16 ms·

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

93 points by babelfish 2y ago

oaththrowaway 2y ago
The industrial revolution and it's consequences...
- mistermann 2y ago
  It heats up the planet.
  - codr7 2y ago
    Beats the next ice age.
Terr_ 2y ago
> Life expectancy at birth is a pretty good proxy for how physically healthy people are in general [...] (Note also that improvements to life expectancy at birth are not entirely due to falling rates of childhood mortality: see here.) Not entirely but it is enough of a factor that naively comparing life-expectancy stats without accounting for it is probably a bad idea. IMO infant mortality improvements underlie so much of the demographic changes involved in a country's industrialization, economic development, and then cultural shifts.
- jph00 2y ago
  Putting aside infant mortality, lifespan for hunter-gatherer societies was 70+ years, according to this study: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2007.00171.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2007... Skeletal records also suggest higher levels of health vs post-agriculture, IIUC. (Although it's pretty hard to be confident about much from such a long time ago, of course.)
  - eru 2y ago
    I think part of the mechanism is that sickly hunter-gatherers die and do so early-ish, but agricultural societies can keep those people around. 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.
    - automatic6131 2y ago
      >some of them will die within perhaps a few years of starvation. We can be fairly sure that before a group of humans die of starvation, they die of violence. Either from another desperate band of humans also starving, or trying to take those humans' land. This is certainly the pattern for hunter-gatherers living on marginal land in the last millennium. Presumably, this was also the case when they were hunter gatherers on prime land too - before they were forced out of it by more numerous, and better organized, agriculturalists. There's no _good_ way of ever going back to a hunter-gatherer society, unless you want to kill 99/100 people (or tell those 99 they can never have children - and enforce it through child murder or sterilization). There's no _good_ way of going back to a pre-industrial society, unless you want to kill/sterilize 9 out of 10 people. Not saying you suggested these - but it should be pointed out.
      - eru 2y ago
        > We can be fairly sure that before a group of humans die of starvation, they die of violence. I'm not completely sure about that, but that doesn't alter the argument in my comment. It's just that violence would be the short-term trigger of their death, with a lack of calories being the underlying cause. Yes, I agree with your second paragraph.
emptybits 2y ago
density → schools → literacy → IR → density → schools → literacy → IR → density → ...
ghaff 2y ago
Look at the Morris, DeLong, etc. data in the article and it basically boils down to nothing pre-industrial revolution really mattered much including the Roman Empire, European declines post-Roman Empire, and the ups and downs in China over the millenia.
tempestn 2y ago
I'm not sure this so much shows the significance of the IR period, as the fact that progress is exponential. All these graphs appear to be long term exponentials plus noise.
- cryptonector 2y ago
  The IR is clearly an (the!) inflection point.
  - tempestn 2y ago
    Yes, but every exponential will have a region in which it begins rapidly increasing. Perhaps we just call that period "the Industrial Revolution". 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.
    - aetherson 2y ago
      Exponential graphs do not have "a region in which it begins rapidly increasing." The differential of e^x is e^x! Across any range of x values, it's possible to choose a scale of y values that shows the classic shape of the exponential graph (ie, the hockey stick). If you then zoom into the flat part of the graph, and choose a different y scale, you'll see a bend there. If you zoom out and choose a different y scale, you'll see your previous bend as part of the flat part. Unless there is a natural and obviously significant range of y values that, independent of the mathematical properties of the graph, is clearly what you actually care about, you can just make the "bend" in an exponential graph be anywhere you want it to be. Here is the graph of e^x from 0 to 10, showing the "bend" is at around x = 