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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."
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.
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?
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.
...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 goes without saying, however, that beer is not usually consumed immediately after it is boiled. In fact, the aftermath of boiling beer can promote pathogens in a less-than sanitary environment.
I'm not sure how serious you were. Good discussion if you're interested.
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.
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
The Industrial revolution was accompanied by untold misery to the world.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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
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.
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.
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
Good one - It was _all_ the northmen that stole everything. Shit, the americas, indies and asians were all on each other's good sides giving everyone hugs then the anglos had to come in and steal it all!
Social darwinism, are you aware of the concept? Anglo's are just the ones who dominated. Everyone else was doing the same damn thing.
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?
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.
It's interesting that you make that comparison, since my understanding of eugenics is that you would be keeping the eloi from breeding, rather than intentionally breeding them to eat. So it is quite the opposite, really.
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
Right on, brother! Tell it!
Too bad you got modded down (probably for your somewhat belligerent tone), but you're actually 100% correct. This is social darwinism at its...errr...'finest' here. If the guy had done some research, which, BTW, I have done, he'd find that actually, there are many, many people in industrial society who are not descended from aristocrats from the Middle Ages. I'd point out examples, but of course, I'm not at liberty to discuss someone else's genealogy without their permission and I can't give myself as an example, being descended from William the Conqueror and the Plantagenet kings of England.
My blog
...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
All you have to do is look at the common dog to see first hand that eugenics works. Of course it does also show why we wouldn't want to trust human to perform it. By call eugenics bullshit, you basically discredit your argument.
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
Eugenics works fine in the short term, provided you ignore sociological influence, of course, but its suicide in the long run. I'm not much of a dog person, but I can give you a great botanical example. Take the banana of commerce. Sure, its yummy and all, but due to the commercial cultivar's breeding of desirable traits, and its widespread propagation, this particular strain has such a high level of genetic similarity that its only a matter of time before a single disease ravages the worldwide population. Granted, most are actually asexually propagated, therefore genetically identical, but the same general thing will happen in cases where the breeding is done only by certain individuals. This can be seen in colonies of endangered animals, like the cheetah, a species that, like the commercial banana, could potentially be destroyed by a single disease due to genetic similarity, which is caused by having a low amount of new blood. A select group of humans bred for a specific quality, say intelligence (which is sociological anyway)would, in a few generations, face the same problems the banana and the cheetah have. And there's also the possible inbreeding problems that may arise when the specially bred group doesn't want to breed with 'lower' humans anymore, but that' just speculation, although if you look at history, royal families have turned to imbreeding or that reason.
good for you dude! the housing market in most countries is a giant ponzie scheme,fueled by peoples ignorance of inflation and the broken window fallacy ie they dont see , cant imagine what the money they spent on interest would have done for them if they had saved it and invested it in other areas. As some one who has been a landlord in new zealand i can tell you the banks have all the good tenants they pay a $20,000 0r $30,000 security deposit,maintain the property and often improve it for their landlord(the bank)at a loss to them,pay all the expenses attendant on the property pay three or four times at least the value of the property in rent(interest),sign 30 year leases without a second thought in return for being given the property at the end of the lease when the final payment is made(mortgage)and encourage others often at great length to do the same. compare the lot of the small residential landlord whose every interaction with his tenants is coloured by their resentment about paying rent(not based on what they receive for it but the fact they pay it to someone they feel does not deserve it( by the way iv been homeless as a youth rent is shelter its only dead money if you have no objection to being cold smelly scared and interacting with nature on a more intimate level than most people appear to be comfortable with ) just as a pastime ask a proponent of this idea who is telling you that they made x amount on residential property to do a little back of an envelope math add up interest lost on the deposit,rates,insurance, interest on the loan,improvements+interest spent to obtain them+interest deferred (ie if the money spent on the improvements had been invested elsewhere + bank fees+estate agent fees, etc etc blah blah over the life of the loan. now take into account inflation for the period concerned income lost from other investment opportunities ie term deposits,share market etc clue here in Australia $1.00 now buys what 0.9cents did at the introduction of decimal currency in 1967. in my experience they simply wont do it and the conversation moves on this is because subconsciously at least they know that things are not what they seem. every bank ad i have ever seen is an advertisement for the act of borrowing money seldom is any particular product mentioned usually an attempt is made to appeal to peoples baser instincts ie show the world your better than joe with an expensive car, house or whatever or a common meme in nz/australia rent is dead money god only knows what in a fractional reserve system interest is supposed to be but paying interest(rent)to a giant landlord(bank) is less offensive to most people than paying rent to someone of most likely similar social class who is trying to get slightly higher up the economic pile. the tragedy of this is that peoples productive lives are sucked out of them while they attempt to raise a family and enjoy some peace of mind while living in a investment instead of a home. not saying buying a house is always a bad idea but at least be honest about your motivations and the realities of the situation. i realise this is a gross simplification of the situation but this is ./ after all
hint commercial property investment is carried out for rational reasons by rational people you may care to look there.
