As usual, I find Paul Graham's comments on economic theory incredibly frustrating. This piece just uses the pull quote "a great deal has been written about the

As usual, I find Paul Graham's comments on economic theory incredibly frustrating. This piece just uses the pull quote "a great deal has been written about the causes of the Industrial Revolution. But surely a necessary, if not sufficient, condition was that people who made fortunes be able to enjoy them in peace." Graham's article about that goes on to theorize that this might be sufficient, and if so that only guild monopolies prevented earlier industrialization. This is, in a word, stupid. Stability is a necessary component of industrialization - though stability to invest is even more directly required than stability to profit. This is not a breakthrough idea, I learned it in high school. Graham just hasn't read enough of the "great deal" he references to discover that. Stability is thoroughly insufficient - there's a laundry list of other requirements, with agricultural advances driving most of the other keys (especially, concentration of capital for investment and displacement of workers from food production). All of this is well-studied, heavily-analyzed content. It's not new to this article, or Graham, they're just reworking theory from scratch. It's not especially egregious here, and I'm not attacking the conclusions of the article by pointing this out. But it's a problem that crops up a lot (ever read pg's thoughts on the Edict of Diocletian?) and it's exhausting to read ground-up recreations of basic theory.