7. https://www.google.com/search?q=graph+of+e%5Ex+from+0+to+10&sca_esv=8ea0361af31360af&sca_upv=1&sxsrf=ADLYWILfr0kgB4okSkZ1j7gfeKB3Ti_hvA%3A1717657063276&ei=511hZrzMEPWuptQP9pGV-As&ved=0ahUKEwj82-iYs8aGAxV1l4kEHfZIBb8Q4dUDCBE&uact=5&oq=graph+of+e%5Ex+from+0+to+10&gs_lp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiGWdyYXBoIG9mIGVeeCBmcm9tIDAgdG8gMTAyBBAjGCcyCBAAGIAEGKIEMggQABiABBiiBDIIEAAYgAQYogQyCBAAGIAEGKIESP8JUMoGWMoGcAF4AZABAJgBiwGgAYsBqgEDMC4xuAEDyAEA-AEBmAICoAKVAcICChAAGLADGNYEGEeYAwCIBgGQBgiSBwMxLjGgB98E&sclient=gws-wiz-serp https://www.google.com/search?q=graph+of+e%5Ex+from+0+to+10&... And here is a graph of e^x from 0 to 100, showing the "bend" is at about 85: https://www.google.com/search?q=graph+of+e%5Ex+from+0+to+100&sca_esv=8ea0361af31360af&sca_upv=1&sxsrf=ADLYWIKWLsH_wO8fn-xLZG6hzjGUEvxlgA%3A1717657057015&ei=4V1hZqpOnfym1A_IuauhAg&ved=0ahUKEwjqwuqVs8aGAxUdvokEHcjcKiQQ4dUDCBE&uact=5&oq=graph+of+e%5Ex+from+0+to+100&gs_lp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiGmdyYXBoIG9mIGVeeCBmcm9tIDAgdG8gMTAwMgUQIRigATIFECEYoAEyBRAhGKABMgUQIRigATIFECEYoAEyBRAhGKsCMgUQIRirAjIFECEYqwJIgQhQgQZYgQZwAXgBkAEAmAGPAaABjwGqAQMwLjG4AQPIAQD4AQGYAgKgApkBwgIKEAAYsAMY1gQYR5gDAIgGAZAGCJIHAzEuMaAHvgc&sclient=gws-wiz-serp https://www.google.com/search?q=graph+of+e%5Ex+from+0+to+100...
jcranmer 2y ago
It is risky to use econometrics as even qualitative data to support a hypothesis about the trajectory of history over millennia because the data doesn't exist. If you're not extremely careful in analyzing the provenance of your source statistics, it's very easy to fall into a circular argument of "assuming my hypothesis, my hypothesis is true." Here, just staring at the GDP per capita data, for example, the source paper pretty bluntly says that it can't back-continue the statistics past 1820, so it uses a completely different methodology to try to offer a number. So the author here commenting that the data is quite different pre- and post-Industrial Revolution shouldn't be surprising considering the data is literally based on completely different metrics! Hell, De Long literally shaves a factor of 4 off pre-Industrial Revolution GDP estimates because he feels like it.
- mr_toad 2y ago
  I don’t think long-term GDP measures are meaningful. What point is there in comparing an economy that produces horseshoes and wooden ships with one that has trains and steamships? A pre-industrial economy can’t produce X% of an industrial economy, because it can’t produce large chunks of that economy at all. At best you can compare the parts of the economy that remain relatively unchanged - like food, or textiles, and use those as rough and incomplete proxies.
  - eru 2y ago
    When both economies are existing at the same time, and even trading with each other, you can relatively easily compare them. Eg you can compare Britain that had already (partially) industrialised with her continental peers who hadn't.
- cryptonector 2y ago
  Life expectancy absolutely is a good metric for comparing the Industrial Revolution to what came before. GDP per-capita less so to some degree, and even today it's difficult to compare 1st world GDP per-capita to places where it's three orders of magnitude slower because GDP measures generally fail to properly capture the production of subsistence farming and other small-scale (but valuable to the people in question) activities . And yet! it is obvious that GDP per-capita has been flatish throughout history by comparison to post Industrial Revolution times precisely because the vast majority of people do not live off subsistence farming, make their own homes, clothing and footwear, etc.
simple_quest_9 2y ago
The Industrial Revolution is a key example of the law of unintended consequences. More than anything else, it has totally changed the way we think -- adversely, I think. I'm a big believer in cultural materialism.
- vixen99 2y ago
  I'd never heard of this. For those who are time-pressed it's "Cultural materialism as a literary critical practice—this article will not address its anthropological namesake—is a Marxist-inspired and mostly British approach to in particular Shakespeare and early modern English literature that emerged and became prominent in the 1980s. Its emphasis on the historical and material conditions of the production and reception of texts has remained influential, even if its political commitment and interventionist purposes have largely been abandoned and increasingly ignored." https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780190221911/obo-9780190221911-0091.xml https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-97...
