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I don’t know I hear things like with ___s population they can just throw people at the problem. Has that historically been true though? Why then have China and

I don’t know I hear things like with ___s population they can just throw people at the problem. Has that historically been true though? Why then have China and India not always led the way as super powers in the first place?

coldtea 6y ago
>Has that historically been true though? Why then have China and India not always led the way as super powers in the first place? Yes. Who said they hadn't? For the biggest part of history, until Europe got forward after kickstarting the industrial revolution (along with the help of colonization and the exploiting of the New World), China was the #1 economy worldwide, and quite more advanced in many ways than the rest of the world. E.g. in the Song dynasty (900-1200 A.D): "These [policies] made China a global leader, leading some historians to call this an "early modern" economy many centuries before Western Europe made its breakthrough". 1500 A.D.: In 1500, China was the largest economy in the world, followed closely by India, both with estimated GDP's of approximately $100 billion. France was a distant third at approximately 18 billion, followed closely by Italy and Germany. What is now the United Kingdom ranked 10th, at barely one quarter the output of France (Figure 1). Heck, China was prosperous all the way back to 20-100 B.C ("Technological innovations, such as the wheelbarrow, paper and a seismograph, were invented during this period") "China's economy led its European counterpart by leaps and bounds at the start of the Renaissance. China was so far ahead, in fact, that economic historian Eric L. Jones once argued that the Chinese empire "came within a hair's breadth of industrializing in the fourteenth century."" https://i.insider.com/586e8834ee14b6507e8b5b45?width=1000&format=jpeg&auto=webp https://i.insider.com/586e8834ee14b6507e8b5b45?width=1000&fo... https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-chinese-economy-1200-2017-2017-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-chinese-economy-1...
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  > "China's economy led its European counterpart by leaps and bounds at the start of the Renaissance. China was so far ahead, in fact, that economic historian Eric L. Jones once argued that the Chinese empire "came within a hair's breadth of industrializing in the fourteenth century."" China had an iron industry earlier than that - 12th century, IIRC. It was all starting - more iron resulting in iron tools all over the place, process improvements, and so on. But then some bureaucrats (mandarins, which I think is the same thing) noticed that some of the "wrong" people were getting rich in all this, and the government forcibly shut it all down in the name of preserving social order. That's one of the strengths of America - more than anywhere else in the world, if you have the right idea, it doesn't matter if you're the "wrong" person.
  - rabidrat 6y ago
    America has that story, but it doesn't really hold up to scrutiny. America may not have "class" restrictions like other places, but it sure does have "race" restrictions. And even when the wrong people manage to make it, they (as a group anyway) will still have it taken away from them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre
  - justicezyx 6y ago
    There were a national debate on economy centered on the circulation of iron and salt. A representative work is "盐铁论” discussions on iron and salt. Chinese civilization peaked in tang (in terms of international influence) and later song (in terms of tech and culture). Then it's a steady declination till the end of Qing. Ancient China was quite liberal and diverse even in modern standards. But the history took a reverse turn to more totalitarian direction. (China never practiced authoritarian regime, even today, people just cannot admit or bother to learn the nuances of modern China political system, I am so very much disappointed there is no modern day Tocqueville on China, what a pity!) Xi's approach is fairly conventional in terms of Chinese tradition. But it has swapped the Confucius core with a blended scientific core through learning from Communism. This is a dangerous direction, as there is quite a risk of how to continue this tradition across generations, history has shown that declination and degradation is inevitable within 2-300 years time period. It will be interesting to see how Xi handles his succession. It might be quite disastrous. But it also has a lot of institutional safety backup. Who knows! To me, this is the single most political affair in the next 10-20 years. Xi is not a dictator, his life experience does not lend the ambition, nor his power can dominate the check and balance in China. Whoever labels xi a dictator is fooling his audience for some unspeakable purpose. [1] https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%9B%90%E9%93%81%E8%AE%BA https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%9B%90%E9%93%81%E8%AE%BA
    - bradleykingz 6y ago
      For a person that's not a dictator, Xi sure does have a lot of dictatorial tendencies. > check and balance in China Do tell. Last I checked, China was a one-party state and doesn't have the same judiciary-executive freedom that typically defines 'checks and balances'
cmehdy 6y ago
European powers were fairly dominant in the world when the industrial revolution started there. The causation link isn't clear to me (if one caused the other or vice-versa - I'd love to hear from people who know better), but the fact of the matter is that local energy sources could be used (coal, as early as the 1700s) so the benefits were clear and local first, and a huge jump in progress ensued across those economies over the last few centuries. Transitioning to less "dangerous" fossil fuels happened once the economies were already pretty robust and machines were doing the work of hundreds of men at once, because countries got richer and as their quality of life improved they increasingly walked away from dangerous stuff (the deaths per TWh of coal and brown coal are horrifying[0] and unions and education of the population surely had their role to play in driving change in the way those countries dealt with fossil fuels). Europe then increasingly moved away from coal (not quite done with it though: Germany is still so anti-nuclear that they are the second biggest users behind Russia and iirc the first next importer of coal-based energy - from Russia), but that's the kind of luxury one can afford when the economy is already in decent shape. That's also in part why, while currently China is the single largest producer of coal in the world (to sustain its growth year-on-year), they're also pretty aware that they've got to switch pretty fast to something better (i.e. nuclear) because the honeymoon won't last forever (and I have no doubt that a few generations there will pay a high price in the future for that - cue social unrest down the road). So at the very least, the idea that we can "throw people at the problem" isn't entirely devoid of sense when you consider how many people in Europe dedicated their lives to this brand-new energy-dense coal for a couple generations, and in doing so definitely sacrificed their health and lives in exchange for rapid social progress (that they might or might not have benefited from..). [0] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
- sverhagen 6y ago
  I've been wondering, is Joe Biden popularizing "the fact of they matter is..."? (Again? As I appreciate he probably didn't invent it, but he sure uses it a lot.) I now suddenly see it everywhere...

