The Industrial Revolution Myth - Page 7 - Historum

PragmaticStatistic · May 9th, 2012, 11:43 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by spellbanisher

Guaporense, I think you should at least skim the article before you critique what I say about it. Sometimes in a simple forum post I can be sloppy with terms. Krugman's point is that the Asian economies, like Russia, were largely directed, with a huge focus on swift martialing of resources and accumulation of capital instead of improving the efficiency of that capital. He actually says that the reason that Singapore is wealthier than Russia is because they have always been more efficient(i.e. historical reasons); his point is that unlike western countries, industrialization in Asia has not corresponded with both increases in inputs and outputs. His greater point is that in terms of efficiency of inputs, East Asia has not been catching up. Whether or not that holds true in the 18 years since he wrote that article I don't know.

I can attest to that. Of MechoShade's 34 international fabricators that I came in contact with, our Malaysian fabricator seemed to me to be one of the better and more efficient businessmen; and he had the sales to back it up.

PragmaticStatistic · May 9th, 2012, 12:43 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Guaporense

We have the historical event, the British Industrial revolution from ~1770 to ~1860 where there occurred an much greater volume of entrepreneurial innovations than ever before and this much greater flow of entrepreneurial innovation continues to this day..

According to Wikipedia there were two distinct Industrial Revolutions:

First_Industrial_Revolution

: 1750-1850.

Quote:

"Where changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, transportation, and technology had a profound effect on the social, economic and cultural conditions of the times. It began in the United Kingdom, then subsequently spread throughout Western Europe, North America, Japan, and eventually the rest of the world: where changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, transportation, and technology had a profound effect on the social, economic and cultural conditions of the times. It began in the United Kingdom, then subsequently spread throughout Western Europe, North America, Japan, and eventually the rest of the world."

Second_Industrial_Revolution

Second_Industrial_Revolution
: 1860 - .

Quote:

"Also known as the Technological Revolution which culminated in mass production and the production line."

A third would be the Information Revolution: 1990 -, which may have the largest impact -- both positively and negatively -- where the processing of information, data and communication increased production, productivity, mass marketing, education, communication between consumers and marketers, and resulted in under employment and lower wages for greater productivity.

Thus, this series of so called "revolutions" in a way speaks to Guaporense's premise that the Industrial Revolution is not so much a revolution as a series of historical events as part of a continuing process of improvement. It may have seemed like a revolution in the mid 1750's because of the strengthening will of self determination in the 1750's, but the succeeding so called production revolutions indicate that the past was just another phase of a continuing process. Like any invention, it relies on the successes and failures of others. Theories that long ago were not accepted are suddenly considered brilliant, and become the solution to a new invention that enable mass production. If we apply the true meaning of a revolution, it was more of an Industrial Evolution than an Industrial Revolution because no authority was forcibly over thrown.

**spellbanisher** · May 9th, 2012, 09:40 PM

The Allen paper I posted on the first page discusses why the Industrial Revolution was revolutionary, and why it led to the Second Industrial Revolution.

PragmaticStatistic · May 10th, 2012, 09:09 AM

I think Matt Tiabbi's recent Rolling Stone article, "How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform", relates to that portion of the discussion about the relationship between business and government.

**Guaporense** · June 28th, 2012, 07:29 PM

That's it people! The real stuff:

http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu.../Riverside.PDF

The Enduring Riddle of the
European Miracle:
The Enlightenment and the
Industrial Revolution

Joel Mokyr

Departments of Economics and History
Northwestern University

Preliminary and Incomplete. Version of October, 2002.

**Guaporense** · June 28th, 2012, 07:33 PM

That's the real stuff:

Quote:

Economic historians may have been neglecting intellectual and ideological change at their peril. In their efforts to find differences between West and East that will explain the historical emergence of the “twin peaks” phenomenon between 1750 and 1914, they have focused too much on economic, geographical, and political or cultural differences. I am not arguing in this paper that any of these factors did not matter. What needs to be explained was the technological take-off that Europe experienced after 1750 and, equally important, the fact that the economic advances implied by this technology did not fizzle out but in fact became sustained and self-enforcing. My argument is that this process cannot be understood without paying attention to the one clear and unmistakable difference between West and East in the eighteenth century: the fact that the West experienced something we call “the Enlightenment” and nobody else did.