  - simple_quest_9 2y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_materialism_(anthropology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_materialism_(anthropo... Essentially, the material and structural factors around us shape our ideology.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
iEchoic 2y ago
It's unfortunate that subjective well-being was left out of this, because that's the one that looks like it might be getting worse. Arguably, it's also the most important.
- adamisom 2y ago
  "worse": in the last 10-15 years? Because the Industrial Revolution was... before that
  - iEchoic 2y ago
    Yeah, I was just curious to see if that's a purely modern phenomenon or if there's a longer historical trend.
- randomdata 2y ago
  The study that looked at subjective well-being in 16th century Spain concluded that subjective well-being mirrors subjective economic inequality. Without going too deep, it seems that relationship continues to hold in the modern time period of which you speak. Subjective economic inequality has increased, and subjective well-being has declined. But that does question just how important subjective well-being is if all it is is your perception of how much better off someone else is.
somat 2y ago
For thousands of years the economic level of humanity was basically a straight line with a very slow upward trend. then in the late 1700's things changed the economic graph went exponential and has not slowed down since. There is this concept of a technological singularity, Some days I feel it has already happened. And collectively we all are in a sort of tech time dilation, caught up in them, we barely notice the exponential tides.
- icapybara 2y ago
  Well put
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  There's a mind-blowing moment when you realize that pretty much everything about modern life has been made in the last 100-150 years. Medicine stopped being voodoo and became reliably useful in that time. All scientific fields graduated from goofing around to serious discovery machines in that time. Meanwhile, half the items you see and use for fun and work and chores, exist because of petrochemical industry that developed in the past century. At least in the western world, the last 100-150 years have been a step change in human experience, so when someone questions if this time it's different, my answer is: yes, this time is really different. I never thought about it in terms of being past the singularity event horizon, but the more I ponder on what you wrote, the more I feel you may be right: we're already experiencing what technological singularity feels from inside. We're riding the exponents already, but are still early enough that we don't notice. (Or at least didn't notice. I thought progress of technology got boring in the past decade or two, but last couple years made me feel things are changing again, and faster than I can keep track of.)
  - jhbadger 2y ago
    I'd say the 1920s (so 100 years ago) is the earliest time someone from today could go back to and still be able to live more or less the life they have today. In the 1920s, at least in urbanized areas in the developed world, you had access to electricity, indoor plumbing, the modern appliances (vacuum cleaners and refrigerators became common in this decade), cars had stopped being luxuries and were rapidly becoming essentials, movies (even with sound towards the end of the decade), and radio (which also served as a forerunner for TV as there were a lot of dramas in addition to music on it)
budgi4 2y ago
The Industrial Revolution was a major leap in energy tech, especially with the steam engine. This was the first time we efficiently converted thermal energy into kinetic energy, leading to mechanization and rapid growth. It’s akin to how the internet revolutionized information exchange. Just as the steam engine transformed industries and transportation, the internet has revolutionized communication and access to knowledge. Both innovations mark clear turning points, driving exponential technological and economic progress, and reshaping society in profound ways.
- codr7 2y ago
  First time is very much up for debate if you ask me.
  - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    If you've got a previous "first time", say what it is. Otherwise, your comment is just vagueposting, which is a waste of everyone's time.
    - codr7 2y ago
      I have no clue, I'm just reasonably sure this wasn't it. There's way to much stuff out there we can't explain yet to draw that kind of conclusion. The Egyptian pyramids are just the tip of the iceberg here.
- cynicalsecurity 2y ago
  AI response?
  - budgi4 2y ago
