd say the interest he's earning would cover it.
My advice to anybody thinking of buying --- think long and hard before doing it. I'm not saying it's a mistake, but it's not as easy as people are saying it is and don't expect to live the way you did when you were renting. Unless you have a rich family, you will be totally committed financially for a long time.
Bruno.
What we see around the world today is that the poor have higher fertility than the rich for the following reasons.
1. The rich have lots of entertainment to choose from. For the poor, sex is a form of entertainment.
2. The poor in expectation of lower life expectancy and higher child mortality tend to over compensate by producing more children. Remember we are talking about fertility here.
3. The rich men are generally afraid of their children who more than the poor tend to usurp parent's property. So to reduce the chances, rich folks have fewer children.
4. Rich countries today have lower fertility than poor countries. India, China, Bangladesh, etc have much higher fertility rates than rich countries whose population is actually reducing.
O this learning! What a thing it is - William Shakespeare
In the original TV show Connections, Burke explained the factors that made the Industrial Revolution come about. I don't fully remember the details, but they go something like this:
First off, the wealthy classes in those days would never think of touching with a ten foot pole something as dirty and common as industry, God forbid, not even as administrators. They where the gentlemanly class, game for a spot of hunting, exploration of the colonies, all those so-called noble pursuits of the day, and the year before, and the century before that, etcetera.
And then, in the eighteenth century, a new type of class suddenly burst into the scene, the industrious christians. Led by their pastors, organizing in the anonymity of small towns well away from London, they founded their own schools with (gasp!) chemistry classes, mechanical workshops, etc, all those things considered gauche by the upper crust. By developing technical skills from childhood, the new christian young men were poised to take a hands-on approach to managing the production of goods that were to come out of their shops and factories.
Why did the new christian breed choose to remain in the backwaters of England, instead of moving to London, an ideal hub as well as target market? Because in the backwaters were the fast-flowing rivers that powered the textile mills. Now, water wheels were not terribly effective, but they were the best one could do in the day. It should come as no surprise that James Watt, who perfected the steam engine (which came out of efforts to pump water out of mines) to the point of making it applicable to industry, was one of these new christians, with a protestant work ethic, hard working, frugal and pious, yet curiously oblivious to the morality of exploiting their fellow men, women and children with incredibly long hours in deplorable and dangerous conditions, for very little pay.
Well, when the christian goods began to hit London, then overseas, money started moving about in ways and paths it had never moved in before. Commerce was way up, creating a new affluent class of citizen, which spent it's newfound money buying the latest mass-produced gadgets being churned out, and on the money-go-round went. And so, there was a boom of new, upwardly mobile manifestations of middle class: 1) producers (in the backwaters), 2) traders (who were also...), 3) consumers. And of course, one new manifestation of the lower class.
But let's overlook that annoying last "irritant", shall we?
There was still the major problem of cost, transporting the goods from the backwaters to the big city and the ports. Many of the goods arrived damaged due to the bump and grind of the deplorable roads. But by now, everybody who was anybody wanted to help this gravy train chug along, and what was done was simple and elegant: the british waterways, a network of canals crisscrossing England, where barges with tons of merchandise were towed by horses. Nothing breaking along the way because of bad roads, just a smooth ride on water.
And on it went, outwards and upwards, until the country was also crisscrossed by train tracks.
I skipped a few steps, might have gotten some the details wrong, but that's the general idea, or how I understood it, anyway.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
One of them missed the first wave and now can't afford to buy anything at the inflated prices of the hot economy so are telling themselves and everybody else that "things just cannot go on as they are and will crash soon" and then they'll get in to pick up the pieces Real Cheap.
The other group is in major hock from spending sprees and telling themselves and everybody else that "things are just gonna keep getting better and better" and eventually they'll sell at a huge profit and then all that debt was worth it, you'll see.
I don't know which is correct, but from what I've read and seen, nothing to do with the economy and finance ever goes up without coming down again. Still, there's always a first time for everything.
Kia ora bros!
