[HN Gopher] What if they gave an Industrial Revolution and nobod...
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What if they gave an Industrial Revolution and nobody came? (2023)
Author : AndrewDucker
Score : 103 points
Date : 2024-06-03 14:05 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rootsofprogress.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (rootsofprogress.org)
| thriftwy wrote:
| The same may be told of our unwillingness to harness the solar
| system. Future dwellers would say we knew how to do this and
| simply did not want.
| adastra22 wrote:
| We want and we will. It's just the minority of us that will
| have to push progress forward, as has always been the case.
| xvector wrote:
| You're spot on. Historically, it's always been a few
| visionaries driving tech forward while the average person
| resists change or even causes regression.
|
| Look at the bike, camera, car, and airplane [1]. Same story
| with AI today. People fear and hate change, but progress is
| inevitable so long as visionaries continue to push it
| forward.
|
| Humanity will be dragged into a better future, kicking and
| screaming if need be, like it always has been.
|
| [1]: https://pessimistsarchive.org/
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Exactly. If we had kept funding NASA up to now, at the levels
| that reached the Moon, we would be mining asteroids by now.
| Instead, once the space race was one, there was no purpose so
| funding was cut. That we do anything with such meager funding
| is incredible. Imagine if we had vast solar arrays, bases on
| multiple planets. It is totally doable with current technology,
| just a matter of funding.
|
| Thought, guess that is the point of this article. There is no
| demand.
| afh1 wrote:
| More so the economics have to work out, the author points
| multiple times to profitability and ROI.
|
| Is it profitable to invest trillions of dollars into...
| Asteroid mining? Vs cheaply mining the earth?
|
| Maybe when there's so little to mine here and rocket fuel is
| virtually free...
| thriftwy wrote:
| You will get access to many order of magnitudes of minerals
| out there.
|
| You answer to it "we don't need that much, and it's not
| where we can use it". Which is basically Emperor's speech
| from the linked article.
| bluGill wrote:
| > many order of magnitudes of minerals out there.
|
| There are less than 100 useful elements on the periodic
| table. Everything else is a molecule that we can make
| from one of the above atoms. We mine for gems, but even
| then lab grown gems are competitive in price. We mine for
| energy (oil, coal). We mine for sand where we mostly care
| about cheap (specific properties matter, but in general
| you can find something local that is good enough and
| transport is cheaper). Most of the rest we are separating
| out the raw atoms and then recombining into the exact
| allow we want.
|
| For gems you might be able to sell this is from whatever
| asteroid. I'm not in marketing but I can see someone
| paying extra for that.
|
| Everything else either cheap is important - the energy
| needed to get it to earth counts against you - or we want
| the raw atoms in pure form.
| thriftwy wrote:
| Space minerals are cheap by the bulk if you use them in
| space. But that's alao true for fruit of
| industrialization. Railway and steel mills make more
| steel mills and railway.
| moomin wrote:
| As disappointed as I am by modern levels of space funding, I
| think everyone underestimates just quite how hard "produce a
| closed sustainable ecosystem that lasts two years" is.
|
| If we wanted to spread out, that would be very high on our
| research priorities and I don't think right now we have any
| idea how hard it actually is.
| jfyi wrote:
| To be fair, we do a pretty good job at a sealed 10 gallon
| carboy with plants and aerobic bacteria. It's just scaling
| from there, right? ;)
| thriftwy wrote:
| You don't actually need humans to be out there all the
| time. Humans are not present at the bottoms of oil wells or
| on top of wind turbines.
| DennisP wrote:
| There was no demand, at the absurd travel costs you get when
| you throw away an expensive rocket with every launch. Now
| that we're on the verge of mass-produced rockets that are
| completely and rapidly reusable, the economics are about to
| change and we might find plenty of demand. (And it's not just
| SpaceX; Stoke Space for example looks really interesting.)
| vundercind wrote:
| It makes it cheaper, but still very expensive. A dozen or
| more launches of very large rockets to ready a payload
| large enough to do _any_ work in the asteroid belt and come
| back, and that'd be like a tiny prospector-robot aiming to
| return a couple kg of material. Doing much more remains
| locked behind the expensive (to put it mildly) and unproven
| notion of getting industrial-scale fuel refining working in
| space (or at least in a much smaller gravity well) with
| minimal inputs from Earth. There are... a few challenges
| there.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Guess I was thinking if we did have 50 (from 70's onward)
| years of massive funding, that cheaper re-usable ships
| would have been developed earlier. We wouldn't have
| needed SpaceX, because re-usability would have been
| achieved earlier.
|
| The Space Shuttle was an attempt, but even that was
| pretty small funding, and later. If the funding had
| continued from the 70's onward then even the Space
| Shuttle would have looked antiquated.
|
| As mentioned there is a huge initial capital cost to
| enter into the Space Industry, that is why you need
| government to jump start it. SpaceX is great, but even
| that is decades later than it had to be.
| pfdietz wrote:
| I think the experience with the Shuttle shows that NASA
| was fundamentally unable to produce an economically
| viable product. They simply aren't structured to be able
| to do that -- the political structure around them
| prevents it, regardless of the level of funding.
|
| It's the same reason private companies in competitive
| industries outperform government design bureaus.
| DennisP wrote:
| If you haven't yet, watch the series _For All Mankind_.
| It 's a look at how history might have played out if the
| Soviets had gotten to the Moon first and the space race
| just kept going. It's really well done, and for any space
| nut it's an odd mix of inspiring and poignant.
| DennisP wrote:
| You'd likely start with the near-Earth asteroids. The
| easiest have the same delta-v requirement as the Moon.
| SpaceX is planning about a dozen refueling flights for a
| Moon landing but that's for a hundred tons of payload.
|
| For the main belt, it probably makes the most sense to
| use low-thrust high-ISP rockets rather than chemical.
