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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."
This may actually be a major component in why the Industrial Revolution took off in England.
Between the fall of Rome and the rise of London, the only cities on earth to approach a million in population were in China. Once the tea culture took root in England, the habit of boiling water allowed urbanisation to increase dramatically, where hitherto cities had been limited by our frankly shocking approach to sanitation.
Well, that and the establishment of imperial trade routes across the world, the merger with Holland linking British resources with Dutch financing, the convenience of not having to spend much on the army and instead putting all that money into boats (see Imperial Trade Routes above for the uses we found for 'em)...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
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
In lots of societies, the rich reproduce faster than the poor.
That blanket statement simply isn't true. The fast majority of poor africans produce many more children than rich fat westerners. You might say it's a cultural thing, or maybe they need more children to tend the fields, but I knew a Medecin Sans Frontier doctor who worked there and had another explanation that sounds weird but kind of makes sense: when people are hungry, they compensate with sex.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The poor are now having more surviving children than the rich. So are we now going to go back to the middle ages?
Then, people realize that there's even more credit to be had and start spending it on a few luxuries here and there. Seeing that a few luxuries didn't lead to immediate bankrupcy, people go out and buy more and more things on credit. At some point, the loans come due and since people aren't usually willing to get rid of their stuff they pull their investments out of businesses and use them to pay the loans that have come due. Businesses suffer, wages don't go up and prices don't go down as fast as they should, people go get more loans to support their new spending habbits.
The spiral continues until many of the jobs have been outsourced to cheap foreign labour (since the locals are demanding higher wages which businesses can't/won't provide - especially when they face the threat of having their share price go down). Desperate politicians resort to pork-barrel spending and random wars to prop up the economy, but the inflation these actions cause hurts the middle and lower classes more than it helps the businesses that sustain them, forcing them further into debt. The random wars make foreign suppliers leery of said nation (they're afraid said nation might spend all its money on bombs and end up unable to pay for the last shipment of cheap stuff, let alone the next one) and the price of imports starts to go up - forcing people even further into debt yet again.
At some point the banks realize that nobody's going to be able to repay their loans because nobody actually owns anything of value and the cheap credit dries up. This breaks the consumption cycle and plunges the nation into a depression. Small banks go out of business. Big banks, naturally, forclose on everything and find that they now own the place. They sit tight and wait for the economy to pick up again so they can sell (well, loan, really) all the stuff they just acquired for free back to the people they took it from.
This lasts until people figure out that being able to produce goods is actually important and shouldn't be neglected in favor of rampant consumerism. The banks regain their confidence in the economy and start mortgaging all the assets they foreclosed on back out again, and businesses start working hard to earn a proffit and repay those loans. At this point we come back to a thrifty, productive, society that saves its money and invests in its own enterprises.
A few generations go by. People forget all about the crash of 'whenever. The cycle repeats.
You make a very good point. I can think of a few additional facts that back you up.
You mention infected water. People were actually aware of this problem, and had a strategy to avoid it: they only drank alcoholic beverages. In pre-industrial times most western people were (by modern standards) total lushes. Not exactly conducive to industrialization.
During the early stages of the industrial revolution, there was a huge demand for tea. Every American schoolchild knows about the hassles over the colonial tax on tea. Various western powers actually invaded China to establish their right to export tea. (The Chinese didn't mind selling the tea, but they didn't care for the traders importing opium to pay for it.)
Unfortunately, most of the moderators don't get that you're serious. Most of your mods are "funny" and there was at least one "flamebait". I'll say it again: the moderator pool sucks.
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.
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.
One does not need to get mythical and utopian about the past to recognize how deeply and profoundly fucked up colonialism and imperialism were. There's a book that I regularly refer people to in order to get a sense of just how profound the socioeconomic effects of European domination were: Late Victorian Holocausts, by Mike Davis. I'd also recommend reading King Leopold's Ghost, by Adam Hochschild, for a look at 19th century sub-Saharan Africa in particular.