Now I don't know how things are done in the USA but here in little ol' NZ the property market has gone absolutely apeshit in the last five years and every man and his dog is buying houses all over the show. Some people on relatively low incomes borrow 100% - that is buy with no deposit at all - and they're buying houses in the NZ$400k + range. How in the heck are they expecting to pay that off and if a major market correction ever occurs, followed by a recession, they may well face layoffs. What happens when you owe, say, NZ$300k on a house that may now be barely even worth that (and you've already paid the bank NZ$100k) and noone is interested in buying even at the lower price and you've lost your job, with no new prospects in sight?
I asked a few people at work that question and they scoffed at the suggestion of such a scenario ever happening, yet I clearly recall a lot of the very same thing occuring after the 1987 sharemarket crash. It really could happen and back then property was cheaper compared to incomes. Real New Zealand incomes haven't increased bugger all since the late 1990s (yes, that's adjusting for all known factors!) but house prices have gone through the roof. People owe so damn much nowadays so I can't see how a lot of them will survive if we get a repeat of '87 and the lean years afterwards.
I'm not saying it will happen. I certainly don't hope it will happen, since I too owe a shitload of money. But it could happen again and I doubt that many people are in a particularly good position to survive such a thing. Just my NZC0.02.
'The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages,' I just love that quote. No wonder many of the chav's and pikey's over here in the UK think they have a right to scrounge off society and not work. I feel it's reversing, with the middle-classes working all hours God sends, and the poor getting free hand-outs. How come they all seem to have the latest trendy trainers (sneakers), mobiles and satellite TV when they don't work? I thought these were luxury items if you are on a budget?
First off. I've never heard that we needed a 'new' explanation for the industrial revolution. Secondly, while elitism drove many MANY a nation I don't see were the guy realistically correlates with a need to switch over to an industrialized economy or why the spoiled wealthy kids would be more productive workers. I think he skipped the entire rational part of this 'theory'. While, it could be true, so could many more supported theories. I think the question is being asked out of context. As if the industrial revolution was truly a revolution and it wasn't. It was just one of thousands or millions of phases of human technological advacement, much like the information age. The fact that this 'revolution' change the topography of the workplace from a home setting to a factory settings. Well, with the advent of factories and a new found source of jobs I don't see why you need this profound explanation for what amounts to nothing more than a technological advancement.
Here we are now during the information 'revolution' and I don't see this same need for a sociological explanation of standard technological advances. Look at other profound advances such as navigation, evolution, or the scientific method and how they changed the culture, yet we don't attribute sociological reasonings for why they happened. Technology may be stifled at times by culture, but I don't think we can say the culture caused these technological advances. They may have worked in conjunction with them rather than fighting against them, but that's not their origin.
Just as man could have invented the internet decades ago many of our technological bursts sit in waiting for funding and mass appeal to realize they are highly useful. If the wealthy elite had realized earlier they could use industry to control the world they would have invested sooner, but they were stuck in colonization mode and hundreds of years of war.
Even if this guy is right, he is still taking attributes of the industrial revolution and saying they, not the revolution itself caused economic gain, but what's that suggesting. An economic boom came out of nowhere and just coincidentally happened in parallel with the largest move to factory labor in those times. riiight. I think we can look at developing nations and see that moving over to an industrialized economy brings with it economic gain, but especially in markets that have room still to benefit from those gains. In the days of UK's industrial revolution the results of being the first nation switching over to much increased production rates must given the UK an enormous edge.
However, taking into account their social state before that you could say many other nations could have benefited more such as China or India because their labor markets are so much larger. I don't see how you can attribute the advances of technology on generalized sociological happenings. I think that's what they do when they can't pinpoint the origins of an invention, such as religion. Oh, well it happened because of a state of mind. Well, I doubt that. More likely it happened because of one or a few events in parallel and a handful of intelligent people who more or less started a new business/technology trend with undeniable results. The technologies were already but, someone still had to put together the new business model and once that happens as we can see today the basic free market principles take over. Either the competition adapts or get monopolized by the new process or model. Why deny the perfection of supply and demand. The industrial revolution happened for the same reason almost every major event in history has happened. MONEY ! It's was a profitable endeavor, not a sociological coincidence.