| sed3 wrote:
| China around 1AD had iron production comparable to England at
| start of industrial revolution. They were also starting to use
| mechanization (quote from wiki bellow).
|
| > The effectiveness of the Chinese human and horse powered blast
| furnaces was enhanced during this period by the engineer Du Shi
| (c. AD 31), who applied the power of waterwheels to piston-
| bellows in forging cast iron.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| What stopped an industrial revolution from cooking up in China?
| Too much labor? Too little coal? Too many wars?
| vundercind wrote:
| It made no sense to burn expensive coal to power an engine
| until you run into the problem of needing to drain coal
| mines, because you already have so much demand for coal that
| you have started to need to do that.
| Jensson wrote:
| Also lack of calculus and newtons equations, almost all
| useful engineering equations depend on those so without
| them you can't make the necessary calculations for engines.
| Without engine calculations it takes way too much trial and
| error to get things to work well.
|
| The industrial revolution happened pretty soon after those
| were discovered, I don't think that is a coincidence.
| lukan wrote:
| "The industrial revolution happened pretty soon after
| those were discovered, I don't think that is a
| coincidence."
|
| Surely no coincidence, it was simply a time of great
| innovation. But I would argue, they also would have been
| invented a 3. time if necessary.
| Jensson wrote:
| > they also would have been invented a 3. time if
| necessary
|
| Not sure what you mean? Romans would have had great use
| of Newtonian physics, they made a ton of machines, but
| they didn't manage to invent the math/physics to do those
| calculations at the time. What do you suggest would
| replace this for making calculations for machines?
| lukan wrote:
| Well, they have been invented 2 times, roughly at the
| same time largely independent from each other. But it
| needed a general high level of math. The romans lacked
| many of the more sophisticated math tools I think.
| Jensson wrote:
| No they weren't invented two times, Newtons physics
| equations were invented one time, then Leibniz
| reconstructed calculus after reading Newtons work on
| physics. Leibniz almost surely wouldn't have invented
| calculus without having read Newtons work on motion, so
| they aren't comparable.
|
| The only thing that event proves is that inventing
| calculus if you have the the formulas of motion is easy,
| both Newton and Leibniz did that, but it was Newton who
| invented the formulas of motion that was required to
| invent calculus.
|
| So I think Newtons equations of motions was a requirement
| for the industrial revolution, that is a key that unlocks
| the ability to understand machines on a whole new level.
|
| Also Newtons motion equations are simply just
|
| F = ma
|
| They don't require a lot of mathematical pre work etc.
| But, nobody solved that properly for a really long time,
| and that is the basis for classical physics so basically
| every single thing we did during the industrial
| revolution. It was the key to modern engineering where we
| use math to calculate machine properties. I don't think
| it is just random chance that the industrial revolution
| happened just a few decades after classical physics was
| invented.
|
| It is such a ridiculous coincidence otherwise, that the
| formulas and concepts that are the foundation to all of
| engineering was invented just before engineering took off
| for real.
| bluGill wrote:
| Was it the case that nobody solve the problem, or was it
| solved many times but since there was no value in the
| solution at the time we don't remember those solutions?
| Or maybe it was the industrial revolution getting
| underway finally made it worth studying at all.
| lukan wrote:
| I recently learned, that the pythagorans were more of a
| cult (who liked secrecy?). I totally can believe that
| some ancient math nerds solved lots of things already,
| but with the people around them not understanding. One
| war could have been enough, to eradicate lots of (semi)
| isolated thinkers.
| bluGill wrote:
| Every book had to be copied by hand so if it wasn't seen
| as useful the paper rotted in a few hundred years.
| z3t4 wrote:
| Timing is very important. The market was not ready. Doh.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| I've heard the argument before that China being very large
| without serious, nearby rivals created less drive for
| innovation than Europe with its smaller countries and
| frequent struggles. There was also more ability to move to a
| different country if people in your country didn't like what
| you had to say. Many European thinkers took advantage of
| this.
| lukan wrote:
| "than Europe with its smaller countries and frequent
| struggles"
|
| I think old china had actually lots in common with old
| europe: lots of small kingdoms and warlords battling over
| their villages. China wasn't really one united nation
| either, for most of its time.
| Jensson wrote:
| > China wasn't really one united nation either, for most
| of its time.
|
| China had some small periods were it was splintered,
| Europe had some small periods were it was unified after
| Rome. It is very different. China is more like Rome never
| fell, it might have lost half some time etc, some
| rebellion splintering it, but always pulling itself
| together after a century or two.
| throwup238 wrote:
| China was splintered for a thousand years after the
| Eastern Han dynasty except for the Tang dynasty and
| wasn't really unified again until the Qing dyansty [1]. I
| wouldn't call those "small periods", it's been splintered
| for the majority of the common era.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynasties_of_China#Time
| line_of...
| Jensson wrote:
| I am talking about the past 1500 years. Also to me half
| of China being under one banner isn't "splintered", that
| is still an empire with a few belligerents, so your link
| there doesn't provide an accurate picture.
|
| And if you compare like to like, Europe has never ever
| been unified since there were always many splinters
| regardless which period you look at. Some parts splitting
| off isn't the same thing as the empire not existing.
|
| No matter how you slice it China has been far more
| unified than Europe, if you made a similar map of
| European dynasties for the same period it would be orders
| of magnitude larger.
|
| If you look at the biggest empire on earth for different
| periods a part of the Chinese empire is almost always
| among the top, Europe was only there during Rome at its
| peak and after colonization. China is much closer to a
| single European country, for example it wasn't as
| splintered as the German states used to be but its much
| closer than comparing it to Europe.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| 'Germany' was under the banner of the Holy Roman Empire
| for 1000 years, but still deeply splintered. So much so
| that proper industrialization only happened after
| unification under the 2nd Reich 1871.