    Related article here: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/09/medieval-smokestacks-fossil-fuels-in-pre-industrial-times/ https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/09/medieval-smokestac...
Will182 2y ago
IIRC, James Lovelock as part of his Gaia Hypothesis argues that the price of energy is the fundamental input in how much “work” we can do, and subsequently causes both economic growth and environmental impact, because we do more stuff. The Industrial Revolution was a step change in how much work we could do, and stuff we could create. Looking forward then, something like solving nuclear fusion might unlock a new Industrial Revolution, and hence cause an environmental disaster, because we will be able to do a massively increased amount of “work” for less cost. So more infra, more building, more production. Ergo, clean energy is perhaps not the answer to a clean world. The only green future is one with “expensive” energy.
- automatic6131 2y ago
  >The only green future is one with “expensive” energy A world of expensive energy is a dystopia.
- thejohnconway 2y ago
  I don’t like that you’re being downvoted. I mean, I don’t agree with the hypothesis, but it’s an interesting perspective from a well known source.
cs702 2y ago
Great post. Worthwhile reading. The industrial revolution was indeed a big deal. I have one suggestion for the author: Please also show plots with a logarithmic scale on the vertical axis, instead of only a linear scale. The logarithmic scale does a good job of showing how growth rates change over time; the linear scale doesn't. When you plot a quantity growing exponentially on a linear scale, the past will always looks like a nearly flat line.
dash2 2y ago
One of the very weirdest things about this article is that it takes absolutely no account of how many people were alive. It is couched entirely in averages. In fact, the author is so serious about this that he can write "it doesn’t seem that any of the deadliest events in recorded history had a transformative negative impact". This includes the Black Death which he thinks killed 10% of all humans! Killing 10% of humans is a transformative negative impact. You must at least have an opinion of whether and when human life is better or worse than death. It matters whether there are 10 million people on earth or 10 billion! If you think only in averages, then anything before the end of the Malthusian regime is going to have only a short-run impact on welfare: any increase in GDP per capita gets dissipated by the resulting population growth. Not thinking in averages would make the flat line before the Industrial Revolution a lot less flat (though the IR would still show a big hockey stick). The human population 12000 years ago was about 4 million. Around 0 AD it was 200 million.[1] This weirdness is almost invisible to people because they have been trained so hard to think in averages. The same mistake is made by people who argue that the coming of agriculture was a disaster. (People got shorter and less healthy! Sure, but one reason for that is there are many, many more people. Again, if you think they would have been better off dead, then fine, but at least make the argument.) I blame Rawls and Harsanyi. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/population-growth?insight=the-world-population-has-increased-rapidly-over-the-last-few-centuries#key-insights https://ourworldindata.org/population-growth?insight=the-wor...
sandbach 2y ago
Anyone interested in a statistical approach to the history of the industrial revolution should read The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848 by Eric Hobsbawm. It's the first in an excellently written series on the history of the 18th century, written for the interested layperson.
AtlasBarfed 2y ago
From the standpoint of the life expectancy chart, the fact that the computer revolution continues the upwards trend despite sharply diminishing returns is probably as significant. The Industrial Revolution was doing the "low hanging fruit" of that. Still unbelievable significant, but the information age (which the medical revolutions are attached to) is doing some unbelievable lifting there. If/when they make serious strides in addressing aging, that will probably be the third (or fourth, the chart doesn't show Hunt+Gather -> Cultivation) major economic revolution. Keep in mind our life expectancy will probably drop without some biotech revolution. Climate change and demographic bombs are fueling dangerous wars, and we haven't even had to deal with really bad climate change impacts from heat and mass population movements/drought on the scale of billions.

