What if they gave an Industrial Revolution and nobody came? (2023) | Hacker News Reader

What if they gave an Industrial Revolution and nobody came? (2023)

rootsofprogress.org

183 pointsAndrewDucker175 comments

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.

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.

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.

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 ).

this post is a great read on this topic/thesis as well: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...

"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

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.

Please refer to this review by Joel M. Kauffman, Professor of Chemistry Emeritus. University of the Sciences in Philadelphia:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1Q4KDKM5SNDBA/re...

> There is no correlation of CO2 levels with [global] warming

Do you really expect us to accept this review?

Its from 2008, the case for global warming was much weaker then. Today it is very hard to argue against global warming being caused by Co2, we have 10% more CO2 in the atmosphere today than in 2008 and that is really noticeable.

So the author of the book was right and the review turned out to be wrong

Yeah, I am just defending the person not the study. It is possible other parts of it are reasonable, I haven't read it, just saying that arguing against such things in 2008 didn't mean you were an insane person, but today it does, so that doesn't discredit everything he says like it would if you hear someone argue that today.

> just saying that arguing against such things in 2008 didn't mean you were an insane person

I disagree with you — the data and the trends were perfectly clear back then and I remember the political lines were drawn no differently from today.

The IPCC started back in 1986 when the problem was considered serious enough for the UN to found a body to investigate. Though perhaps back then there was more controversy, I don’t remember. But I do remember that by 2000 my thinking had shifted to understanding it was a serious problem, though not one I was concerned enough to start working on.

Sorry for no footnotes — I’m writing this more as a disagreement of opinion.

Vague international bodies deciding there is a problem is not evidence something genuine is actually happening.

Has anyone actually changed positions on global warming since 2008? The same people who called it a communist hoax back then call it a communist hoax now.

The trend continuing with 0.2C added average global temperature the past 16 years ended all sane opposition.

> The same people who called it a communist hoax back then call it a communist hoax now.

Yes, but the people who didn't think there was enough data then think there is enough data today. Talking about the group that didn't change isn't very useful if you want to find those who did. Today the sane opposition argues that raising temperature isn't a bad thing or that it can be worked around, they don't say that global warming isn't a thing.

Edit: If you want proof look at discussion about global warming on conservative reddit, top post says that climate change denial is dumb, the right today doesn't believe that climate change is a conspiracy except for a fringe and the rest of the right think that those are lunatics.

This all happened since 2008, if you believe most right wing people today are climate change deniers then you are ignorant, but if you thought so 2008 then you would be not far from right:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Conservative/comments/yzdcqy/global...

Many scientists, including generational geniuses like Freeman Dyson have had mixed feelings about CO2 and its effect on climate. I will almost certainly take their opinions on it over an activist environmental lawyer.

Review the concept of mimetic theory and understand that the majority holding an opinion doesn't guarantee it being even remotely true.

So you believe anthropogenic climate change is a hoax?

please review the HN guidelines for commenting

Huh??? Asking someone their views on climate change is now against guidelines?

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.

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.

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/

> 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.

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.

I imagine the person you’re replying to is a Marxist

Your sentence is a refreshing (for these days) example use of their term in a normative, rather than political and/or pejorative sense.

Marxism is really a consequence of the Victorian era, despite Marx and Engles being German. It is the fruit of not just the economic system of the mid-late 19th century but its social values as well. It makes no sense for the prior period of early industrialization.

Also Britain’s political emphasis of commercial activity predates significant industrialization — just look at the enclosure laws and Corn Laws, and compare them to the contemporary extractive view towards commerce in France.

The reason I said it is because they seemed to be implicitly dismissing anything that isn't a historical material factor (i.e. dismissing an ideological explanation that doesn't address the historical material conditions)

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.

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.

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.

Yes, the labor surplus was caused by China's family structure. In China women married as teens and started bearing children young.

In Northwest Europe, women married when they and their prospective husbands had saved enough to form a new household, typically 24 to 27 years of age. That is several fewer children per woman.

It was also self-balancing. When population was high, wages decreased, so women married later, so population decreased in the next generation. And vice versa.