| Jensson wrote:
| Yeah, as I said I'd argue Germany was more splintered
| than China, but its closer than comparing the soup of
| splinters that is Europe to China.
|
| Point is that saying that China wasn't always unified so
| it is similar to Europe is wrong, Europe was so
| splintered that typically traveling 60 miles meant you
| would be in another country, that means it was very easy
| to flee to another country if your views weren't accepted
| were you are now, very different from larger
| countries/empires like China and its splintered factions.
| lukan wrote:
| "Point is that saying that China wasn't always unified so
| it is similar to Europe is wrong"
|
| Good point, I agree. That is why I initially said "lot's
| in common". But I believe the concept of "flee to another
| country if your views weren't accepted were you are now"
| is also quite present in chinese folklore.
|
| So yes, there was the one person you could not flee from
| in china, which was the emperor and his court. But I
| would argue that your views also could not really go
| against the catholic church and the pope in europe for a
| long time and in most parts of it. (In a point more on
| topic, I would argue, that the disempowerment of the
| Inquisition, was the main ingredient in the industrial
| revolution, see Galilei and co.)
| pantalaimon wrote:
| Reformation was most popular in the northern countries of
| the Hanse trade union. Freeing themselves from
| Catholicism also meant freeing themselves from the
| emperor and the tribute payed to him.
|
| When the Protestant stronghold Magdeburg refused to pay,
| it was entirely obliterated during the 30 year war, to
| set an example for other 'rebel' cities
| ajmurmann wrote:
| This is true and doesn't apply after 12th century from
| when on it was unified and which is the period during
| which the jump to industrialization probably would have
| been more likely. On top of that it was run by the well-
| organized Mandarin bureaucracy.
| izend wrote:
| The Han Dynasty peaked around 1AD and fell into decline as
| there were weak Emperors (usually extremely young) and
| eventually collapsed in terrible internal conflict.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_the_Han_dynasty
| sed3 wrote:
| Too many wars, sort of. History book I read explained that as
| a wrong division of power. Increased iron production failed
| to increase military strength.
|
| Class that valued industrial production, looked down on
| warfare as something beneath them.
|
| And warlords preferred feudal society of peasants to squeeze.
| Industry would threaten them.
| rhelz wrote:
| Did china have a ready supply of clock and watchmakers?
| bsder wrote:
| Limited sailing.
|
| Sailing and its associated warfare drove technology. China
| started on that path at roughly the same time as everybody
| else and then pulled back for various reasons.
|
| Note that a lot of the industrial revolution was using
| clockmakers. Why do you need super accurate clocks?
| Navigation and ... that's pretty much it. And why do you need
| navigation? Naval warfare.
| throwup238 wrote:
| I think there's one flaw in the overall theory presented in the
| article: it was demand for coal for heating independent of the
| industrial revolution that really kickstarted things and the
| labor exploited for coal mining was the lowest of the
| socioeconomic classes. Before the industrial revolution England
| was already mining around five times more coal than the rest of
| the world _combined_ just to survive winters. Once they exhausted
| the easy surface deposits they had to go deeper and deeper which
| required mechanized power to work against the water seeping in.
| The first engines were invented not when labor became too
| expensive but when it was impossible to do with human labor at
| all.
|
| After reading _Coal - A Human History_ I'm of the opinion that
| the industrial revolution was a complete accident of circumstance
| on a tiny island that didn't have enough trees to support its
| population's energy needs and a surface supply of coal just big
| enough to get the industry started but not enough to supply the
| growing population without digging deeper.
| moomin wrote:
| Yeah, the cost of labour amongst city dwellers seems very far
| from relevant when you're stuck down a pit in Wales.
|
| I think it's interesting to note that the original steam
| engines were specifically for coal mines. A lot of the cost of
| coal was transportation; at the source it was actually pretty
| cheap.
| vundercind wrote:
| For a while it was the _only_ place where burning coal to
| power an (early, inefficient) engine made any economic sense.
|
| There was an ACOUP piece linked on here recently that did a
| pretty convincing job of explaining that you needed the twin
| circumstances of (relatively) deep coal mining (which means
| you need existing substantial demand for coal _unrelated to
| powering engines_ ) and a lot of effort already being spent
| on developing pressure vessels (say... a long-running arms
| race for better and more-powerful cannon) to both get the
| Industrial Revolution at all, and to see it develop so
| remarkably fast as it did. Absent the former, it just doesn't
| happen, and absent the latter, it's a lot slower to get
| going.
| DrScientist wrote:
| I like that idea.
|
| I also think there is always an element of chance. Sometimes
| looking back it's easy to think there was some special sauce -
| Britain was special etc, but sometimes it is a large part
| random chance.
|
| This is particularly the case for something like the Industrial
| revolution where there is a snowball effect - as you optimise
| the process at one point the shifting economics cascade (
| something that was expensive is now cheap, that cheap thing can
| now be used in places it couldn't before ).
| songeater wrote:
| this post is a great read on this topic/thesis as well:
| https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...
| waihtis wrote:
| "Coal - A Human History" was written by a known
| environmentalist which bleeds far too much into the content,
| you shouldn't use it as a trustworthy source for making any
| conclusions
| throwup238 wrote:
| Do you have specific examples of inaccuracy or bias in the
| chapters covering the history of coal in England?
|
| If not for your comment, I wouldn't have known that Barbara
| Freese was an environmentalist.
| highfrequency wrote:
| It's more complicated than that. Mechanization of the textile
| industry (initially with hand power, then water power) was
| underway well before the steam engine's widespread adoption.
|
| Given the massive importance of textiles to Britain's economy
| and the substantial efficiency gains before the steam engine
| was used in textile factories, I don't think it's fair to say
| that the industrial revolution was entirely a coal/heating
| driven coincidence.