Not everything in the Enlightenment mattered equally to subsequent economic development. I have focused here on two phenomena. One is that the diffusion of Baconian thinking on the nature and purpose of useful knowledge was the taproot of continuing technological advances in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Industrial Enlightenment was no more confined to Britain than the political Enlightenment was confined to France, although it was in Britain where its first successful products emerged. The other was the growing resistance to privileges, tax-exemptions, limitations on geographical and occupational mobility and choice, monopolies, and other sources of rentseeking and built-in economic inequality. As Mancur Olson might have noted, the French Revolution and its aftermath wiped out or weakened a great number of distributional coalitions in continental Europe. Yet the political Revolutions in the West during the four decades between 1775 and 1815 were no historical accident, and their ideological constituents mattered to the institutions they created. That such institutions were far from perfect and that rent seeking never disappeared and is still a continuing threat to economic performance goes without saying. By the criteria outlined above, however, the institutional changes inspired and guided by Enlightenment ideas qualify as “institutional progress” much as the inventions of that period qualify for the label technological progress. Without understanding those dual developments, the European Miracle will remain the Global Enigma.

fascinating · June 28th, 2012, 11:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by PragmaticStatistic

According to Wikipedia there were two distinct Industrial Revolutions:

1750 to 1850: 1750-1850.

Second_Industrial_Revolution: 1860 - .

A third would be the Information Revolution: 1990 -, which may have the largest impact -- both positively and negatively -- where the processing of information, data and communication increased production, productivity, mass marketing, education, communication between consumers and marketers, and resulted in under employment and lower wages for greater productivity.

Thus, this series of so called "revolutions" in a way speaks to Guaporense's premise that the Industrial Revolution is not so much a revolution as a series of historical events as part of a continuing process of improvement. It may have seemed like a revolution in the mid 1750's because of the strengthening will of self determination in the 1750's, but the succeeding so called production revolutions indicate that the past was just another phase of a continuing process. Like any invention, it relies on the successes and failures of others. Theories that long ago were not accepted are suddenly considered brilliant, and become the solution to a new invention that enable mass production. If we apply the true meaning of a revolution, it was more of an Industrial Evolution than an Industrial Revolution because no authority was forcibly over thrown.

Oh for goodness' sake! How many revolutions are we going to dream up? Considering the exponential growth in productivity that has occured in many industries on many different points in history over the last 200 years, we could call many thngs "revolutionary", but it is an over-used word. Remember "revolution" means one complete turning around of a wheel, but in this context it implies a complete change in direction, and I suppose it could mean (in my view) the change of the graph of productivity (mostly a wiggly, but largely flat, line for all of history up to 1750) to an exponentially growing curve.

Of course, in trying to identify the start of the industrial revolution we won't be able to see a tidy curve (and identify a point on that where growth became mathematically exponential) because of the "noise" of economic ups and downs. We are left with identifying individual industries (I include agriculture as an "industry" in the sense of people industriously trying to make products) which showed the greatest increase in production per worker hour.

PragmaticStatistic · June 29th, 2012, 03:07 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by fascinating

Oh for goodness' sake! How many revolutions are we going to dream up? Considering the exponential growth in productivity that has occured in many industries on many different points in history over the last 200 years, we could call many thngs "revolutionary", but it is an over-used word... Of course, in trying to identify the start of the industrial revolution we won't be able to see a tidy curve (and identify a point on that where growth became mathematically exponential) because of the "noise" of economic ups and downs.

You did not read my post entirely, because that was exactly my point, that this series of so called "revolutions" in a way speaks to Guaporense's premise that the Industrial Revolution is not so much a revolution as a series of historical events as part of a continuing process of improvement.