In China, childbearing was not regulated by economic conditions so the population was controlled via famine, which tends to bring riots, banditry and so on with it.

+ Chinese polygamy, as Marco Polo observed, allowing well-off men to parallelize reproduction

It's ... a theory. Close inspection of European history may reveal a system of dowries and a lot of marrying young, large families, and famines (e.g. in Bohemia) even in the 18th century, but I'm quibbling.

North-west Europe. The Seine Basin, the Low countries, and England primarily. Scandinavia and (iirc) Scotland had stem families. Ireland and most of the rest of Europe, including Bohemia, had something closer to the communitarian type, so famines there are unsurprising.

If Emmanuel Todd is to be believed, on this, his primary area of expertise. Like Noam Chomsky he branched out into other topics later.

Of course there were other regulators in China. Female infanticide was a primary one. Sex ratio imbalances also cause trouble though.

Do you have a source you can point me to regarding sex imbalances in china historically. demographics, and its sibling, economic growth are super fascinating subjects.

Iron blast furnaces using charcoal go back thousands of years. But hot blast furnaces using coal are much more recent, and the development of a coal fuelled hot blast furnace that could mass produce pig iron without relying on wood, followed by the Bessemer process to mass produce steel from pig iron was crucial to the Industrial Revolution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_blast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessemer_process

It isn’t quite as developed as the Bessemer process, but they were producing steel with a precursor, using a cold blast:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_of_th...

Do you have any evidence that the nuclear family is “ancient”? I would have expected they the communal form predated it, but you seem to be implying that it was a later development

Labor costs are irrelevant, as cheap labor also means cheap labor for making machines. It was uneconomical, and caused economic turmoil even in Britain, there were much more arduous tasks that needed to be mechanized such as threshing, which took up a massive amount of labor that could have been freed instead. The Old regime in France was growing steadily. GDP per capita is a stupid metric, GDP per manhour would make much more sense.

> GDP per manhour would make much more sense

And is why labor productivity is used as a comparator.

The question, still completely applicable today, is the trade off between cost of capital and cost of labor. Will your cap ex ultimately cuts your op ex?

Another key invention there is the joint stock limited corporation, developed for shipping voyages but allowing a new mechanism for financing cap ex.

The problem with GDP per capita is that it encourages marginal work. Let's say you can do all you need in four hours. Then you spend another 36 hours on some bullshit of marginal value because hey, GDP got higher. GDP per manhour would discourage such low value work. If it's necessary its price will rise until it gets worth doing.

> 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

If Great Britain is a tiny island I’d love to hear what regular-sized islands you’d recommend.

The "tiny island" schtick is part of the British mythos, I believe.

Yes, very much so. So is "overcrowded.

I am British - Sri Lankan (dual nationality, have lived in both countries) and find it weird - Sri Lanka is smaller and has a higher population density (population a little less than Australia).

I think part of it is that most of the population lives a few high density areas so it feels crowded. Another part is the tendency to compare to the US (which is culturally dominant in the English speaking world), rather than say The Netherlands or Honshu.

Looking for something more in a Madagascar, Baffin, or Sumatra size. kthx

It’s a common turn of phrase which I’ve always taken to mean “limited in its expansion due to being an island”, said island being small in comparison to other powers, notably France, Spain, Austria, Prussia, and later Germany and Russia

The hypothesis in the article is false because of the simple fact that cheap labor also means cheap labor for making the machines. And vice versa it can't be more profitable to make machines because the wages are high, as high wages would make the machines more costly as well.

You are ignoring the raw resource costs. The raw resource costs of humans is very low, it is really hard for early machines to compete with that, burning wheat in a machine instead of feeding more humans is really wasteful.

Its only when you put enforce minimum standards for all humans that humans starts to cost, and its only when you start to dig up fossil fuels that you start to have excess energy for your machines compared to feeding humans. Without those two the natural resource cost of machines is immense relative other things.

Same thing. My point is that the cost of the digging up is proportional to the cost of the diggers. Cheap labor digs up the fossil fuels cheaply. It isn't that labor becomes expensive for everything else except for the machines, and the fuel for them.