|
| These three non-coal factors were also at play in stimulating
| the automation of spinning and weaving:
|
| 1. High wages relative to capital costs (compare with India,
| the previous textile leader, where it was uneconomical to
| invest in machines to reduce human labor)
|
| 2. Relatively elastic input supply of cotton from American
| colonies, and relatively elastic output demand for textiles
| throughout Europe, India, Africa, Asia and America.
|
| 3. A parliamentary system that significantly prioritized
| commercial interests relative to monarchies like Spain, France,
| China. This was relatively unique in the world (exceptions
| include the Dutch Republic and Italian city-states like
| Venice), and certainly unique among states of Britain's size
| and defensibility. It's important to remember that kings don't
| really care whether GDP per capita goes up 1% per year or 0%
| per year; they care about glory from empire expansion and
| regime defense (and the latter is often manifestly _counter_ to
| commercialization and automation, which simultaneously empowers
| a threatening merchant class and also leads to revolts and
| instability among the lower class.)
|
| Note that the first two largely stemmed from Britain's
| increasing domination of world trade, itself founded on a
| combination of naval hegemony, efficient capital markets, and
| shipping expertise (many of these inherited from the Dutch
| legacy following the Glorious Revolution).
|
| Outsized results are almost always caused by a confluence of
| many interacting factors rather than a single explanation like
| coal deposits.
| throwup238 wrote:
| I think you're confusing different engines: Newcomen's first
| practical engine used for pumping water out of mines predates
| Arkwright's water powered Cromford Mill by over 60 years and
| Watt's steam engine by 75. Watt's engine allowed other
| industries to mechanize without water power so that's the
| cutoff most people use for the industrial revolution, but
| coal miners were using a less efficient engine for over half
| a century by that point.
|
| _> Outsized results are almost always caused by a confluence
| of many interacting factors rather than a single explanation
| like coal deposits._
|
| That's a complete strawman. I wasn't making that argument at
| all; quite the opposite! It was the confluence of factors
| that drove England _to use coal_ that are responsible for the
| industrial revolution like the population boom, England 's
| geography and dependence on pasture rather than more
| productive agricultural land leading to deforestation and a
| robust textile industry, and so on.
| highfrequency wrote:
| The first ~40 years of textile manufacturing improvements
| (from the spinning jenny in the 1760s to the first major
| steam powered mills in the 1810s and 1820s) was parallel to
| and largely independent of the steam engine. Concretely,
| Crompton's spinning mule used hundreds of spindles
| simultaneously and was driven by water power. This parallel
| development to the steam engine arc suggests that coal
| alone can't fully explain the magic of the British
| industrial revolution.
|
| There was an incentive to innovate and automate, and a
| political structure that supported it - or at least did not
| shut it down - that existed independently of Britain's coal
| deposits and heating needs.
|
| In my view, the deforestation --> coal --> steam engine arc
| is important, but just one of several factors (other
| notable factors being global trade dominance founded on the
| world's strongest navy and most efficient capital markets,
| as well a parliamentary system consistently advocating for
| commercial over monarchical interests). Coal deposits and
| local deforestation near large cities were _not_ unique to
| Britain (see China, Belgium and Germany).
|
| > _After reading Coal - A Human History I'm of the opinion
| that the industrial revolution was a complete accident of
| circumstance on a tiny island that didn't have enough trees
| to support its population's energy needs..._
|
| This is the part of your initial comment I am responding
| to. I don't mean to make it a straw man, but I do disagree
| with the primacy of the deforestation --> coal arc. I think
| Britain with more trees would still industrialize; on the
| other hand I think Britain without its trade empire or
| navy, or Britain run by an all-powerful emperor would _not_
| have industrialized first.
|
| Another take on why the trade empire/navy was more
| _primary_ than deforestation is that the former had a
| strong causal relationship on the latter. The Royal Navy 's
| shipbuilding was a major cause of deforestation [1], and
| the growth of international trade was itself a significant
| driver of London's population growth which in turn caused
| the forests to be stripped for fuel.
|
| [1] https://legionmagazine.com/the-royal-navys-war-on-
| trees/
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> My point is that the tremendous pre-steam improvements
| in spinning and weaving indicate that there was an
| incentive to innovate and automate - and a political
| structure that supported it - that was independent of
| Britain 's coal deposits and heating needs._
|
| It just sounds like you're trying to make an ideological
| point.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| What? He's _citing_ facts. (True, he hasn 't cited any
| for the proposition that political structure is
| important. There are some to cite, though. For instance,
| see China's 12th-century revolution in iron production
| that was shut down because the politicians didn't like
| it.)
|
| To me, it sounds like you are so sensitive to a
| particular axe being ground that you can't hear it when
| there's objective evidence to support the viewpoint that
| you're nervous about.
| tuatoru wrote:
| There was also a fourth factor, the concentration of a
| literate and mechanically skilled[1] workforce in the areas
| that industrialised first, the Midlands.
|
| Making ploughs and other agricultural machinery, cutlery,
| military arms, and other bits of machinery (axles for carts
| and carriages for instance).
|
| The exploitation of coal for kinetic energy allowed the
| industrial revolution to continue, but yes, it certainly got
| underway well before coal had any contribution of this sort.
|
| I would add that because nearly all of it is invisible, the
| role of heat in industrial processes is now widely
| underestimated. Making salt, the precursor for many chemicals
| as well as having many uses itself; scouring wool, making
| bricks (way more efficient than using stone), and many more.
| Coal enabled all of these to be scaled up well beyond the
| carrying capacity of any country's forests.
|
| Edit: oh, and of course iron smelting!
|
| 1. But not particularly well paid.
| tuatoru wrote:
| And a sixth factor, North-West Europe's backwardness in
| anthropological terms, which enabled labour mobility,
| moving to where the work was.
|
| Most of Eurasia had a communitarian family form, in which
| adult sons and their spouses lived with their parents, and
| were married young, while still economically dependent on
| them.
