13 ms·

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

183 points by AndrewDucker 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
thriftwy 2y ago
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.
- adastra22 2y ago
  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.
  - xvector 2y ago
    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/ https://pessimistsarchive.org/
- FrustratedMonky 2y ago
  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.
  - afh1 2y ago
    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...
    - thriftwy 2y ago
      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.
      - bluGill 2y ago
        > 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.
        thriftwy 2y ago
        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.
        bluGill 2y ago
        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.
sed3 2y ago
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.
- schmidtleonard 2y ago
  What stopped an industrial revolution from cooking up in China? Too much labor? Too little coal? Too many wars?
  - vundercind 2y ago
    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.
    - Jensson 2y ago
      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.
      - lukan 2y ago
        "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.
        Jensson 2y ago
throwup238 2y ago
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.
- moomin 2y ago
  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.
  - vundercind 2y ago
    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.
- DrScientist 2y ago
Jensson 2y ago
> 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.
- kibwen 2y ago
  > 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.
  - Jensson 2y ago
    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.
    - OtherShrezzing 2y ago
      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.
goeiedaggoeie 2y ago
Didn't the Malthusian cycle result in labour shortages continously? What about the roman empire (byzantanian) after plagues?
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  Yes, but at such a time you would not have a shortage of wood for fuel.
  - lazide 2y ago
    Shortly after a contraction, if anything the forests would regrow. Fueling the war machines a decade or so later, of course.
  - peoplefromibiza 2y ago
    it actually happened https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_during_the_Roman_period https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_during_the_Rom...
throwaway22032 2y ago
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.
- philosopher1234 2y ago
  > 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?
  - throwaway22032 2y ago
    I'm just making a general statement, not a comment on how things are today or whether they should change.
- noelwelsh 2y ago
  The !Kung[1] are both extremely egalitarian and work about 15 hours per week[2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C7%83Kung_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C7%83Kung_people [2]: https://www.ft.com/content/8dd71dc3-4566-48e0-a1d9-3e8bd2b3f60f https://www.ft.com/content/8dd71dc3-4566-48e0-a1d9-3e8bd2b3f...
kaycebasques 2y ago
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=format&w=198&dpr=3&q=80 https://mit-press-us.imgix.net/covers/9780262536165.jpg?auto... https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41gNLyXI-BL.jpg https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41gNLyXI-BL.jpg Also check out MIT Press using imgix for their image server!)
- allturtles 2y ago
  If anything it should make you suspicious of Smil's book, since it was published more recently.
  - kaycebasques 2y ago
    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
    - slothtrop 2y ago
      I only read How the World Really Works, but I thought it was generally good, save for occasional non-sequiturs.
- ghaff 2y ago
  Allen has been publishing about this topic since the 1970s. I first became acquainted based on his work around knowledge diffusion.
- QuesnayJr 2y ago
  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.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
usrusr 2y ago
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.
- michaelt 2y ago
  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.
  - lazide 2y ago
    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.
  - Spooky23 2y ago
    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?
openrisk 2y ago
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...
- roncesvalles 2y ago
  What if they gave the Internet and it wasn't addictive?
verisimi 2y ago
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.
jjk166 2y ago
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.
rhelz 2y ago
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?
- pixl97 2y ago
  Was Briton not a large naval power by that point in their history already?
- astrange 2y ago
  > 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)
  - rhelz 2y ago
    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 :-)
    - astrange 2y ago
      > 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.
dang 2y ago
Discussed at the time (of the article); What if they gave an Industrial Revolution and nobody came? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35983290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35983290 - May 2023 (5 comments)
Sniffnoy 2y ago
One thing not discussed here: Coke had been used in China since ancient times. How does that fit into the discussion about coke here?
dan_mctree 2y ago
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
golergka 2y ago
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.
paulorlando 2y ago
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.
cm2187 2y ago
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.
- ffgjgf1 2y ago
  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.
jongjong 2y ago
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.
christkv 2y ago
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.

183 points by AndrewDucker 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

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.

adastra22 2y ago
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.
- xvector 2y ago
  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/ https://pessimistsarchive.org/
FrustratedMonky 2y ago
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.
- afh1 2y ago
  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...
  - thriftwy 2y ago
    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.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      > 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.
      - thriftwy 2y ago
        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.
        bluGill 2y ago
        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.

sed3 2y ago

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.

schmidtleonard 2y ago
What stopped an industrial revolution from cooking up in China? Too much labor? Too little coal? Too many wars?
- vundercind 2y ago
  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.
  - Jensson 2y ago
    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.
    - lukan 2y ago
      "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.
      - Jensson 2y ago

throwup238 2y ago

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.

moomin 2y ago
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.
- vundercind 2y ago
  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.
DrScientist 2y ago

Jensson 2y ago

> 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.

kibwen 2y ago
> 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.
- Jensson 2y ago
  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.
  - OtherShrezzing 2y ago
    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.

goeiedaggoeie 2y ago

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

AnimalMuppet 2y ago
Yes, but at such a time you would not have a shortage of wood for fuel.
- lazide 2y ago
  Shortly after a contraction, if anything the forests would regrow. Fueling the war machines a decade or so later, of course.
- peoplefromibiza 2y ago
  it actually happened https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_during_the_Roman_period https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_during_the_Rom...

throwaway22032 2y ago

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.

philosopher1234 2y ago
> 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?
- throwaway22032 2y ago
  I'm just making a general statement, not a comment on how things are today or whether they should change.
noelwelsh 2y ago
The !Kung[1] are both extremely egalitarian and work about 15 hours per week[2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C7%83Kung_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C7%83Kung_people [2]: https://www.ft.com/content/8dd71dc3-4566-48e0-a1d9-3e8bd2b3f60f https://www.ft.com/content/8dd71dc3-4566-48e0-a1d9-3e8bd2b3f...

kaycebasques 2y ago

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=format&w=198&dpr=3&q=80 https://mit-press-us.imgix.net/covers/9780262536165.jpg?auto... https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41gNLyXI-BL.jpg https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41gNLyXI-BL.jpg Also check out MIT Press using imgix for their image server!)

allturtles 2y ago
If anything it should make you suspicious of Smil's book, since it was published more recently.
- kaycebasques 2y ago
  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
  - slothtrop 2y ago
    I only read How the World Really Works, but I thought it was generally good, save for occasional non-sequiturs.
ghaff 2y ago
Allen has been publishing about this topic since the 1970s. I first became acquainted based on his work around knowledge diffusion.
QuesnayJr 2y ago
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.

deleted 2y ago

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usrusr 2y ago

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.

michaelt 2y ago
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.
- lazide 2y ago
  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.
- Spooky23 2y ago
  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?

openrisk 2y ago

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...

roncesvalles 2y ago
What if they gave the Internet and it wasn't addictive?

verisimi 2y ago

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.

jjk166 2y ago

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.

rhelz 2y ago

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?

pixl97 2y ago
Was Briton not a large naval power by that point in their history already?
astrange 2y ago
> 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)
- rhelz 2y ago
  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 :-)
  - astrange 2y ago
    > 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.

dang 2y ago

Discussed at the time (of the article); What if they gave an Industrial Revolution and nobody came? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35983290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35983290 - May 2023 (5 comments)

Sniffnoy 2y ago

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

dan_mctree 2y ago

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

golergka 2y ago

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.

paulorlando 2y ago

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.

cm2187 2y ago

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.

ffgjgf1 2y ago
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.

jongjong 2y ago

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.

christkv 2y ago

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.