> Cheap labor digs up the fossil fuels cheaply

Only if you have fossil fuel to dig up though. To do that you need to have identified where it is and build the infrastructure and skills to be able to dig it up.

Coal mines are far from everywhere, without them you would have to grow fuel and thus compete with human food.

What makes the machines expensive is (as the article says) the capital cost. An investor must sink a considerable amount of money into producing or obtaining a machine before any money is made, that money is now locked up until the machine (with a limited lifespan) turns a profit, at the cost of not making better investments elsewhere.

The cost of the machine is proportional to the cost of labor needed to make it. Cheap labor means cheap machines, expensive labor means expensive machines.

What about resources needed to make the machine?

There wasn't really an "industrial revolution".

The term is just carefully doctored spin and propaganda from the British Empire.

Europe has been manufacturing at scale with industrial processes for centuries before the "industrial revolution". (And industrial-scale mechanized mining dates back to the stone age.)

Basically, it wasn't a "revolution", just a gradual slow development of more of the same.

>And industrial-scale mechanized mining dates back to the stone age.

Citation needed. “Industrial scale” doesn’t just mean “a lot”.

"Industrial scale" as in mechanized, formalized processes and world-spanning supply chains.

The stone age (as well as the bronze age) ended because the supply chains that spanned continents started to be untenable and something new needed to be done.

Our mental model is wrong - industrial processes and global supply chains are not a recent invention. In fact, these things are some of the first things homo sapiens invented. (Many millennia before agriculture or the wheel, for example.)

Homo sapiens has always been "modern", whatever characterizes our society isn't that.

Mechanized how though? I don’t think a few cases of water or wind mills turning things meaningfully moves the needle.

And it’s definitely not “a formalized process” because those existed long before the qualitative change that came with the Industrial Revolution, which was significant energy expansion into basically every industry, especially transportation.

Moving away from depending on animals to move goods outside of waterways dramatically shifted the entire world because it completely changed what was viable (cities of any significant size off of water ways).

Production of most things started to grow exponentially, that is a revolution. We call it the industrial revolution since industrialization made that happen. The industrial processes you talked about were done, yes, but they weren't revolutionary and changing everything like the industrial revolution did. That is why the industrial revolution is called a revolution while the other things aren't.

> Production of most things started to grow exponentially, that is a revolution.

No, exponential growth is compound interest. By definition not a "revolution" because there is no discontinuity anywhere.

The term "industrial revolution" was invented much later by propagandists, people living at the time certainly didn't see it as such.

You are confusing cause and effect. The revolution (upturning of a system) refers to the cause of the increase of the exponential growth, not the consequence.

There is a very sharp bend in the growth rate in the 19th century. Even more interestingly, it produced a sharp uptick in global wealth even though industrialization itself did not immediately diffuse uniformly and completely around the globe.

The UK was an empire of some global influence in the 19th Century, a number of events occurred during that time, eg: a sizable fraction of the commercial traders got to share in a (modern) £17bn bailout following the abolition of slavery.

While having "lost" ownership of slaves many still retained profit sharing in the industries, cotton production, coffee, sugar, etc. and now had lump sums for capital investment in new colonies, new canals, new railroads, new factories, new steam engines, etc.

Exactly. The switch from hydropower to steam was a minor detail in the larger context.

> There is a very sharp bend in the growth rate in the 19th century

Not really.

The revolution really was the change from using streams and rivers to coal and steam engines. Suddenly you were not as limited in location for setting up factories allowing flat continental European countries to industrialize at scale.

> The revolution really was the change from using streams and rivers to coal and steam engines.

Yes, that is what they say. A very minor "revolution" compared to everything else going on at the time.

(Also we're back to using "streams and rivers", hydropower is growing.)

Points at a dark satanic mill

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!)

If anything it should make you suspicious of Smil's book, since it was published more recently.

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

I only read How the World Really Works, but I thought it was generally good, save for occasional non-sequiturs.

Allen has been publishing about this topic since the 1970s. I first became acquainted based on his work around knowledge diffusion.