|
| In NW Europe the ancient neolocal nuclear family form was
| still in use. Adult children moved out of the parental home
| on their own marriage. This meant they could move to
| wherever there were good work prospects rather than being
| stuck on the family farm.
|
| In nearly all of Eurasia getting the necessary urban
| workforces would have been a difficult job.
| hosh wrote:
| And yet, the Song dynasty had a proto-industrial
| revolution, complete with deep mining for salt and
| natural gas, water powered forges, blast furnaces for
| steel, and so forth. This would be between 960 - 1279.
|
| China had a labor surplus for much of its history. There
| were not enough economic opportunities, and ever growing
| numbers of marginalized young men with varying skills in
| militia training leading to increasing banditry,
| uprisings, and so forth.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _it was demand for coal_
|
| "...the industrial revolution was more than simply an increase
| in economic production. Modest increases in economic production
| are, after all, possible in agrarian economies. Instead, the
| industrial revolution was about accessing entirely new sources
| of energy for broad use in the economy, thus drastically
| increasing the amount of power available for human use. The
| industrial revolution thus represents not merely a change in
| quantity, but a change in kind from what we might call an
| 'organic' economy to a 'mineral' economy. Consequently, I'd
| argue, the industrial revolution represents probably just the
| second time in human history that as a species we've undergone
| a radical change in our production; the first being the
| development of agriculture in the Neolithic period."
|
| https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...
| _Note: one of my favourite essays_
| Jensson wrote:
| > for what? Merely to save labor. Our empire has plenty of labor;
| I personally own many slaves. Why waste precious iron and fuel in
| order to lighten the load of a slave?
|
| This here is called central planning, yeah of course industrial
| revolution doesn't happen under central planning made by people
| who have no clue. Capitalism solves this by distributing these
| decisions out to all the laborers, they decide what to make by
| deciding what to spend their money on and investors try to give
| them that.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> Capitalism solves this_
|
| The opposite of central planning isn't capitalism, it's a
| market economy, of which capitalism (which makes a distinction
| between the owners of machines and the laborers manning the
| machines) is one expression.
| Jensson wrote:
| What real world market economy didn't work via capitalism?
| You need a system that disrupts production and fires (or
| retrains) workers with deprecated skills to meet new demand,
| worker cooperatives wouldn't fire themselves because the
| market demand change etc, as far as I know no system except
| capitalism has managed this.
|
| Real world cooperatives has shown they are happily keeping
| progress at bay just to make their own lives easier, only
| pressure by capitalist competitors or laws has worked to help
| give people the products they want.
|
| In general workers has been hostile to new better methods,
| since they put those workers out of a job forcing them to
| retrain and get a new job, workers doesn't like that.
|
| Edit: Is there another system where consumers has more say in
| production than capitalism? I haven't seen it. Consumers
| having a big say in production is really important.
| OtherShrezzing wrote:
| You're conflating "market systems" with "capitalism". All
| capitalist systems are market systems, but not all market
| systems are capitalist.
|
| One of the most significant economic revolutions in all
| human history happened over the last few decades, under a
| socialist market economy rather than a capitalist market
| economy. Similarly, the actual industrial revolution
| started under mercantilist economy, before capitalist
| market economies in anything like their modern forms
| existed.
| Jensson wrote:
| > One of the most significant economic revolutions in all
| human history happened over the last few decades, under a
| socialist market economy rather than a capitalist market
| economy
|
| Where? China is a capitalist market economy, with a bit
| more state regulations than we have in the west, but they
| still have investors, billionaires, profits, buyouts,
| mergers, wage slaves etc. Before their economy went
| capitalist they remained one of the poorest countries on
| earth, then when they adopted capitalism that revolution
| happened.
|
| State regulations are necessary for capitalism to get
| good results, but its still capitalism.
| daedrdev wrote:
| If you are talking about China, they have financial
| markets with private share ownership, a large percentage
| of their economy is private businesses, and their state
| owned companies are run for profit, with said profit
| retained by both private and state own companies within
| themselves rather than being distributed among the
| population in a social dividend or similar scheme, which
| is what people usually think of when they think of a
| socialist market economy.
|
| Additionally, China doesn't have a policy of production
| for use instead of for profit, there is not widespread
| self-management or workplace democracy among companies.
|
| Thus I argue they are state capitalism, since they do not
| actually have socialist policies and instead clearly are
| some form of capitalism with heavy government
| intervention.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> You need a system that disrupts production and fires (or
| retrains) workers with deprecated skills to meet new
| demand_
|
| The prevailing monarchic structure of corporations is
| terrible at firing the people at the top. All of my friends
| at Google would love to fire Sundar Pichai, and yet they
| can't because authority in companies is structured such
| that it flows from the top down rather than from the bottom
| up. Give ownership to the employees and let them vote on
| the executives.
| Jensson wrote:
| Capitalism fires the people at the top by replacing them
| with new companies. That ensures progress will happen,
| either by incumbents or by disruptors, either way we
| aren't stuck.
|
| When/if Google gets bad enough or their technology gets
| deprecated they will get replaced. You can argue it isn't
| happening fast enough for your taste, but its just been a
| decade or two depending on how you count, this rate of
| progress and disruptions and replacements is extremely
| fast compared to any other known system.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> Capitalism fires the people at the top by replacing
| them with new companies._
|
| That's common to all market economies, including ones
| where ownership of the company belongs to all of its
| employees rather than merely to its executives.
| Capitalism is not the only system where competition
| between companies is a feature.
| Jensson wrote:
| > That's common to all market economies
|
| No, you need a system to fund new companies, only
| capitalism does that naturally. The alternative to
| capitalism would be central planning, or that we vote to
| fund new companies.
|
| So you would have to organize a vote to make a new search
| engine if you thought Google wasn't good enough, and
| without that vote there would be no new search engine
| funded so we wouldn't have alternatives, so people
| wouldn't even know if anything better could exist.