boldly going nowhere
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?
furthermore, few women would drink beer, thus it didn't have a positive effect on birth rate....though, with the men drinking beer, I suppose that also didn't have too good an effect on birth rate, even if they were more likely to remain healthy. ...or something.
Max.
Amen. I haven't the faintest idea what my genealogy is beyond the grandparent level, but I do know that I'm a descendant of inbred hillbillies. I am now in the honors program of a well respected university and consider myself very knowledgeable in a good many fields of study. Obviously, I don't have much respect for genetic determinism (and the rest of that elitist BS), because, among other reasons, according to it I should be about as smart as the average jar of mayonnaise.
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.
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.
It is, as in nature, a matter of balancing the pros and cons of inbreeding and outbreeding. Natural selection by definition reduces genetic diversity. In a population where resources are limited, you cannot achieve unlimited genetic diversity. Eugenics, or selective breeding, are ways of managing adaptive or desirable traits when you do not have an unlimited selection of organisms to choose from, and unlimited food to feed them with. Humans did not evolve large brains by accident. It was the result of selective pressure which reduced genetic diversity by removing smaller-brained, less intelligent humans (and proto-humans).
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.
Ignoring your inability to write, you (badly) make some points I'd like to address:
Those who have no debt have no interest payments, meaning they have more money to spend on the actual things they want to buy.
When you've paid off your mortgage you'll still be paying your property taxes. And when the ceiling leaks you're going to have to get off your ass and fix it yourself.
If you sell your house before you've paid your mortgage you'll pay the bank a huge early repayment fee, in addition to the fee you paid the real estate broker. Also, you can't sell a house and make a proffit unless you A) live in a smaller house until the market comes down, B) buy a crappy house and fix it up (thus putting in all the money you'll be "making" on the sale), C) have connections that can get you a new house at cost, or something along those lines.
If you rent out your house and the renters decide they don't like you and move out then you'll have to work to pay the mortgage on your rental property, and the mortgage on wherever you happen to be living. If the bank's computers mess up and start taking double-payments on your mortgage, or they don't recognize the insurance company you'd like to insure your house with, or if the bank starts being a pain in general you can't just buy a new house, and sell the old one, and move, and say "to hell with you - I'm a consumer and I have a choice here"...it's a little more complicated than that when you have a mortgage.
And in most places I've lived, local laws protect tennants against idiot landlords - except when the landlord is a bank and the rental agreement is called a mortgage.
If there's a recession the rental rates will go down, but your mortgage payments will go up because interest rates usually rise during a recession. Payment locked down for five years? Well, you still have to worry because recessions can last a decade or more.
And please don't give me the "I'm free to do as I will with my house that I own whereas you can't have X or Y on the premises" bullshit. The market's as good at providing rental units that permit X and Y as the government is at requiring (often expensive) permits for W and Z.
The only place the above really breaks down is in areas where the real estate market is under such high demand that renting is more expensive than buying - but that's ridiculously rare and in any case it's still a bad time to buy a house because its value is at a peak.
Thanks, Captain Obvious!
Thanks for learning English ;)
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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 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?