coldtea 6y ago

>Has that historically been true though? Why then have China and India not always led the way as super powers in the first place? Yes. Who said they hadn't? For the biggest part of history, until Europe got forward after kickstarting the industrial revolution (along with the help of colonization and the exploiting of the New World), China was the #1 economy worldwide, and quite more advanced in many ways than the rest of the world. E.g. in the Song dynasty (900-1200 A.D): "These [policies] made China a global leader, leading some historians to call this an "early modern" economy many centuries before Western Europe made its breakthrough". 1500 A.D.: In 1500, China was the largest economy in the world, followed closely by India, both with estimated GDP's of approximately $100 billion. France was a distant third at approximately 18 billion, followed closely by Italy and Germany. What is now the United Kingdom ranked 10th, at barely one quarter the output of France (Figure 1). Heck, China was prosperous all the way back to 20-100 B.C ("Technological innovations, such as the wheelbarrow, paper and a seismograph, were invented during this period") "China's economy led its European counterpart by leaps and bounds at the start of the Renaissance. China was so far ahead, in fact, that economic historian Eric L. Jones once argued that the Chinese empire "came within a hair's breadth of industrializing in the fourteenth century."" https://i.insider.com/586e8834ee14b6507e8b5b45?width=1000&format=jpeg&auto=webp https://i.insider.com/586e8834ee14b6507e8b5b45?width=1000&fo... https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-chinese-economy-1200-2017-2017-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-chinese-economy-1...