|
| It is hard enough today to get a handful of founders and
| investors agree to make a company, imagine needing
| thousands to millions of people to vote to agree on
| making a new company... I don't see how that could work
| nearly as well.
|
| Also I asked for real examples, not hypothetical, when
| you make up hypothetical scenarios like that you miss
| many real world requirements like what I brought up here,
| your system doesn't solve that. To have a healthy market
| you need to fund new promising ideas, capitalism does
| that via rich people, communism does that via central
| planning, how would you do it except voting? And as I
| said above, voting isn't good enough, voting to fund new
| companies would massively slow down progress.
|
| Most wouldn't want a new company, workers doesn't benefit
| from it, without rich people you need hundreds or
| thousands of workers to risk their savings to fund a
| company just to most likely lose all their money and not
| even get paid since the company folded and they were paid
| profits instead of salaries, that isn't something they
| would be happy to do.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> No, you need a system to fund new companies, only
| capitalism does that naturally._
|
| I'm not sure why you have come to believe this. Companies
| can start small and grow large as they need to. As
| companies grow and gain employees, those employees gain
| equal control over their company in the same way that
| citizens to a country gain the ability to vote. I'm not
| sure where this conception comes from that we need to
| have the entire country vote on starting new companies,
| that has nothing to do with this.
|
| _> capitalism does that via rich people_
|
| You appear to think that the goal of this is to eliminate
| wealth inequality, but that's not the point at all. You
| appear to be importing your conceptions about communism
| into this conversation, but this has nothing at all to do
| with communism. This is a market economy where companies
| are structured as democracies rather than as monarchies.
| panick21_ wrote:
| A point lots of socialist like to make. But practically
| speaking that is the only market economy that has ever
| existed beyond a few short lived experiments and those were
| questionable.
|
| You can only have a market if you have property rights. And
| property rights without the ability of having somebody else
| on work on your land/maschine doesn't really make sense.
|
| Many of the market socialist theoriest totally failed to put
| their ideas into practice. And I have yet to actually see
| somebody come up with a coherent alternative.
|
| Seems to me the whole 'market economy' term is just used by
| socialist when they dont want to admit the benefits of
| capitalism.Therefore imply some alternative that has markets
| but not all the bad parts.
|
| These ideas come around again and again and I have never seen
| anything that is actually coherent.
| kibwen wrote:
| Nowhere in my previous comment do I mention abolishing
| property rights. This has nothing to do with socialism, and
| I'm not sure why you think it has. This is about replacing
| the monarchic corporate structure with a democratic
| corporate structure; please refute democracy and argue in
| favor of monarchy if you think this is wrong.
| panick21_ wrote:
| You are talking about a system that has never existed and
| I'm not even remotely clear what 'democratic corporate
| structure' would mean in practice.
| asdasdsddd wrote:
| Here is the refutation. I own the legal entity therefore
| I get to say how the thing works.
|
| Now you are free to associate or not with the legal
| entity, but while you are associated with the legal
| entity, I get to dictate how it runs.
| goeiedaggoeie wrote:
| Didn't the Malthusian cycle result in labour shortages
| continously? What about the roman empire (byzantanian) after
| plagues?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Yes, but at such a time you would not have a shortage of wood
| for fuel.
| lazide wrote:
| Shortly after a contraction, if anything the forests would
| regrow.
|
| Fueling the war machines a decade or so later, of course.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| it actually happened
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_during_the_Rom.
| ..
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| It strikes me that if you have different classes of people
| working on a problem then it doesn't necessarily matter what's
| more efficient on a per-person basis initially because some
| people will not be doing the work anyway.
|
| For example, buying a power sander for 10 hours labour cost when
| you could just have sanded the table down in less than 10 hours
| manually.
|
| It's not like there were infinite quantities of slaves or lower
| class workers, at some point someone is going to explore the idea
| of automation purely out of interest.
|
| For what it's worth this is why I believe that inequality and
| some level of wealth at the top is useful and necessary. You want
| a class of people who can just sort of mess about as they see
| fit. Otherwise everyone is just scrambling to meet basic needs.
| philosopher1234 wrote:
| > For what it's worth this is why I believe that inequality and
| some level of wealth at the top is useful and necessary. You
| want a class of people who can just sort of mess about as they
| see fit. Otherwise everyone is just scrambling to meet basic
| needs.
|
| I'm not sure who you're responding to, but it doesn't sound
| like a position any Marxist I read would take. I also think
| your position is contradicts reality.
|
| Consider
|
| 1. Some inequality is necessary to fuel competition, and that
| is good. But the level of inequality we have today is
| destabilizing and breeds abuse. It's about quantity, not
| quality
|
| 2. Why is the choice between "everyone scrambles to meet basic
| needs" and "a few people can mess around"? The level of wealth
| we have as a country could make it such that far more people
| can mess around than do today. Wouldn't that be better, by your
| own logic?
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| I'm just making a general statement, not a comment on how
| things are today or whether they should change.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| Tangential: the cover of Allen's book uses the exact same
| painting as Vaclav Smil's _Energy and Civilization_?? I 'm
| reading too much into this but that seems a bit suspect and
| lazy... And yes I judge books by their covers; it is actually a
| fairly reliable heuristic for me (edit: but in this case the
| heuristic would fail me because this book sounds excellent)
|
| https://mit-press-us.imgix.net/covers/9780262536165.jpg?auto...
|
| https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41gNLyXI-BL.jpg
|
| Also check out MIT Press using imgix for their image server!)
| allturtles wrote:
| If anything it should make you suspicious of Smil's book, since
| it was published more recently.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| Valid! _Energy and Civilization_ didn 't live up to the hype
| for me so I'm happy to include this possibility
|
| For completeness we should also mention the other
| possibilities:
|
| * The author(s) had no control over the cover design (which I
| hear is common)
|
| * There aren't many readily available paintings out there
| that capture the vibes of the industrial revolution as well
| as this one
|
| * No one cares, stop talking about this
| slothtrop wrote:
| I only read How the World Really Works, but I thought it
| was generally good, save for occasional non-sequiturs.