there is certainly a lot of debate as to why the industrial revolution occurred where and when it did.
theories come along all the time, but imho none of them really come close to replacing or contributing much to the basic reasons as i see them i.e.
the growth in demand for, and the ability to produce cotton was the driving force behind the industrial revolution;
obviously new technology had appeared e.g. steam engine, spinning jenny, power looms etc which helped a lot, and the abundant waterways in the north allowed for transport and a source of power(waterwheels and then steam).
also, good local wool made available the needed warp, but most of all the damp environment in the north of england, meant that the cotton stretched a bit in the machines and lessened the stress that was placed on them. the large amounts of free flowing cash floating around london and its social clubs didn't harm matters at all.
its always worth remembering that the huge british navy was more than able to enforce an artificial monopoly over any alternatives to english cotton that appeared around the world; a good example being the superior indian calicos. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calico_(textile)
FFS this guy is about 100 years behind the curve.
http://www.mises.org/
You bring an insightful point, but there are two problems with it, so let's deal with the more obvious one first: you can't have a steam-powered thresher, or a steam-powered anything, without inventing steam power first. They just didn't have that earlier, so it's silly to look for other explanations like "maybe they were lazy" or "maybe they needed caffeine".
It may seem like a simple idea, but it took a huge time to have all the pieces in place even for the most primitive ones.
E.g., Watt's machine didn't use steam to _push_ a piston. It just filled a cylinder with hot steam at room temperature, sealed it, let the steam cool down, at which point its temperature would drop and _suck_ the piston in. (Or rather the higher air pressure outside would push it in.) It was a very weak and slow engine.
But even for that you first needed stuff like a gasket that seals well enough, or low enough tollerances for the piston and tube so the outside air doesn't flow right in.
It wasn't trivial at all to make something like that in the middle ages. Medieval canons, for example, left a huge empty space around the canonball (sometimes up to an inch) rather than even try to get a neat tight fit. As late as the mid-1800, it was easier to make the Minnie ball (first practical rifled bullet for mass army use) just expand its base to engage the rifling than to even try to have it made exactly the right caliber.
Plus you needed theoretical concepts that they just didn't have yet, such as air pressure. Unless you know about air pressure, and that it's greater than zero, you can't come up with the idea to use it to push a piston in.
So basically there's a damn good reason right there why the industrial revolution didn't happen earlier: they just didn't have the technology yet.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"For example science feeds into medical science, which is sustained by trade of knowledge and materials, which also helps engineering. etc. etc."
Reminds me of that PBS show "Connections".
I didn't say they were useless. Far from it. I'm just saying that even that was damn high-tech for the time. So take that as praise, not as putting it down.
Since the whole claim in TFA is that, you know, it's just some culture changes that finally made the industrial revolution possible, I'm saying here: technology had something to do with it too. You couldn't start the steam-powered industrial revolution earlier, because the technology and knowledge were missing to invent a steam engine. If you tried to invent that in the middle ages, there'll be entirely too many pieces of technology missing that it relied on.
Basically technology is like a castle of cards. You can't build the top until you have the lower parts ready. For each invention, there were tens of other inventions and advances which had to be made first.
Hence it's silly to find explanations like "because they started boiling water" or "because they finally got off their butts and started working long hours", when earlier the foundation just wasn't there. That's all I'm saying.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
How 'bout this - The hillsides of England, Wales, and lowland Scotland became the home for many dissenters, non-Anglicans and non-Catholics, whose Calvanistic philosophies required that they make something better of themselves and entered into the textile market at precisely the right time to take over control from Flanders where the monks had dominated the industry for centuries. With the help of money from dissenter investors like Lloyds, they were able to finance and build small empires just waiting for another dissenter, James Watt, to come up with a steam engine design that would allow them to move the whole thing down into the cities. Then combine that with the assembly line idea (also from another dissenter), and BOOM!