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.

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.

> 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?

I'm just making a general statement, not a comment on how things are today or whether they should change.

The !Kung[1] are both extremely egalitarian and work about 15 hours per week[2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C7%83Kung_people

[2]: https://www.ft.com/content/8dd71dc3-4566-48e0-a1d9-3e8bd2b3f...

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...

What if they gave the Internet and it wasn't addictive?

The (Roman I presume) emperor in the ancient world would have bitten their arm off to get the industrial revolution. Famines were still a regular occurrence, and Rome heavily depended on the food supply from Egypt. Anything that could have increased crop yields (and agriculture was still thought as the most important industry and form of wealth) would have had massive political impact.

Medieval Europeans were able to increase crop yields (given same conditions) compared to the Romans without an industrial revolution. There was still a lot of space for (in hindsight very simple and obvious compared to steam engines) innovation left.

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.

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?

Was Briton not a large naval power by that point in their history already?

> Wages are set by supply and demand, same as anything else.

This is true for a one-time negotiation, but over time high productivity is necessary to sustain the high wages, or else the market will cease to clear. (that is, the workers will get laid off or the business will close)

High productivity is certainly necessary for high wages. But this makes the original article's point even more mysterious: if the workers had high productivity before the industrial revolution, that high productivity was not caused by the industrial revolution: so what caused it?

And high-productivity is certainly no guarantee of high wages. E.g. mothers arguably produce everything, but that's not a waged job at all.

So what was it which was propping up workers wages in pre-industrial England? What was preventing employers from eroding workers wages using the same tactics which, say, software companies are eroding engineering wages? w.g. making unnecessary layoffs, firing older workers and replacing them with younger workers, negotiating tacit anti-poaching agreements, etc?

What were they doing right that we are doing wrong :-)

> And high-productivity is certainly no guarantee of high wages. E.g. mothers arguably produce everything, but that's not a waged job at all.

Productivity means work over time. Being a mom is low productivity because you can (mostly) only do one at a time.

Productivity is not just work over time--its how much value you produce per unit of time. Mothers produce all value. Without them, nothing would have any value at all.

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

I think easy access to lots of smaller waterways with natural fall and little chance of massive flooding was an important factor for why Britain was able to industrialize before the invention of the steam engine. If you look at where industry popped up in Britain you see water power as a major factor.

Now for the emperor sell him faster and cheaper sword production by making his blacksmiths more productive and you get industrialization as its specialized skills that can’t be easily scaled by throwing tons of bodies at it.

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.

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.

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/

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.

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...

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.

> 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.

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.

It will take a lot of lifting earth stuff into orbit before we have useful mills in space to refine those metals. Maybe eventually you will be correct, but current human lifetimes space minerals are very expensive.

Same with industrialization. Awfully huge down payment.

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.

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? ;)

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Didn't the Malthusian cycle result in labour shortages continously? What about the roman empire (byzantanian) after plagues?

Yes, but at such a time you would not have a shortage of wood for fuel.

Shortly after a contraction, if anything the forests would regrow.

Fueling the war machines a decade or so later, of course.

it actually happened

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_during_the_Rom...

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)

This is a great article and is useful for putting tech into perspective in a modern context.

The quote about the emperor not needing the steam engine because he already has slaves to do that work for free is an excellent one. It neatly demonstrates the role of technology as a tool for liberation. From the perspective of the emperors of past centuries, our modern world is, in many ways, worse than theirs. So of course the emperor would never approve of such technologies; even if you showed them a crystal ball and removed all the risk, they still wouldn't want it.

There are parallels in the modern age. You don't need an emperor to get the same effect. With our centrally controlled monetary system, there are strong Cantillion effects which cause wealth compounding; this creates an increasingly strong incentive for people to service the rich and an increasingly weak incentive to service the poor. So we are somewhat in a situation where those who have money in tech think "Why do we need more efficient software tools? I have 10K software engineers on hand to build whatever the company needs. I have a market monopoly so their wages are peanuts to me... The money comes in regardless of development efficiency or improved security. We don't need more efficient tools... Why? So that my small competitors can build software at the same speed as me with only 1% of the engineering capacity? Why would I want such tool to exist?"