| ghaff wrote:
| Allen has been publishing about this topic since the 1970s. I
| first became acquainted based on his work around knowledge
| diffusion.
| QuesnayJr wrote:
| Allen is probably the leading economic historian of the
| Industrial Revolution. Reading someone want to dismiss his book
| because someone used the same painting on their book cover
| later is probably the most HN comment I've ever seen.
| usrusr wrote:
| Surprised to see that long a text about the demand side of
| innovation without any mention of war as the mother of all
| invention. Seems to me almost like an elephant in the room
| nodding in puzzled agreement. Puzzled that strong demand side
| influence isn't taken as a given.
| michaelt wrote:
| Back when we mostly had WW2 to look at, and Vietnam seemed an
| outlier we could ignore, wars seemed to spur loads of
| inventiveness.
|
| After 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan, though? The "war as the
| mother of all invention" hypothesis seems a lot weaker. It
| might have spurred some advances in the science of treating IED
| injuries, but I've never heard any serious scholars attribute
| Facebook, Youtube or the iPhone to the US presence in Iraq.
| lazide wrote:
| Wars you can lose are the mother of invention. It's literally
| existential threat as a motivator writ large.
|
| The US could never win, and never 'lose' (as in, cease to
| exist as a county) either of those wars.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Huh? The last 25 years completely turned the conduct of war
| on its head. The arrival of the drone and ubiquitous
| communications made everything obsolete.
|
| As witnessed in Ukraine, tanks are toast, fighter planes are
| of relatively limited utility in contested airspace, and
| surface navy is a dinosaur.
|
| As witnessed in a variety of places, communications rules. If
| your leadership is hamfisted in how it acts and communicates,
| public opinion will flip on you, and then you're done.
| History should educate us eventually about how influence
| operations affected western democratic processes.
|
| Warfare is back to insurgency and infantry/artillery
| shootouts. Except now chaos and effective surveillance and
| improving drone technology limit power projection. How many
| C-17s need to be blown up on the ground by little drones
| before landing a rapid reaction force isn't feasible? How
| many major warships sunk by semi-submersible drones will be
| acceptable to operate in an area of the sea?
| bluGill wrote:
| > As witnessed in Ukraine, tanks are toast, fighter planes
| are of relatively limited utility in contested airspace,
| and surface navy is a dinosaur
|
| None of those are witnessed in Ukraine.
|
| Tanks are only useless if you use them in roles most
| armchair strategists wouldn't be stupid enough to use them
| for, much less a proper military strategist. Ukraine is
| using tanks to great effect today - as are the few
| competent commanders Russia has. (though with drones tanks
| are not as useful as in the past they are still useful).
|
| Ukraine is asking for more fighters for a reason - they
| believe that if they had greater numbers they could contest
| airspace and win. Fighters are useless in small numbers is
| a good lesson to draw, but that doesn't say anything about
| larger numbers.
|
| Surface navy hasn't been fighting in Ukraine at all. We
| cannot draw any lessons from this conflict. Sure they are
| vulnerable to drones - but there are also protections that
| could be applied. You should perhaps look to the red sea
| where the US navy is fighting and shooting down drones with
| reasonable success.
|
| Ukraine/Russia is one war. While there are a lot of lessons
| to learn there, do not draw the wrong ones. Militaries
| around the world constantly make the mistake of preparing
| for the last war. The next war (whatever it is!) will be
| different, and taking a lesson out context will lose the
| war for your side.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> Huh? The last 25 years completely turned the conduct of
| war on its head._
|
| When people say "war is the mother of all invention" they
| don't just mean military invention, they mean _all_
| invention.
|
| WW2 coincided with major advances in control theory,
| cryptography, penicillin, plastics, synthetic fuels,
| computing, rocketry, radionavigation, jet engines and so on
| - advances with major non-military relevance to this day.
|
| In comparison, what's the equivalent technology to come out
| of Iraq? The 2005 Darpa Grand Challenge that might lead to
| self-driving cars any decade now, and that never saw any
| use in Iraq? Drone tech that's 95% developed in China, who
| weren't even involved in the war?
| openrisk wrote:
| What if they gave a digital revolution and nobody came?
|
| Interesting mental exercise to put ourselves 50 years into the
| future and examine who, why and to what effect adopted what kind
| of digital technology...
| verisimi wrote:
| Surely the biggest factor would be the use of force. From acts of
| enclosure (where common land was stolen by the local upper
| classes), to the destruction of local crafts as with the
| Luddites. Once you destroy the local 'lifestyle' businesses, you
| force thousands off the land to become cheap labour. Or be
| subjected to the poor houses.
|
| Force upon force - this is government, the state.
| jjk166 wrote:
| This article, like many, grossly oversimplifies the industrial
| revolution to the adoption of the steam engine and similar
| capital investments. Steam engines were not the industrial
| revolution, nor were they the cause. Most of these technologies
| were evolutionary improvements on other technologies that
| predated the industrial revolution, and the industrial revolution
| began before their wide adoption. The industrial revolution
| enabled steam engines, bessemer furnaces, automated looms, and
| other such technologies, not the other way around.
|
| The industrial revolution is really a series of several major
| upheavals in life which occurred in discreet stages across a
| rather long time period. You have the scientific revolution that
| leads to a steady stream of invention and, more critically,
| refinement which in turn allows machines and processes to be
| steadily improved over time instead of the haphazard slip-faults
| of earlier progress. You have the agricultural revolution which
| both enables massive population growth and frees up large
| portions of the population to live and work in urban centers. You
| had the development first of the cottage system, then the british
| factory system, and then the american factory system, which
| changed both how goods were produced and how society was
| structured. There is the metrology revolution which, while
| building off the scientific revolution, was really more of a
| political and economic change, and enabled the development of
| machine tools and economical precision parts. And you have the
| birth of modern economics and the rise of the capitalist class as
| a dominant element in society, which really made large capital
| investments viable. None of these things depended on the steam
| engine, most preceded the wide adoption of the steam engine.
