Was the Industrial Revolution the Industrial Revolution?

Before 1840 or so, most people never got more than 50 miles from home. By 1890, in Europe or the US, there were trains to all major cities. In major cities, you could then take an electric street car from the train station by the 1890s.

Here's a railroad map of the US from 1890.[1]

That was the era when the world changed in one lifetime.

[1] https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3701p.rr000640/?r=-0.171,-0.01...

The rapid change in productivity is exemplified by the making of the humble machine screw.

Prior to Maudsley, screws were made by hand, and numbered because they weren't interchangeable. Craftsmanship was required to make a good screw thread. Within a decade, an apprentice could make them with almost no training. Soon thereafter, machines turned them out in quantity.

The quality of material required to be suitable stock for use in a lathe was the result of other similar improvements in quantity and quality of production.

You can follow the causal chain down a million rabbit holes.

Not just flying, literally standing on the fucking moon.

There is no other way to explain how this can happen, then industrial revolution. No other term captures the spirit of that change. That why it will always stick around popularly.

And in world historic political terms, it also lead in to essentially control of the world by 6 small West European nations.

Overall very interesting article. Reading about that time is really fascinating and something I want to do more of. Not just the statistical, but lives of the people that lived during that change.

The argument always seemed political to me: just look at Orwell’s Wigan Pier (~1920s) or Wylie’s Village in the Vaucluse, or hell, the 1939 German invasion of Poland with horse drawn cannon to see the flatness of the curve.

Zhou Enlai’s quip about the significance of the French Revolution is instructive here: “Too soon to tell”. For a “revolution” — a true turn of the wheel — is usually a slow motion and almost invisible affair, like swimming through a huge wave. Unless you’re close to the shore where it breaks, it’s hard to see and its implication unclear.

You don’t need a huge first derivative when you are collecting the AUC and that’s why you often don’t see it. Remember the computer “revolution” that was “visible everywhere but in the productivity statistics” (that was Solow in 87). The ARPANET had already transitioned to TCP by then but the consequences were still decades away.

So there was an industrial revolution, but trying to describe it as a kind of Big Bang is a parallel relic of the “great man” school of history.

We have pretty amazing electric cars but they’re only like 1% of the global fleet. Solar powers also only 2% of US electricity, and even less than that globally on average. Same for battery storage or even IT innovation. I think in some ways we still haven’t fully absorbed computer technology from 50 years ago. Electric aircraft is similar. A lot of people aren’t even aware that we really have electric aircraft as a technological possibility. We have probably 80 years of growth just to fully utilize lithium battery chemistries, IMHO. Things like mRNA tech are even more important.

I also wonder how events like pandemics and wars facilitate growth (in the form of increasing technology permeation through society) as compensation for the destructive effects of pandemics and wars. In the last year or so we experienced an explosion of infusion of work from home technology and online ordering/home-delivery that probably would’ve taken a decade or 2 to happen otherwise. The trick is to get the advantage of these events without the destructiveness. I don’t think we figured that one out yet.

It takes time to build a factory, especially one that's unlike any that has ever been built before. Then after you get it working, it takes time for people to learn all the little idiosyncrasies necessary to get the most out of it. Indeed, adopting radically new technologies might in the short term lead to substantial losses in productivity.

But substantially, the way things were made changed. Some industries associated with the revolution saw enormous growth of course, but everything changed. Wooden tools were replaced by metal, labor was concentrated and mechanized, backwater towns became bustling cities while old centers of commerce declined. Normalizing growth rate per capita is dumb when part of the revolution is the change in population.

It also seems silly to hold the growth of that period against the standard of today. Innovation builds upon innovation, and the modern growth rate is the product of billions of people educated in modern sciences and technical disciplines. China can achieve 8% growth rates today because it can utilize the advances of others. If on the other hand you compare growth rates to pre-industrial societies, 2% is really impressive. Prior to the industrial revolution, growth was barely existent, GDP per capita was as likely to go down as up. In the first world from 1750 to 1850, GDP per capita nearly doubled, during the same period in the third world it decreased by 10%. The UK specifically saw a 61% GDP per capita increase from 1830 to 1860, compared to an average for western Europe of 29%. The industrial revolution marks the beginning of consistently positive growth, a major qualitative shift.

We observe in reality exactly what we'd expect to see: a major change in how things are done in the late 1700s followed by rapid economic growth compared to neighbors who did not make those changes over the subsequent decades.

I have often wondered about exactly this kind of thing so it's nice to see a researched take on it. The thing in my mind was always that culturally, an image of "big city industry" arose at some point - but that point clearly wasn't the late 1700's, or even into the first decades of the 1800's. So then, when was it? There are a few reference markers that suggest when that image could have coalesced, though:

* The first railroads of the 1830's

* The gold rushes and immigration waves of the mid-19th (precipitated by faster communication and rising sea traffic)

* The Crimean and US Civil Wars, both "industrial" in their making.

* The completion of transcontinental railroads

* The creation of modern urban sanitation

* The organization of wage labor as a movement, including revolutionary forms

These markers seem to align well with the 1850's-1870's growth figure assessment. The world by 1880 had experienced a vast reallocation of physical resources and human capital, and fell into a new political context premised around those reallocations. In the emerging cities, by day, immigrants toiled in sweatshops; by night, those with the means came out to party underneath the gaslamps. More and more goods were available imported. If you travelled, you bumped shoulders with the vast crowds at hub train stations. And there was always news of something more being invented. All of that made the revolution a visible thing reorganizing everyday life, even if it only tangentially affected you. Before that period, while you might have heard of new developments from afar, most of them did not carry such sudden impact.