We tend to be indoctrinated about 20th century atrocities, particularly those of the Nazis and the Soviets. Democides involving millions were perpetrated in the century before, but aren't nearly as much part of day to day historical memory.
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
The fast majority of poor africans produce many more children than rich fat westerners.
I don't know how the inter-cultural numbers stack up, but intra-culturally speaking, I had learned to associate greater levels of education in modern industrialized societies with less children. But then I heard this story on NPR this weekend:
In Some Circles, Four Kids Is the New Standard
The newest status symbol for the nation's most affluent families is fast becoming a big brood of kids.
Historically, the country-club set has had the smallest number of kids. But in the past 10 years, the number of high-end earners who are having three or more kids has shot up nearly 30 percent.
Some say the trend is driven by a generation of over-achieving career women who have quit work and transferred all of their competitive energy to baby making.
I'm sure Thorstein Veblen is smirking in his grave.
Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime... -- Machiavelli
As the parent points out open field farming in the middle-ages in England and France was extremely inefficient. The labor dues owed to the lord of the manor by a family working a 30 acre tenancy was 3 full days of labor per week. This was on top of the rent they paid and they also had to work their own fields. A typical manor had a large pool of labor to draw upon - far more than it needed during most of the year. This kept the price of labor very low and peasants very poor.
The big factor that changed things was the Black Death. The plague outbreaks in the 1300's changed the economic landscape. The size of the labor pool dropped dramatically. The people that survived became much more prosperous, because there was a lot more land to work per person. Workers were paid higher wages, even though laws intended to keep wages low were put into place pretty much universally.
The growing prosperity of peasant families after the plague wasn't caused by rich people becoming peasants, it was caused by a smaller population density in the rural areas. The trend gets accentuated by demand for wool in the coming centuries and the 'discovery' that fencing of fields makes them much easier to manage and more productive. By the 1500's grain yields on enclosed acreage was much higher than it had been in the 1200s on open fields, even though the climate was worse.
If there is one single factor that leads to the industrial revolution it's the plague outbreaks that start in the 1340s. Even though it happens hundreds of years before the industrial revolution, its the plague that causes the break down of the old economic system that had been in place in much of Europe since the end of the Western Roman Empire.
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.
Beer was the first storable food.
Quite likely, though fruit-based wines also go back into pre-history.
A decade or so back, I read an interesting bit of data collection showing that the value of beer is still with us. The researchers travelled around the world, visiting assorted local restaurants. Instead of eating and drinking what they ordered, they took it back to their hotel room and fed it to their portable lab, to learn about its safety.
One of their conclusions was that, if you want something that's safe to drink, there's a simple rule that works anywhere: Order beer. They reported that they found beer everywhere, and it was the only thing that was always safe to drink. They conjectured that this was because commercial beer everywhere is brewed in the same industrial stainless-steel vats by the same process. The only variation is the details of the ingredients, which affects the final flavor, but not the safety.
Some reviewers commented that this is generally true even of home-brewed beer. The reason, they explained, is that if you try making beer, you quickly learn to be fastidious about cleanliness. If you don't properly sterilize the ingredients by boiling, you don't get beer; you get disgusting glop that nobody will touch. So you either get beer or glop; there's no intermediate partly-contaminated state. We can conclude that beer is the universal beverage partly because of this.
Wine is actually much easier to make. You can often get drinkable wine by just squeezing out the fruit's juice into a bottle and letting it sit in a dark closet for a couple weeks. But there's no guarantee that you won't have something else growing there in addition to the yeast. It's tempting, because it's so easy, and it usually works. But if you didn't sterilize the juice and add a good yeast culture, sometimes you get something that tastes good and makes you sick.
[B]eer is also an excellent source of calories.
It's also a good source of B vitamins. Of course, this is true of anything made with live yeast, including wine and bread.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.