Outrun Change


Brief introduction to the Industrial Revolution




Here is a great article on how we got here:



1) The world was absurdly poor from the dawn of mankind until the late 1800s, everywhere.

2) The average person did not become richer, nor was overall economic growth particularly spectacular, during the Industrial Revolution; indeed, wages may have fallen between 1760 and 1830.

3) Major macro inventions, and growth, of the type seen in England in the late 1700s and early 1800s happened many times in human history.

4) It is hard for us today to understand how revolutionary ideas like “experimentation” or “probability” were.

5) The best explanations for “why England? why in the late 1700s? why did growth continue?” do not involve colonialism, slavery, or famous inventions.

Prof. Kevin Bryan paints a good comparison. If you want to see how practically every person, in every place, in every time until the early 1800s lived, take a look at modern Chad. Look at the stats of England in the early 1800s, at which point it was one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Compare that info to the country of Chad today:

  • Eng.     Chad   metric
  • 30        50        life expectancy
  • 150      90        infant mortality per 1000 live births
  • Min.     35%     literacy (min. meaning minimal, or, essentially nobody could read)
  • 3-4x     3-4x     median wages compared to subsistence (subsistence: having enough wealth to barely keep yourself alive)

Amazing. Today Chad has the 192nd largest GDP per capita out of 226 countries on the list. Not at the bottom of the list, but close.

That puts the people in Chad ($1,900 PPP, which is a way of comparing per capita income) slightly below Lesotho (2,000) and Yemen (2,300) and slightly better off than Bangladesh (1,700) and Senegal (1,900). People living in England in the late 1700s weren’t that well off. I’ve been to Lesotho. You would not want to live there.

As horrid as the mills and mines may have been in England, everyone everywhere on the planet today is better than the so-called rich country of England back then. People in rural areas were worse off than those living in the horrid industrial towns.

Why did the Industrial Revolution happen? Why England? Why at that time?

The extremely short answer is that it was not economic rewards from colonialism, economic rewards from slavery, or a few critical inventions.

Many factors were involved. Check out the article.

Incremental innovations and experimentation are major factors. Left out of the immediate discussion is any mention of property rights and a political system that won’t steal your wealth the moment you have a bit of accumulated capital.

Oh, about the source document from Mr. Mokyr. You can find it here. All 84 pages. That’s the introduction to his textbook.

The article is what called academic instead of what is considered popular writing. To give you a sense of what it looks like, the first two or three pages discuss whether the term Industrial Revolution is even appropriate and how that phrase came into play. Here’s a sample:

How revolutionary was the Industrial Revolution? Compared to political revolutions, like the American and French revolutions that were contemporaneous with it, it was rather drawn-out, its dates usually set between 1760 and 1830 following Ashton (1948). To be sure, it was punctuated by some periods of feverish activity such as the year 1769, the annus mirabilis as Donald Cardwell (1972) called it, in which both James Watt’s separate condenser and Richard Arkwright’s water frame were patented. But, on the whole, economic changes, even economic revolutions, do not have their Bastille Days or their Lenins. Economic change is rarely dramatic, sudden, or heroic. Consequently, some scholars have found the revolutionary aspects difficult to stomach. John Clapham and Herbert Heaton, the doyens of economic history in the 1930s and 1940s, shunned the term Industrial Revolution altogether. In contrast, historians in the 1960s wrote of “Great Discontinuities” (Hartwell, 1971b) and “take-offs” (Rostow, 1960).

I get the main point: massive economic change doesn’t have a specific day in history to mark its start and end.

However, I have no idea who Ashton, Cardwell, Clapham, Heaton, Hartwell, or Rostow are. Sorry to say, but without a moment of searching on the ‘net, I don’t have any idea what a separate condenser or a water frame might be, let alone why they were a big deal.

As you can imagine, I won’t be reading the 84 pages of the intro anytime soon, let alone the full book (couldn’t find it at Amazon anyway). But I do have several popular books on my reading list.

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