93 points by babelfish 2y ago

oaththrowaway 2y ago

The industrial revolution and it's consequences...

mistermann 2y ago
It heats up the planet.
- codr7 2y ago
  Beats the next ice age.

Terr_ 2y ago

> Life expectancy at birth is a pretty good proxy for how physically healthy people are in general [...] (Note also that improvements to life expectancy at birth are not entirely due to falling rates of childhood mortality: see here.) Not entirely but it is enough of a factor that naively comparing life-expectancy stats without accounting for it is probably a bad idea. IMO infant mortality improvements underlie so much of the demographic changes involved in a country's industrialization, economic development, and then cultural shifts.

jph00 2y ago
Putting aside infant mortality, lifespan for hunter-gatherer societies was 70+ years, according to this study: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2007.00171.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2007... Skeletal records also suggest higher levels of health vs post-agriculture, IIUC. (Although it's pretty hard to be confident about much from such a long time ago, of course.)
- eru 2y ago
  I think part of the mechanism is that sickly hunter-gatherers die and do so early-ish, but agricultural societies can keep those people around. 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.
  - automatic6131 2y ago
    >some of them will die within perhaps a few years of starvation. We can be fairly sure that before a group of humans die of starvation, they die of violence. Either from another desperate band of humans also starving, or trying to take those humans' land. This is certainly the pattern for hunter-gatherers living on marginal land in the last millennium. Presumably, this was also the case when they were hunter gatherers on prime land too - before they were forced out of it by more numerous, and better organized, agriculturalists. There's no _good_ way of ever going back to a hunter-gatherer society, unless you want to kill 99/100 people (or tell those 99 they can never have children - and enforce it through child murder or sterilization). There's no _good_ way of going back to a pre-industrial society, unless you want to kill/sterilize 9 out of 10 people. Not saying you suggested these - but it should be pointed out.
    - eru 2y ago
      > We can be fairly sure that before a group of humans die of starvation, they die of violence. I'm not completely sure about that, but that doesn't alter the argument in my comment. It's just that violence would be the short-term trigger of their death, with a lack of calories being the underlying cause. Yes, I agree with your second paragraph.

emptybits 2y ago

density → schools → literacy → IR → density → schools → literacy → IR → density → ...

ghaff 2y ago

Look at the Morris, DeLong, etc. data in the article and it basically boils down to nothing pre-industrial revolution really mattered much including the Roman Empire, European declines post-Roman Empire, and the ups and downs in China over the millenia.

tempestn 2y ago

I'm not sure this so much shows the significance of the IR period, as the fact that progress is exponential. All these graphs appear to be long term exponentials plus noise.

cryptonector 2y ago
The IR is clearly an (the!) inflection point.
- tempestn 2y ago
  Yes, but every exponential will have a region in which it begins rapidly increasing. Perhaps we just call that period "the Industrial Revolution". 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.
  - aetherson 2y ago
    Exponential graphs do not have "a region in which it begins rapidly increasing." The differential of e^x is e^x! Across any range of x values, it's possible to choose a scale of y values that shows the classic shape of the exponential graph (ie, the hockey stick). If you then zoom into the flat part of the graph, and choose a different y scale, you'll see a bend there. If you zoom out and choose a different y scale, you'll see your previous bend as part of the flat part. Unless there is a natural and obviously significant range of y values that, independent of the mathematical properties of the graph, is clearly what you actually care about, you can just make the "bend" in an exponential graph be anywhere you want it to be. Here is the graph of e^x from 0 to 10, showing the "bend" is at around x = 7. https://www.google.com/search?q=graph+of+e%5Ex+from+0+to+10&sca_esv=8ea0361af31360af&sca_upv=1&sxsrf=ADLYWILfr0kgB4okSkZ1j7gfeKB3Ti_hvA%3A1717657063276&ei=511hZrzMEPWuptQP9pGV-As&ved=0ahUKEwj82-iYs8aGAxV1l4kEHfZIBb8Q4dUDCBE&uact=5&oq=graph+of+e%5Ex+from+0+to+10&gs_lp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiGWdyYXBoIG9mIGVeeCBmcm9tIDAgdG8gMTAyBBAjGCcyCBAAGIAEGKIEMggQABiABBiiBDIIEAAYgAQYogQyCBAAGIAEGKIESP8JUMoGWMoGcAF4AZABAJgBiwGgAYsBqgEDMC4xuAEDyAEA-AEBmAICoAKVAcICChAAGLADGNYEGEeYAwCIBgGQBgiSBwMxLjGgB98E&sclient=gws-wiz-serp https://www.google.com/search?q=graph+of+e%5Ex+from+0+to+10&... And here is a graph of e^x from 0 to 100, showing the "bend" is at about 85: https://www.google.com/search?q=graph+of+e%5Ex+from+0+to+100&sca_esv=8ea0361af31360af&sca_upv=1&sxsrf=ADLYWIKWLsH_wO8fn-xLZG6hzjGUEvxlgA%3A1717657057015&ei=4V1hZqpOnfym1A_IuauhAg&ved=0ahUKEwjqwuqVs8aGAxUdvokEHcjcKiQQ4dUDCBE&uact=5&oq=graph+of+e%5Ex+from+0+to+100&gs_lp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiGmdyYXBoIG9mIGVeeCBmcm9tIDAgdG8gMTAwMgUQIRigATIFECEYoAEyBRAhGKABMgUQIRigATIFECEYoAEyBRAhGKsCMgUQIRirAjIFECEYqwJIgQhQgQZYgQZwAXgBkAEAmAGPAaABjwGqAQMwLjG4AQPIAQD4AQGYAgKgApkBwgIKEAAYsAMY1gQYR5gDAIgGAZAGCJIHAzEuMaAHvgc&sclient=gws-wiz-serp https://www.google.com/search?q=graph+of+e%5Ex+from+0+to+100...