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
'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?
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)
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.
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.
The parent is uninformatively brief, but not off-topic. Max Weber's thesis of the Protestant Work Ethic (thrift, hard work, usefulness) and its relationship to the development of capitalism and industrialised society is directly related to the topic at hand.
Which, believe it or not, still could mean that you are descended from British royalty and, in fact, that fact alone actually increases its likelihood.
My blog
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.
Inbreeding can result in postitive traits being reinforced, as well as negative traits. You got lucky. It seems that your first-cousin great-great grandpartents were both fairly bright, and your parents didn't share any of the negative, recessive genes that could have left you with a birth defect.
By the way, I'm from the sticks, and my maternal grandparents were sixth cousins, so I'm not trying to insult you!
Thoroughbred horses are very inbred, for example. As are "show dogs", and even prized livestock. Because the positive traits are reinforced.
I felt the same way when first encountering this idea; but lifespans back then for people who lived after the age of five were similar to that of most people in the world today (perhaps a decade or two shorter than in the USA). What's different (if anything) is lower infant mortality now, so more people live past age five now. So, back then, if everyone lived to sixty after age five, but 50% of people didn't make it that far, then we get an "average" lifespan of thirty But, even then, the infant mortality figures of say 50000 years ago are still a lot of guesswork, and it is possible some anthropologists desiring to paint a good picture of life in the 1930s or so of then current living conditions had motivations to cook the figures.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Someone smarter than a jar of mayonaise should be able to comprehend the difference between absolute and fatalistic determinism (which IQ is not) and predisposition (which IQ is). Adult IQ is approximately 80% heritable.
n #Criticisms
Yes, this article is from Wikipedia, but it is well sourced: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ#Heritability
As for your earlier assertion that IQ can't be defined and therefore doesn't exist, it's the result of a simple, rigorous factor analysis. A broad population survey of things such as health, income, reading ability, mathematical prowess, education level, romantic success, academic ability, and so on are all interrelated by a single scalar. Again, this scalar doesn't DETERMINE these other traits, but they are correlated, and often highly so. They call that scalar 'g.' IQ test scores correlate very highly with g. So if you want a semi-rigorous definition of IQ, it would be something like "an admittedly error-prone measurement of that single scalar variable uncovered by factor analysis that has proven highly predictive of a variety of abilities listed above." Does it matter that you call artistic ability intelligence? No. "Intelligence" is just how some people interpret g. You don't have to agree. But -- and this is crucial -- your disagreement does not invalidate the empirical reality of g.
As to The Mismeasure of Man, I urge you to familiarize yourself with some of its criticism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Ma
Notably, the popular press loved the book but the scientific community excoriated it. Gould's theses contradict much of mainstream academic psychology, and the discrepancy between the two has only grown in the ten years since his second edition. If you want to believe what reality SHOULD be (in your mind) over what it IS, that's fine, but at least be honest that your beliefs are religious and not scientific. For whatever it's worth, I join you in wishing that there were no such thing as inherent intelligence, that the variability in success owed entirely to strength of character and other worthier traits (ideally not themselves genetically predisposed), and that everyone got to play with the same hand of cards. Likewise, I wish that things such as autism, Down syndrome, and other such marked inborn disabilities did not exist. But neither of these reflects the world we live in, and for both of them, I accept that science disproves my wishful thinking.
Finally, while I know you're very impressed with your own intellect, the honors program of a state university is not exactly the elite upper crust of American education. I wouldn't use your enrollment there as evidence that you're some sort of science-defying luminary. Certainly you're smarter than average, but again, even adult IQ is only 80% heritable.
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.
Oh, that's nothing. Anglo-saxons are far too stupid to lean any other language so we have to learn english to be able to talk to them...
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.
Wait - you don't believe that humans are subject to the forces of evolution?
Would you like some Creationism with that?
Last post!
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.
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.
First, I'm not impressed by my own intellect, mostly because intelligence doesn't exist. I said I was knowledgeable, not intelligent.
