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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."
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.
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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.
Like all other drugs, caffeine loses its effect unless you keep increasing the dose. The stimulating effect of caffeine is vastly overestimated and doesn't last if you keep "using". If you don't believe this, don't consume caffeine in any form for half a year and then see what effect a single cup of coffee has on you after you've been weaned of caffeine. I would suggest that caffeine causes more accidents by making people think they can stay awake with coffee than it prevents by keeping people awake a little longer.
"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."
Responding to this quote, while from the research that has been done happiness does not seem to be significantly a function of wealth or life expectancy, concluding from this to minimize the very real hardships of poverty reduces the human experience to utilitarianism.
I feel fairly confident in saying that the life I am privileged to is in many ways qualitatively better - though not more valuable - than the life of a member of a hunter gatherer society. How can I make this comparison? On the premise that if neutrally presented with the opportunity to benefit from many of the amenities and conveniences my life affords me, most hunter gatherers would accept the opportunity to avail themselves of these. This to me seems like the appropriate way to make this comparison.
And this doesn't mean they would abandon their traditions and beliefs, and doesn't mean they would leave their land.
It's simply that I surmise most would prefer to have access to modern medicine, to sanitized water, to refrigeration, to vaccinations, than to not. Now, this may not be correct, but it certainly seems to me to be a reasonable, probable hypothesis, and I suspect many would agree.
Although I agree with you that free time is a form of wealth.
People have been working insane hours for a long time. Insane hours doing sleep inducing jobs on the other hand, is a new things. The Amish don't fall asleep behind the plow.
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.
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
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?
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Actually you have a point and I don't think you should be modded funny.
However I also think it's flawed to try to point at a single cause for industrialization. I think a whole set of inter-related changes led to the boom in the 1800s. Part of it was better medicine and living conditions. Part of it was increased trade allowing things such as tea and coffee (and many other useful things!) to become more widely available. Part of it was the culture at the time that supported the ideal of working long hours to avoid poverty. Part of it was advances in science and engineering. All these things mingle.
For example science feeds into medical science, which is sustained by trade of knowledge and materials, which also helps engineering. etc. etc.
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Going a step back, why were so many able to boil water? Fossil fuels. Coal, then oil, then natural gas. The industrial revolution has its roots in virtually free energy to run machines and generate food. Fossil fuels are amazingly dense energy sources plus a cheap way to produce food (natural gas=fertilizer, oil=pesticides, diesel tractors=more land under cultivation, trains/trucks/planes=more food to market unspoilt ... together they add up to expanded food supply and exponentially increasing population).
Anyway, this guy's argument seems to boil down to something like "all the lazy and stupid people died out". How long after the onset of the industrial revolution however, did things change so that those in the upper rungs have began having fewer kids and only the poor and uneducated (or very religious) did the serious breeding? Anyway, this notion sounds far fetched to me.
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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.
Indians are usually far more sanitation conscious than is made out. The problem is a lack of proper facilities, due to the inefficient government monopoly on all services of this nature, not the tendencies of the people themselves. For instance, bathing was a regular part of the common man's daily routine for known Indian history. In the great city of Vijayanagar (destroyed by Muslim invaders in the year 1565), there were adequate sanitation facilities for every citizen to have a bath. Hell, even the cities of the Indus/Saraswati valley civilisation (c. 3300-1700 BC, flourished 2600-1900 BCE) had an elaborate system of baths and underground drainage.
""Boiling water helped decrease disease among city workers.""
"This may actually be a major component in why the Industrial Revolution took off in England."
The reason the Industrial Revolution happened in England was largely due to the British Agricultural Revolution, which dramatically increased yields (and therefore the number of people who could be fed per acre of arable land) while also progressively replacing common fields with privately owned ones, displacing those who had previously farmed those fields. The writing was already on the wall by the late 16th century, and agricultural mechanisation in the 18th century sounded the final death knell of both common land farmers and labour-intensive agriculture because it favoured the owners of large tracts of land, who now required far fewer people to work them. Britain had undergone two prior major population explosions (in the 13th and mid 17th centuries), but starvation had resulted in the population falling again due to a lack of adequate agricultural output. The population explosion of the mid 1700s was however sustainable with the new farming techniques, and this led to a permanent (and growing) increase in demand for clothing, pottery, and various other goods that the large and growing labour pool could fulfil by forming cottage industries, which also exploded during this period, and were the precursors to the Industrial Revolution that followed.
Other important factors for Britain were (as you say) its growing trade empire, which led to an accumulation of capital that was looking for profitable investments; a simultaneous scientific and engineering revolution that supplied industry with ever more efficient manufacturing and transport technologies; and significant domestic reserves of coal to drive the new machines. It's also interesting to note that unlike much of the rest of Europe, where countries were often split into separate governmental regions that taxed any items which crossed their borders, Britain was for trade purposes a single nation that allowed products to move freely from any area to any other area, so both manufacturers and food producers had a large and increasingly wealthy domestic market for their wares.
Increased literacy and numeracy were a by-product of the industrial revolution rather than a causal factor (I know you didn't say anything to the contrary, but the theory this topic is based around does). Industries cannot run with manual labour alone: they also need clerks, accountants, secretaries, and other "white collar" workers to handle their many administrative tasks, and such people are also necessary for the large number of financial and service industries that grew up around the factories (banking, transport, postal services, etc.). Such people don't just appear magically from nowhere, but have to be trained, and it didn't take long to realise that the most efficient way to do this was by educating children. A provision of the Factories Act of 1833 made it law for employers of children under the age of 13 to provide them with at least 3 hours of free (i.e. costs could not be deducted from their meagre wages) education per day that they worked, although most large employers had already been doing this for some time because they'd realised that it was a cheap way of turning common labourers into a (then) much rarer and therefore more valuable type of employee. This led to the establishment of the British "middle class" (Americans should note that the British definition of "middle class" isn't quite the same as that of the US).
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
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.
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