jcranmer 2y ago

It is risky to use econometrics as even qualitative data to support a hypothesis about the trajectory of history over millennia because the data doesn't exist. If you're not extremely careful in analyzing the provenance of your source statistics, it's very easy to fall into a circular argument of "assuming my hypothesis, my hypothesis is true." Here, just staring at the GDP per capita data, for example, the source paper pretty bluntly says that it can't back-continue the statistics past 1820, so it uses a completely different methodology to try to offer a number. So the author here commenting that the data is quite different pre- and post-Industrial Revolution shouldn't be surprising considering the data is literally based on completely different metrics! Hell, De Long literally shaves a factor of 4 off pre-Industrial Revolution GDP estimates because he feels like it.

mr_toad 2y ago
I don’t think long-term GDP measures are meaningful. What point is there in comparing an economy that produces horseshoes and wooden ships with one that has trains and steamships? A pre-industrial economy can’t produce X% of an industrial economy, because it can’t produce large chunks of that economy at all. At best you can compare the parts of the economy that remain relatively unchanged - like food, or textiles, and use those as rough and incomplete proxies.
- eru 2y ago
  When both economies are existing at the same time, and even trading with each other, you can relatively easily compare them. Eg you can compare Britain that had already (partially) industrialised with her continental peers who hadn't.
cryptonector 2y ago
Life expectancy absolutely is a good metric for comparing the Industrial Revolution to what came before. GDP per-capita less so to some degree, and even today it's difficult to compare 1st world GDP per-capita to places where it's three orders of magnitude slower because GDP measures generally fail to properly capture the production of subsistence farming and other small-scale (but valuable to the people in question) activities . And yet! it is obvious that GDP per-capita has been flatish throughout history by comparison to post Industrial Revolution times precisely because the vast majority of people do not live off subsistence farming, make their own homes, clothing and footwear, etc.

simple_quest_9 2y ago

The Industrial Revolution is a key example of the law of unintended consequences. More than anything else, it has totally changed the way we think -- adversely, I think. I'm a big believer in cultural materialism.

vixen99 2y ago
I'd never heard of this. For those who are time-pressed it's "Cultural materialism as a literary critical practice—this article will not address its anthropological namesake—is a Marxist-inspired and mostly British approach to in particular Shakespeare and early modern English literature that emerged and became prominent in the 1980s. Its emphasis on the historical and material conditions of the production and reception of texts has remained influential, even if its political commitment and interventionist purposes have largely been abandoned and increasingly ignored." https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780190221911/obo-9780190221911-0091.xml https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-97...
- simple_quest_9 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_materialism_(anthropology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_materialism_(anthropo... Essentially, the material and structural factors around us shape our ideology.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

iEchoic 2y ago

It's unfortunate that subjective well-being was left out of this, because that's the one that looks like it might be getting worse. Arguably, it's also the most important.

adamisom 2y ago
"worse": in the last 10-15 years? Because the Industrial Revolution was... before that
- iEchoic 2y ago
  Yeah, I was just curious to see if that's a purely modern phenomenon or if there's a longer historical trend.
randomdata 2y ago
The study that looked at subjective well-being in 16th century Spain concluded that subjective well-being mirrors subjective economic inequality. Without going too deep, it seems that relationship continues to hold in the modern time period of which you speak. Subjective economic inequality has increased, and subjective well-being has declined. But that does question just how important subjective well-being is if all it is is your perception of how much better off someone else is.