The point of this is that *incentive* is a major factor and the nobility in England never had any incentive to do anything, and the upper middle classes of England were colonial financers and traders, empire builders managing the monopoly of shipping they effectively bought from Holland when they offered them the crown of England in 1688. The British East India Trading Company used to be the *Dutch* East India Trading Company. These people were still making tons off of raw supplies through the Caribbean sugar plantations and trade with America (in spite of losing the monopoly there) and were starting their trade empires with South Africa, India, and China. They had no need to manufacture goods in England - it was cheaper to buy them.
The dissenters of England, who had next to no rights at all EXCEPT when it came to money, property and inheritance, and driven by a religious work-ethic never seen before, were the ones who created the revolution. They're the ones who *needed* to create it because they had no way otherwise of getting into the rich middle class's trading empire.
You don't make a revolution by accident. You make a revolution out of necessity. Either having it or creating it.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Given the fact that UK is pretty ordinary white country when it comes to IQ (don't bother to remind me of British blacks, we're talking about history here), one might expect that all the other white countries (and there are a lot of them) should pass through the same transition in such a mysterious way as to arrive to aproximately to the same result. Not bloody likely.
In short, whoever the hell wrote this book is an idiot, completely ignoring WHO in England actually started the revolution. They may have been middle class at the time of the steam engine, but they got that way through hard work over the previous 120 years building up a textile industry in the hills. And though we might call them middle class by our standards, at the time they were a repressed population, second-class citizens, more lowly than the east-ender Londonite 'cause at least that poor man in London was of the King's faith.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
A decent plow, draft animals to pull the plow, field rotation (though Chinese invented that earlier too), waterwheels for grinding and so on.
Sounds like a very elaborate explanation for why every American is related to a Duke, Marquess, Earl, Viscount, or Baron in Merry Olde England. Now I understand why nobody seems to come from peasant stock...
Probably if it wasnt for the Little Ice age, which crshed the Viking explorers, and a series of medievel palgues, the industrial revolution may have begun a couple centuries earlier.
Did all the poor have wills at the time? I am surprised.
You can't handle the truth.
A culture with deeply incalcated motif of growth and progress is going to by definition cush or absorb all other cultures eventually. Capitalism was the first culture of "economic growth" is good. You could argue that early Christianity and Islam culture of conversion were cultures of growth- but that only applied to religious belief. Both those religions were apposed to banking (lending with interest) which was early captialism. Islam still retains muchof that aversion. Empires like Rome, Persia, Greece and China encouraged political and geographic growth, but not economic growth. Rome collpased under its parasitic explotation of conquered provinces.
I'll probably get flamed for this, but here goes:
It's social Darwinism, plain and simple. I find it ironic that many of the same people who believe so vehemently in the principles of evolution actively work to defeat the same forces of natural selection in their society.
In the pre-industrial revolution society where you had to provide everything for your children or face losing them, it made sense to have no more children than you could afford. You would be constantly broke and your children would have a rough life.
Today it is the poor who are out-reproducing the upper and middle classes. For the upper and middle classes who consider their ability to pay for a good start for their children, the advantages of good daycare, better education (tutoring, piano lessons, college), medical care (braces, contacts) it makes sense to have fewer children. But for the poor, whose children will all get the same minimum-standard subsidized food, medical care, housing, and education, it makes little difference if they have one child or a dozen.
In other words by removing the natural selective pressures on reproduction, we have structured our society to encourage the reproduction of the poor. This should in theory drive the society the opposite way - toward a less educated, less advanced, less successful populace. I believe we are already seeing the beginning of that; but that is strictly a personal observation.
If you look at the way English society was in the 18th century, especially in the Anglican church you can see it as a very class driven society. In the 18th century the general idea of the population was that God knew who was saved and who wasn't and therefore he had already picked those whom He had saved. There was also the notion that He had shown favor to His people with the form of wealth so the poor not only felt was there not a reason to be thrifty but there was no reason to live a moral life.
When the Wesleys and others started preaching to the poor that they could and would be saved by Grace many turned away from raucous lives. Also when John Wesley preached that they should "Gain all they can; Save all they can; Give all they can" it opened up a new idea to many that they can better themselves. Wesley's Sermon #50 talks about his view of bettering the poor which instills the very ideas of what became Middle Class values.