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
> "China's economy led its European counterpart by leaps and bounds at the start of the Renaissance. China was so far ahead, in fact, that economic historian Eric L. Jones once argued that the Chinese empire "came within a hair's breadth of industrializing in the fourteenth century."" China had an iron industry earlier than that - 12th century, IIRC. It was all starting - more iron resulting in iron tools all over the place, process improvements, and so on. But then some bureaucrats (mandarins, which I think is the same thing) noticed that some of the "wrong" people were getting rich in all this, and the government forcibly shut it all down in the name of preserving social order. That's one of the strengths of America - more than anywhere else in the world, if you have the right idea, it doesn't matter if you're the "wrong" person.
- rabidrat 6y ago
  America has that story, but it doesn't really hold up to scrutiny. America may not have "class" restrictions like other places, but it sure does have "race" restrictions. And even when the wrong people manage to make it, they (as a group anyway) will still have it taken away from them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre
- justicezyx 6y ago
  There were a national debate on economy centered on the circulation of iron and salt. A representative work is "盐铁论” discussions on iron and salt. Chinese civilization peaked in tang (in terms of international influence) and later song (in terms of tech and culture). Then it's a steady declination till the end of Qing. Ancient China was quite liberal and diverse even in modern standards. But the history took a reverse turn to more totalitarian direction. (China never practiced authoritarian regime, even today, people just cannot admit or bother to learn the nuances of modern China political system, I am so very much disappointed there is no modern day Tocqueville on China, what a pity!) Xi's approach is fairly conventional in terms of Chinese tradition. But it has swapped the Confucius core with a blended scientific core through learning from Communism. This is a dangerous direction, as there is quite a risk of how to continue this tradition across generations, history has shown that declination and degradation is inevitable within 2-300 years time period. It will be interesting to see how Xi handles his succession. It might be quite disastrous. But it also has a lot of institutional safety backup. Who knows! To me, this is the single most political affair in the next 10-20 years. Xi is not a dictator, his life experience does not lend the ambition, nor his power can dominate the check and balance in China. Whoever labels xi a dictator is fooling his audience for some unspeakable purpose. [1] https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%9B%90%E9%93%81%E8%AE%BA https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%9B%90%E9%93%81%E8%AE%BA
  - bradleykingz 6y ago
    For a person that's not a dictator, Xi sure does have a lot of dictatorial tendencies. > check and balance in China Do tell. Last I checked, China was a one-party state and doesn't have the same judiciary-executive freedom that typically defines 'checks and balances'

cmehdy 6y ago

European powers were fairly dominant in the world when the industrial revolution started there. The causation link isn't clear to me (if one caused the other or vice-versa - I'd love to hear from people who know better), but the fact of the matter is that local energy sources could be used (coal, as early as the 1700s) so the benefits were clear and local first, and a huge jump in progress ensued across those economies over the last few centuries. Transitioning to less "dangerous" fossil fuels happened once the economies were already pretty robust and machines were doing the work of hundreds of men at once, because countries got richer and as their quality of life improved they increasingly walked away from dangerous stuff (the deaths per TWh of coal and brown coal are horrifying[0] and unions and education of the population surely had their role to play in driving change in the way those countries dealt with fossil fuels). Europe then increasingly moved away from coal (not quite done with it though: Germany is still so anti-nuclear that they are the second biggest users behind Russia and iirc the first next importer of coal-based energy - from Russia), but that's the kind of luxury one can afford when the economy is already in decent shape. That's also in part why, while currently China is the single largest producer of coal in the world (to sustain its growth year-on-year), they're also pretty aware that they've got to switch pretty fast to something better (i.e. nuclear) because the honeymoon won't last forever (and I have no doubt that a few generations there will pay a high price in the future for that - cue social unrest down the road). So at the very least, the idea that we can "throw people at the problem" isn't entirely devoid of sense when you consider how many people in Europe dedicated their lives to this brand-new energy-dense coal for a couple generations, and in doing so definitely sacrificed their health and lives in exchange for rapid social progress (that they might or might not have benefited from..). [0] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

sverhagen 6y ago
I've been wondering, is Joe Biden popularizing "the fact of they matter is..."? (Again? As I appreciate he probably didn't invent it, but he sure uses it a lot.) I now suddenly see it everywhere...