The End of the Past
medium.com
medium.com
I agree slavery was very important but, early modern Europe had slavery too. It begs the question to just say slavery was less important to the modern economy: why was that? One difference is that early modern Europe, for all its wars, had no dominant apex predator like the Roman Republic.
True, the Republic fostered advanced trade -- it was wise enough not to destroy provincial economies. But aristocrats still lived off the taxes and bribes payed in conquered lands.
This meant that if you had some wealth, the best investment for it was to bribe your way to a government post. This general pattern lead to the empire, and to its corruption.
It also explains the rentier culture that the article describes.
Roman Italy was fed and clothed by products of non-Italian economies; It's easy to get a multiplier of your GDP if you have landowners that "farm" overseas land with overseas slave labor that isn't part of your economy consumption.
(From my memory of a book I read a year ago.)
I'd guess that even without Rome, military technology & organization would've made cities increasingly vulnerable, and it'd have been a race between increasing despotism from such developments and the fact that freer more dynamic societies also have a kind of military advantage (see Archimedes again at Syracuse). But of course I'm indulging in total speculation.
I've asked this question before - why didn't the Roman Empire progress to an industrial revolution?
The Roman Empire never developed the concept of the corporation. They never got beyond the "one rich guy" or "rich family" stage of business organization. They never had much in the way of inter-city businesses. They didn't have common carriers for shipments. They had the roads and the legal system to make that work, but somehow never developed something like Wells Fargo, the stagecoach line. They lacked the organizational tools to scale a business.
The Roman Empire had figured out how to scale government, training provincial executives in Rome and sending them out to govern. The Empire had a sizable grain and oil shipping operation, but this seems to have been done as a Government contracting operation, not as a private business.
Another argument is that the industrial revolution needed coal, iron, and water power in reasonably close proximity. Italy doesn't have much of that that. England and France do. So do parts of the US. Once you've got railroads, the proximity doesn't matter as much, but until then, it's hard to get started.
The political importance of land ownership may have been an obstacle, but England had a landed gentry all through the Industrial Revolution. The landowners couldn't stop progress, although some of them opposed it. They couldn't even stop railroads; Parliament could and did approve "compulsory purchase" of the right of way.
It's a good question. For a thousand years, the Roman Empire couldn't solve this basic economic problem. What are we missing about our own society?
great story for a young kid like me but shit acting and cheap special effects made it totally forgettable.
A corporation allows for both pooled and limited risk.
This permits a civilization to take on large projects such as building a railroad or a refinery - activities that were both expensive and financially risky.
The only other alternative is the State, but then that involves taxes and keeping the populace happy, which tends to impede progress. Things like the Coliseum get built instead of railroads.
Individuals have high tendency not to do it because once people have attained a certain amount of wealth, they are more interested in protecting against losses than taking on expensive risky projects. Daniel Kahneman wan a Nobel prize for work related to this kind of decision making (http://www.apa.org/monitor/dec02/nobel.aspx).
I have always heard an answer that I thought was widely accepted (maybe not): the combination of slavery and Christianism.
Masters would not be interested in improving efficiency because the work was done by slaves. Look for a short story by William Golding: "Envoy Extraordinary" for a literary version of that point.
Then Christianism didn't improve the situation. It got rid of slavery, but not of slaves. The mindset was not the same but no better either.
...which is far from open-shut, in my reading of it. It's a tangential point, I guess, but worth considering in evaluating the plausibility of the whole argument.
The question is ill posed. It assumes that economies move on a linear scale - with definite positive and negative directions. Was the economy of the Soviet Union in the 1930s more advanced than that of the Dutch Republic in the 1600s? Well, the USSR could produce tractors and icebreakers. But the Dutch had a stock market and a really good internal transportation network.
In the US? Compared to whom? Doctors? Bankers? Lawyers? Politicians?
Who do you think that you are better than?
Most of my ethics course from university focused on US based case studies (Tacoma Bridge, Kansas City walkway collapse, Space Shuttle etc.) So it could be possible Engineers in US have a worse reputation.
One of these things is not like the others.
In a macroeconomic sense, there's no significant difference between poor workers buying their food and housing versus a slaveowner buying food and constructing barracks for the slaves; there's not significant difference between a job being so worthless that noone would pay poor laborers to do it and a job that's not worth the food & resources that slaves would consume while doing it. A poor worker could do a slave's job for just a meal, if (s)he had no better alternatives.
A robot-based economy creates different challenges. If a robot can do a job cheaper than a handful of rice a day, then poor people won't be able to live with such a job ever again. Just as right now people (or slaves!) can't feed themselves by working in a treadmill (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treadwheel).
Mass slavery can drive the price of (some?) labor down to the level of bare sustenance. Mass automation can potentially drive the price of (some?most?) labor down below that level - and that's a significant difference.
Isaac Newton.
I'm surprised that historians don't consider that possibility, at least to the extent required to exclude it.
Consider also the printing press. Invented much earlier, but something which built up momentum as it was improved and paper was made cheaper.
Perhaps the improved ability to disseminate information made the industrial revolution inevitable?