Just another piece of the huge puzzle of 18th century society.
This is just another attack on the real people of the world: another Conservative justification for their belief that only the wealthy and priveleged are real humans, only the rich are loved by God, only the top 2% are intelligent, etc.
In reality, the opposite is true: nothing good in the world has ever been from the wealthy. All the artists of the renaisance came from humble beginnings, all the greatest technological acheivements came from the people doing the work rather than writing the checks.
Also, if you look at the things which make the USA great, all of them came despite opposition from the wealthy. The Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, Civil Rights, and our very freedom itself were all opposed by the wealthy.
And don't even get me started on the Southerners who still celebrate their heritage of being part of the terrorist insurgency against the US government during the Civil War (and some of them even as far back as the Revolutionary War).
The largest problem I have with this group of theories is that it pretty much ignores that there had been a series of technical advances prior to the end of the 17th century which were directly responsible for the Industrial Revolution. The Victorians, like the Enlightenment thinkers before them, tended to think prior generations were a pack of simpering twits, when in fact they were rather ingenious people.
I agree with the overall demographic picture, but think the authors overstate their case.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Yes. Let us return to the good old days of the Robber Barons, free from regulation and unnecessary constraints, when you could make your employees work 18 hours a day for a nickel. The economy was flourishing then because there was little regulation, and no unions, and the smoke that rose from the smoke stacks smelled like money to us from our home in the country. That's the way to prosperity.
Ok, sorry for the long delay, but here's the second problem I see there: a machine is only useful in the right circumstances. There may be times and places where the same machine doesn't even make sense at all.
E.g., since we're talking threshing machines, let's remember that threshing is only one step of it all. It starts with the ploughing.
An acre was defined basically as the area of land that a peasant with one ox can plough in a day, from dawn to dusk. (They worked long hours before the industrial revolution too.) There's also a reason why that was defined not as a square, but as a long rectangle: you lose more time when turning at the end, so you could plough a larger area if it was a narrow strip and you had to turn less often.
So a peasant with one hide of land, at the worst end of the spectrum, would look at 120 days spent on just ploughing that land. Add to that work duties to the seigneur/lord/whatever-you-call-him, and that was more than half a year spent just ploughing. (They used more than one kind of crop, though, so they could sow the early crops and let them grow, while they continued ploughing the land for the later crops.)
Harvesting was also very work intensive. Not only it took a lot of time, but it was time that couldn't overlap with anything else. (E.g., you couldn't harvest some very early crop off field 1 on the same day as you ploughed field 2 for some very late crop.) And again you had some more days in between when you were required to work for the seigneur.
I mention the overlap, although maybe insultingly obvious, just to highlight the point that you can very much do a sum there. You add X days for ploughing to Y days for harvesting, and you get no overlap.
You also have pretty hard limits on when you have to be ready with it either, because the seasons don't wait. So you can't extend much further than those 120 old acres of land anyway, because then you'll be ploughing frozen ground in January to cover it all.
Threshing, by contrast, was a couple of days at the end. The whole point is that agriculture was that horribly inefficient, that you'd actually need all that surface just to feed your family and pay your rent and tithe. For all that year long working dawn-to-dusk, at the end you had a small mound of grain to thresh. Not a fun activity, but a lot shorter than everything else in that whole process.
So if someone had built a thresher back then, it would have saved those peasants... what? Maybe 1-2 days out of the whole year?
No, what had to came first was the ability to (A) get more land, (B) have the means to work more land, and (C) get more grain per acre too. Otherwise mechanizing threshing would have solved nothing. The real bottleneck would have been just the same.
Someone else correctly mentioned the black death, and indeed that was one major factor in why they could get more land to work. But another thing came a bit earlier too, namely a way to actually be able to plough more land: someone figured out a harness with which they can use a horse to pull the plough. That went much faster than with oxen. That had actually been invented much earlier, in the year 800 AD or so, but it took a while for that invention to spread and it took an even longer while for more and more peasants to be able to afford horses. (Initially that was something more exclusive, and the rise of the knight class was basically the rise of those who could afford a horse. And in some parts of Eastern Europe they continued to use oxen until the 1800's.)