| Likewise for the other technologies that typically come to mind
| when thinking of the time period.
|
| The article also fundamentally mischaracterizes other time
| periods. The Romans were actually quite big on adopting new
| technologies that would save labor. They were an extremely
| pragmatic people, and they viewed their reliance on slave labor
| as undesirable. Especially in late antiquity after their
| conquests mostly stopped, and as they were frequently troubled by
| civil wars, labor was actually a major issue. They would have
| gladly adopted a working steam engine. The issue was that, being
| pragmatic, they weren't big on developing technologies that
| didn't have clear practical applications. The development of what
| would become Watt's steam engine took roughly 200 years of people
| screwing around with what was essentially a toy, which they
| mostly did as a means of signalling to their peers that they were
| sufficiently wealthy that they could dilly-dally on nonsense. It
| wasn't just the steam engine itself, important technical
| challenges like precision machining of bores all had to be
| figured out, it took a whole culture of people pursuing useless
| invention to make progress, as opposed to one or two hyper
| fixated polymaths. And even Watt's steam engine wasn't that good,
| it would be decades more before people started, for example,
| putting them on ships.
|
| Next, while I'm sure the book has more, the data the article
| presents seems to be a very week evidence in support of its
| thesis. London wages, when normalized for prices, don't jump
| relative to other nations until after 1825. At the normally
| accepted start date of 1750 for the industrial revolution (even
| though the groundwork was being laid long before this), London
| wages were typical for northern europe, lower than those in
| Amsterdam had been in the past several centuries, and they were
| falling. Prices for coal in London were typical; prices nearer
| the coal mines were low but there is no comparison made to other
| cities outside Britain that were near to coal production sites.
| For the wages to price of capital, the whole of England is
| compared to two cities which weren't even particularly notable
| industrial centers when their respective nations first started to
| industrialize. The analysis of supply side factors seems much
| more focused on inventors than on the process of invention, which
| is inherently collaborative and multifaceted. It seems from the
| quotes at the end that the book is far more conservative in its
| claims, so perhaps this is sufficient, but again I feel it is
| ignoring a lot.
|
| Finally, I am generally critical of any analysis that asks why
| the industrial revolution started in Britain, as opposed to
| elsewhere, and treats it as a unique, solitary data point.
| Obviously it can only happen for the first time once, but many
| nations have industrialized, and every time it has been a process
| spanning decades if not centuries, starting in some regions while
| reaching others later. While no doubt each example has its
| idiosyncrasies, for example there's a world of difference between
| the industrialization of Meiji Japan and Communist China, there
| are nevertheless patterns that repeat. Any convincing theory as
| to why the industrial revolution started in Britain ought to
| predict how industrial revolutions begin and spread in general,
| or at least explain why it needs to be considered separately. I
| can't really blame an english speaking historian for focusing on
| a region whose primary sources are all in english, but if you're
| going to call something a global perspective, I expect more.
| bluGill wrote:
| The above is why the bicycle and car were invented at almost
| the same time despite a car seeming to be vastly more complex.
| (in fact the first car was demonstrated over 100 years before
| the first bicycle - at least according to the wikipedia
| timelines, though drawings of both existed for longer that
| appear to have never been built). Once you have enough of the
| industrial revolution to build a practical bicycle (chain, ball
| bearings) you also have enough to build a car. The car is in
| fact easier because the power source not being human means you
| don't have to care about efficiency.
| rhelz wrote:
| Curios claim in the article:
|
| > High wages come from high productivity,
|
| which, I think is patently false. Wages are set by supply and
| demand, same as anything else. High wages incent increases in
| productivity, not the other way around.
|
| Why were wages _not_ at substance levels in Briton on the eve of
| the industrial revolution? What drove up the demand for workers?
| pixl97 wrote:
| Was Briton not a large naval power by that point in their
| history already?
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time (of the article);
|
| _What if they gave an Industrial Revolution and nobody came?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35983290 - May 2023 (5
| comments)
| Sniffnoy wrote:
| One thing not discussed here: Coke had been used in China since
| ancient times. How does that fit into the discussion about coke
| here?
| dan_mctree wrote:
| I'd like to recommend the author mentioned briefly in the article
| on this topic: Joel Mokyr. Unlike how this article paints him,
| Joel doesn't really point to a sole cause for the industrial
| revolution, but highlights a broad range of contributing factors,
| I thought it was very insightful.
|
| While it's certainly not the only cause, high wages as a
| contributing factor to innovation in productivity does still seem
| like a plausible factor behind the industrial revolution. I
| suspect that these days in the west, labor is relatively so cheap
| compared to how much capital is around, that capital ends up
| being rather inefficiently used. Or at least, capital doesn't
| primarily go to production increases anymore. Perhaps there's
| avenues for gains here today
| golergka wrote:
| Capitalism and real open markets for capital and labour were
| essential requirements for industrial revolution to take off.
| Roman Empire had some capitalist features, but most of the
| economy was run either by the state or oligarchs, and a large
| proportion as emperor himself. So, even if some invention offered
| real productivity gains, the stakeholders who had the power were
| much interested in conserving and increasing their share of the
| pie instead of growing the pie for everybody.
| paulorlando wrote:
| I wrote a short book on this topic, from a timing lens. That is,
| what needs to happen to see certain inventions become sustainable
| innovations. The business model piece is what's often left out if
| you only think about new capabilities. Lots of examples to draw
| upon for this. If interested, the book is called Why Now: How
| Good Timing Makes Great Products.
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