How big a deal was the Industrial Revolution? (2017)

Eg you can compare Britain that had already (partially) industrialised with her continental peers who hadn't.

The early part of exponential growth always looks flat compared to the last part, it’s the proverbial hockey stick.

There are actually continuous developments in agriculture through the Iron Age. off the top of my head there are windmills, more and better iron tools, heavy iron plows, improved crop rotation, more advanced irrigation etc. The Arab agricultural revolution changed a lot of farming technology, and facilitated exchanges between east and west. Then there was the post Columbian trade with the new world. Imagine a world without potatoes!

But is it? That's ostensibly the point of this article--trying to actually use data to establish whether or not this "obvious" principle is true [1]. But if you turn to the actual data, the author of the data is creating the historical data using one of three assumptions: either real GDP per-capita is correlated with population growth, which comes both with and without an arbitrary pre-industrial haircut, or real GDP per-capita is literally flat pre-industrial.

It really isn't clear to me if there really is a step change in per-capita GDP growth around the First (and/or Second) Industrial Revolution, or if it's a one-off jump, or if it's a continuous, consistent per-capita growth rate with no real impact. All of those would look pretty similar in a linear-scale graph at first glance. What we do know from other economic proxies from archaeology is that pre-industrial economies weren't exactly static: you can see a clear trend that highlights the rise and fall of Rome (see, e.g., the data in https://acoup.blog/2022/02/11/collections-rome-decline-and-f...), so you better expect that the econometric statistics you use can replicate that trend.

[1] Let's assume the purposes of discussion that GDP here is something meaningful for economic prosperity in pre-industrial times, something that can capture the productivity enhancements that did occur at that time.

I mean obviously that's not true. You mean that the GDP per capita of Venice and the other trade republics stayed flat throughout their rise and fall as trading with the whole known world, becoming absurdly rich and their currency being used as the reserve currency for the whole of Europe? Or that Spain's colonisation of 2/3s of the Americas and the vast riches there such as mountains of silver, didn't impact their GDP per capita? Or that the Ottomans' stayed flat throughout their rise from a backwater band of mercenaries to an empire spanning three continents to a failed state?

Life expectancy is a bad measure because infant mortality was pretty high. This skewed the averages down considerably. Humans don't live 50 years longer but only 10 year or so.

Also if you have too many hunter gatherers around for a given area (and assuming they can't leave), some of them will die within perhaps a few years of starvation.

There's a much wider band of population densities for agricultural societies where they can produce enough calories to keep people from starving, but many will be miserable from malnutrition.

As an aside: in our over-populated hunter-gatherer scenario the average amount of food available might still be plenty, but there might be the occasional bottleneck during the harshest parts of winter.

Thanks to that bottleneck keeping numbers low, the typical day of life experience for your typical hunter-gatherer might be pretty nice. And thus you can get 70+ healthy years for many of them.

That's not to say that medicine didn't improve and it's genial. I do certainly like my spectacles and diabetes medicine is life changing for the people affected. But the measure of life expectancy is crap. A better measure should be comfort/pain during your 70 years.

But when I think about trying to explain to someone from 1820, you can't explain anything. They were 40 years before Maxwell's Equations, so no electricity, no radio, no telegraph, no telephone. They were before the first common-carrier railroad. The first internal combustion powered automobile was 1808, but they were not yet practical in any sense. The precursors aren't there. (Yes, the industrial revolution is starting. The products of the industrial revolution that will change how we live aren't there yet, though.)

Medicine is radically better: some diseases eliminated entirely (smallpox), others reduced to manageable conditions (HIV), even novel pandemics get multiple vaccines within a few years; the first successful transplant was 1954, a kidney between two identical twins, because they didn't have a good way to do immunosuppression until 1970.

PV and batteries weren't impressive until suddenly each was a revolution.

Long-distance travel became cheap, widely accessible. My uncle moved to Australia (from the UK) to get away from his mum, my first trip abroad (aged, I think, 8) was to visit him.

Tech and computers enabled so many other things that I don't think it's reasonable to prefix them with an "except for". Even just going from 1954 to 2000 was approximately my Dad's career, and that included "we're sending you on a two day training course on this new thing called 'software'" (he worked for a UK defence contractor, writing simulation software for IFF radar systems).

The reason it's relevant is that the premise of the article is basically that some events in history are so positively transformative, like the IR, that we should focus on how to being about those events. But if the IR is just an inevitable region along a centuries (or millenia) long exponential curve, that premise may not hold.

Essentially, the material and structural factors around us shape our ideology.