And from there there's a whole period known as the British Agricultural Revolution, spanning from the 16'th to the 19'th centuries.
That's a whole series of long steps that were needed, before a thresher even started to make sense. Before you can worry about threshing more grain faster, you first have to start with actually being able to produce more grain.
And I'm saying that the same applied to the whole industrial revolution. You don't need to just look at "hmm, what did
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Cosmic AC gave two references to debunking of Mismeasure by active researchers. Why don't you argue against them? Oh... you can't, so you do sniping attacks against Burt instead.
Answer the common criticisms, which Gould himself mostly avoided:
The Mismeasure of Man has been highly controversial in some quarters, particularly among psychologists. [..]"a paleontologist's distorted view of what psychologists think, untutored in even the most elementary facts of the science." [...]
Numerous critics have accused Gould of selective reporting, distorting the viewpoints of scientists, and letting his viewpoints be influenced by political and ethical biases; they allege that many of Gould's claims about the validity of intelligence measures, such as IQ, contradict mainstream psychology.
[Quotes from real researchers in the field:]
straw man arguments, [..] erred [...] ignoring scientific consensus [...] misrepresented [...] political agenda [...] selectively juxtaposing data in order to further a political agenda
Finally, many of Gould's positions conflict with conclusions reached by the American Psychological Association [etc]
(Positive reviews by real scientists seemed to be be either in some other field -- or marxists.)
The really fun part is that Gould's criticism needs that the IQ researchers are idiots or in a conspiracy -- which is more or less what the creationists argue about the paleontology researchers!!
Now good bye, troll.
Nothing new here. This is well-known among historians.
People drank beer, not water. No one was stupid enough to drink water in the cities. There are tracts from the periods from Christian pastors explaining how to brew beer as a healthy family drink alternative to gin.
The Inca were 13 million strong in the 1400s, 6 million in the main city. The Maya had half a million people in Tikal in the 600s AD.
Half a million for the Maya in 600ish I can believe. Six million for an Inca city though is absurd. Contemporary Cuzco only has about 300,000 people. Consider the task of feeding the population of such a megalopolis without the vast modern infrastructure of motorised transports and refrigeration of food supplies from a huge agricultural hinterland... Perhaps you meant '600,000'? Misplaced decimal points are not unknown in ancient record-keeping.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
The social impact of coffee and tea is possibly just as important as the physical effects. In those days people went to coffee houses to drink coffee. These were melting pots where people from a wide variety of backgrounds would meet and discuss the latest ideas. In London, coffee houses were known as "penny universities". And of course as anyone who has ever given up caffeine for a while will know, if you only drink it occasionally it has a hell of an effect. Imagine some the greatest minds of the Industrial Revolution all sat brainstorming in a coffee shop high on caffeine!
Yes, unions played a big role in the solution. So did OSHA, the Davis-Bacon Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, the PWA, the Wagner Act, The TVA, and an extremely large list of other government actions. The highest living standards the world had ever seen arose in the latter half of the twentieth century in an environment of unprecedented regulation and government participation in the economy. Infrastructure that the private sector depends upon doesn't build itself. The rules that permit the free market to function well are not themselves a product of the free market.
I would tend to conclude that industrial age happened when it happened, but largely because of events in Europe. At that time the US happened to be Lassie-Faire. But this may only be a coincidence, there is a correlation but insisting upon the form of government in the US causing the Industrial Revolution seems like a weak argument. Stalinist Russia also experienced rapid economic growth and industrialization, but I would not be eager to argue that totalitarian Communism is a good way to advance an economy. (Although I guess I would argue that is is better than the Feudalism that preceded Communism.) Maoist China also enjoyed significant industrialization.
Think global, act loco
In the case of the Incas, it would be a misplaced knot on the quipu. Same mathemetical error!
