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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."
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
Yes, because Idiocracy was such a great documentary.
How many people here were born so far inside the ivory tower that they don't realize that Idiocracy is complete BS? Personally, I'm tired of hearing that, 'Well in Idiocracy, blah, blah, blah, fucking poor people.' Ok, maybe lower income people are reproducing faster, I personally don't have that particular statistic, but for the sake of argument, lets just say that they are. You want to know what's going to happen as the poor begin to outnumber the rich?
Nothing. There might be temporary recession of sorts, but after that the offspring of the lower classes will fill in the empty hole in society left by the lack of upper class offspring. And guess what, they'll do it just as well as the upper class's progeny had been doing, proving once and for all that sociobiology is classist (and racist and sexist, for that matter) pseudoscience. Of course, this is assuming that the upper class doesn't fabricate some sort of barrier to impede the upward social mobility in order to keep secure their position at the top, and as history tells us, the rich taking advantage of the poor by denying them the opportunity to improve their live is not unheard of.
Sigh, if only Stephen Gould were alive to mock that movie.