But with high inequality, liberation of the poor isn't financially viable. So long as the poor are willing to engage in the current system, their living standards will keep declining, because nobody who is in a position to liberate them has an incentive to do so. There is no incentive to produce such technologies. There is little doubt that technologies have been used to further enslave people, rather than liberate them. This is why the woke/DEI agenda is so horrible, it's pure gaslighting. Preaching equality while implementing the least equal, least fair system ever designed in the history of mankind.

One thing not discussed here: Coke had been used in China since ancient times. How does that fit into the discussion about coke here?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

> 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.

> 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?

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> a large percentage of their economy is private businesses

Are these businesses actually private? Does the fact they all started teaching Xi Jinping Thought (TM) to their executives at the exact same time indicate who ultimately controls them?

> and their state owned companies are run for profit with said profit retained by both private and state own companies within themselves

If the central government can mandate those companies to invest that profit in <currently important sector>, can you really say it's theirs to keep?

> 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.

Which people? This redistribution has never happened in any socialist system that calls itself as such, only in systems like the West which one might call a "primarily private market economy with a large socialist appendage" (socialist as in social/public ownership).

> there is not widespread self-management or workplace democracy among companies.

There has not been widespread self-management in any socialist system and certainly no workplace democracy in any real sense.

> 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.

Why would you say their policies are not socialist? The lack of a social safety net and absence of human rights is exactly like other socialist governments. If you want to say such policies are not actually socialist, that's your prerogative. I cannot think of any Socialist government that actually existed which did things radically differently.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What stopped an industrial revolution from cooking up in China? Too much labor? Too little coal? Too many wars?

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.

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.

"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.

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Every book had to be copied by hand so if it wasn't seen as useful the paper rotted in a few hundred years.

My physic courses have been a while, but I would argue with "F = ma" alone, you won't get far, when you want to build high pressure machines and model them before. You do need calculus for that. And quite a bit more I would think.

F = ma leads to calculus was my point, and that is the starting point if you want to think about pressure etc. Once you have F = ma the rest of physics happened pretty fast, getting to F = ma took millennia, getting from there to exploring most of classical physics took a century.

I got a degree in engineering physics, I have a fairly good idea what kind of physics and math is used for machines and structures. Without the concept of force that Newton invented basically all useful calculations are beyond you, so all machines before then were made via rules of thumb as the math wasn't useful. But when you have the concept of force many of the easy things like how to calculate structural integrity or treating pressure as a field of force isn't that far away.

Then you can start designing machines where you know the components will hold without testing, since you have done the calculations. That is what enables complex machines with many parts.

Timing is very important. The market was not ready. Doh.

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.

"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.

> 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.

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#Timeline_of...

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.

'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.

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.

"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.)

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

Industrialization started in Germany because England and France were industrializing and would have proceeded if Germany was unified or not IMHO.

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.

I find myself being cautious when it comes to reading characterizations of China's historical dis/unity, knowing the current government has some rather strong opinions about what narrative it would like to see in the history books.

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

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.

Did china have a ready supply of clock and watchmakers?

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.

Lack of free markets.

One factor is that Northern Europeans made much more intensive use of animal power than the Chinese (or the Greeks of antiquity) ever did. If you are already using oxen or horses to pump water out of your coal mine, it is less of a leap to start using machinery to do it (because you will probably be able to re-use some of your laws, legal precedents and business practices for using the oxen and horses).

The Northern European's close relationship with the cow goes back about 7,000 years. Other cultures relied on cows for a large fraction of their calories, too, but the Northern Europeans were the first farmers to do it. I.e., they weren't nomads.

Once a farming culture gets good at keeping cows for calories, it is a short leap to using male cows (oxen) to help plow fields. And once you are doing that, it is a short leap to using them for transportation.

But more straightforwardly, the Industrial Revolution started when the Scientific Revolution was well underway. The first generation of European steam engines were inefficient, then they used the new science of thermodynamics to design steam engines that were twice as efficient.

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