Sadly, I do not believe that we have quipu-based demographic information that lets us know anything about pre-colonial Cusco.
That was specifically about Mismeasure. You haven't even tried to give counter-arguments.
(Re Burt, I don't know enough to have an opinion. The criticism is from idealists -- and those often do dishonest arguments like Gould. Otoh, Burt might have been faking. It will be hashed out with time.)
I can't discuss your position, since you more or less write that you don't like the consensus among the intelligence researchers. To answer that would be like discussing if you wrote about your favorite color. Let me just note that the world is seldom as the idealists feel it should be (true for all ideologies).
I won't follow this any more, so you can get the last word.
I always agreed with Max Weber that the change happened because of the rise of secularism as a outgrowth of the Renaissance which created the "protestant work ethic" and helped create the middle class that we know and love today, which, through the equitable distribution of wealth away from the polarization that the nobility knew allowed for a increase in the standard of living of a larger population thus overcoming the Malthusian trap and creating a free economic environment that collimated into the democratic and economically liberal society of today. "Dr. Clark says the middle-class values needed for productivity could have been transmitted either culturally or genetically." The book seems to think that the work ethic was more to do with the rich replacing the poor but if this were the case then why isn't Italy, which has had some of the most wealthy royalty of the last 2000 years, duke of the world A #1?
I don't get why people nowadays constantly try to re-explain things that have already been explained very well. Read Wealth of Nations written by Adam Smith 250 years ago. Steam power wasn't really invented yet but Adam Smith explains very well why the industrial revolution happened when it happened and why it happened in Britain. There is no mystery about it.
It was for the same reasons as industrialization happens today. It had to do with wealth accumulation and division of labour. Extensive division of labour was possible in Britain because it was a big market for products. It was a big market for products because communications were good because of an extensive canal network and a long coast line (it helps being on an island) and because wealth was relatively well distributed in Britain. Meaning people could actually afford to produce mass produced goods.
The last part was the key component lacking in e.g. other advance and wealth countries like e.g. China. In China wealth was concentrated with the rich so there was no consumer market for mass produced goods. Secondly Britain had a rule of law that allowed business to thrive, and which supported inovation and enterpreurship.
But all in all industrialization is just the natural progression of things. When the right technologies, social condidtions and economic situation is in place it will happen.
It was an ambitous woman wishing to 'settle down' ?
This whole thing seems ridiculous. Just one absurd sweeping over generalization after an other. First it seems silly to assume that all poor people are impulsive, violent and lazy and that's why they are poor. Has anyone ever heard of the Stanford Prison Experiment? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_exper iment
These participants were predominantly white and middle-class.
In psychology, the results of the experiment are said to support situational attributions of behavior rather than dispositional attribution. In other words, it seemed the situation caused the participants' behavior, rather than anything inherent in their individual personalities.
In other words the poor are impulsive, violent and lazy because they are poor, it's not the case that they became poor because they were impulsive, violent and lazy. Obviously this is also an over simplification some people really are poor because they are impulsive, violent and lazy but the causes of poverty, especially in ridge class systems are many and varied.
In evolutionary biology the population is not typically just one or the other (rich or poor). Diversity is pretty common. Humans are pretty adaptable creatures so it wouldn't be that hard to adapt to capitalism once it was introduced. History seems to bare this out.
The speed at which the Industrial Revolution spread would indicate it wasn't simply genetic unless one argues that the exact same replacement occurred everywhere at the same time. Which seems highly unlikely.
Next, the Industrial Revolution did not bring unbridled wealth to everyone who worked hard.
The 18th century economist Adam Smith noted the imbalance in the rights of workers in regards to owners (or "masters"). In The Wealth of Nations, Book I, chapter 8, Smith wrote:
We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate...
When workers combine, masters... never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combinations of servants, labourers, and journeymen.
Hence the term wage slave. It's always the goal of the owners (masters) to accumulate as much wealth as possible, at the expense of workers, suppliers and customers.
Finally has anybody heard of Occam's Razor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor
"All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one."
Why go for a non economic explanation for an economic phenomenon.