Second, where do you get 80% at? There's no way to scientifically arrive at that, so where does it came from? I'd wager that someone made it up, probably using fabricated information, which is not unheard of in the field of intelligence determination.
Third, let me bring a quote by Stanley Garn, an anthropologist of some renown, to your attention. "If the Aborigine drafted an I.Q. test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it." Think about that.
Fourth, the difference between a state university and the 'upper crust' you speak of is a simple matter of money. Bush went to Yale because daddy bought his way in, just like all those other legacies and people who get in through nonacademic means. Think about that, too.
Fifth, I do realize that some people are born with various brain ailments, ect, but they are the exception to the rule. I do not make my conclusions based on idealism, but it seems like you, as well as most proponents of IQ, g, divine right ect., make yours out of a need to claim innate superiority. I, for one, am comfortable with the fact that I am an equal to anyone who is willing to make an effort to learn.
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!
i'm not sure how my comment was meant to be a troll, but still...
in mentioning Burt, i wanted to get an understanding of what you would consider a personal attack. you gave me an answer, so fair enough. now if i point out that in the very prominent Newman et al twins studies (a cornerstone of iq research), that there were clear indications of bias in the selection process (participation was deliberately refused to twins that said they were unalike!) then would this be considered a personal attack on those involved in carrying out the study?
as to The really fun part is that Gould's criticism needs that the IQ researchers are idiots or in a conspiracy does this mean that anyone who believes that iq tests are unfair and based on a very limited idea of what constitutes intelligence are idiots or in a conspiracy?
i haven't actually read the mismeasure of man but i'm critical of the iq test, my main problem being the unexamined ideas and circular arguments that lie behind it, for example the lack of any kind of scientific validity. i mentioned this before but you failed to deal with it, choosing instead to cut and past a bunch of stuff.
and it certainly doesn't take an idiot to confuse correlation with causation; there are any number of scientists that make this same mistake over and over.
anyhow, imo iq theory is pseudo-science, just like astrology or biorhythms, and for that reason it should be dismissed, along with the dodgy political beliefs that it is used to justify (eg social darwinism and eugenics.)
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.
No. You said that inheritable intelligence cannot exist, because you had an inbred hillbilly ancestry, [yet you're intelligent]. This last implied step of your inference is a claim to an intellect.
Plomin, R., DeFries, J. C., Craig, I. W., & McGuffin, P. (2003). Behavioral genetics in the postgenomic era. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Twin studies are the obvious answer: test how IQ varies between identical but separated-at-birth twins as compared to adopted strangers. Please substantiate your allegations of widespread (or at least "not unheard of") data fabrication among intelligence research.
I have thought about it. So have the creators of the "progressive matrices" style of IQ test, which is highly predictive while using no words whatsoever. These tests have, I believe, been independently verified so that their measurement of g is consistent with all of the g-loaded predictions in that other culture. Furthermore, even if you are right that IQ tests are invalid for cultures sufficiently unlike our own, that does not contest the validity of IQ tests within cultures sufficiently like our own.
Definitely not. There are a scant handful of people who get into fancy colleges because their daddies donated a lot of money, but they probably constitute less than five percent of every class. There is a vast, gaping chasm between a state university and the upper crust of private education. Take a look at SAT averages if you don't believe me -- and don't tell me about the effects of test preparation, since (1) the advantage can be statistically measured at far less than the gap between the schools' scores, and (2) most programs are cheap enough (~$1500, tops) that they can be financed on debt. Finally, all great universities have comprehensive financial aid programs that will ease or eliminate the burden on poor students. For example, I believe Harvard is now free for anyone whose family makes under something like $50k/yr.
Yes, extreme differences in phsyiology, like autism, are noticeable and rare. But we've demonstrated that there are SOME genetic effects on intelligence; what makes you so sure that there aren't more, subtler, similar conditions? If a given genetic expression made the difference of only 1-5 IQ points, it would be far less likely to have been diagnosed than autism. Enough independent such differences and you end up with a continuum.
I never said that and do not believe it. Perhaps it is you who is projecting your insecurities onto me.
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.
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.