somat 2y ago

For thousands of years the economic level of humanity was basically a straight line with a very slow upward trend. then in the late 1700's things changed the economic graph went exponential and has not slowed down since. There is this concept of a technological singularity, Some days I feel it has already happened. And collectively we all are in a sort of tech time dilation, caught up in them, we barely notice the exponential tides.

icapybara 2y ago
Well put
TeMPOraL 2y ago
There's a mind-blowing moment when you realize that pretty much everything about modern life has been made in the last 100-150 years. Medicine stopped being voodoo and became reliably useful in that time. All scientific fields graduated from goofing around to serious discovery machines in that time. Meanwhile, half the items you see and use for fun and work and chores, exist because of petrochemical industry that developed in the past century. At least in the western world, the last 100-150 years have been a step change in human experience, so when someone questions if this time it's different, my answer is: yes, this time is really different. I never thought about it in terms of being past the singularity event horizon, but the more I ponder on what you wrote, the more I feel you may be right: we're already experiencing what technological singularity feels from inside. We're riding the exponents already, but are still early enough that we don't notice. (Or at least didn't notice. I thought progress of technology got boring in the past decade or two, but last couple years made me feel things are changing again, and faster than I can keep track of.)
- jhbadger 2y ago
  I'd say the 1920s (so 100 years ago) is the earliest time someone from today could go back to and still be able to live more or less the life they have today. In the 1920s, at least in urbanized areas in the developed world, you had access to electricity, indoor plumbing, the modern appliances (vacuum cleaners and refrigerators became common in this decade), cars had stopped being luxuries and were rapidly becoming essentials, movies (even with sound towards the end of the decade), and radio (which also served as a forerunner for TV as there were a lot of dramas in addition to music on it)

budgi4 2y ago

The Industrial Revolution was a major leap in energy tech, especially with the steam engine. This was the first time we efficiently converted thermal energy into kinetic energy, leading to mechanization and rapid growth. It’s akin to how the internet revolutionized information exchange. Just as the steam engine transformed industries and transportation, the internet has revolutionized communication and access to knowledge. Both innovations mark clear turning points, driving exponential technological and economic progress, and reshaping society in profound ways.

codr7 2y ago
First time is very much up for debate if you ask me.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  If you've got a previous "first time", say what it is. Otherwise, your comment is just vagueposting, which is a waste of everyone's time.
  - codr7 2y ago
    I have no clue, I'm just reasonably sure this wasn't it. There's way to much stuff out there we can't explain yet to draw that kind of conclusion. The Egyptian pyramids are just the tip of the iceberg here.
cynicalsecurity 2y ago
AI response?
- budgi4 2y ago
  Related article here: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/09/medieval-smokestacks-fossil-fuels-in-pre-industrial-times/ https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/09/medieval-smokestac...

Will182 2y ago

IIRC, James Lovelock as part of his Gaia Hypothesis argues that the price of energy is the fundamental input in how much “work” we can do, and subsequently causes both economic growth and environmental impact, because we do more stuff. The Industrial Revolution was a step change in how much work we could do, and stuff we could create. Looking forward then, something like solving nuclear fusion might unlock a new Industrial Revolution, and hence cause an environmental disaster, because we will be able to do a massively increased amount of “work” for less cost. So more infra, more building, more production. Ergo, clean energy is perhaps not the answer to a clean world. The only green future is one with “expensive” energy.

automatic6131 2y ago
>The only green future is one with “expensive” energy A world of expensive energy is a dystopia.
thejohnconway 2y ago
I don’t like that you’re being downvoted. I mean, I don’t agree with the hypothesis, but it’s an interesting perspective from a well known source.

cs702 2y ago

Great post. Worthwhile reading. The industrial revolution was indeed a big deal. I have one suggestion for the author: Please also show plots with a logarithmic scale on the vertical axis, instead of only a linear scale. The logarithmic scale does a good job of showing how growth rates change over time; the linear scale doesn't. When you plot a quantity growing exponentially on a linear scale, the past will always looks like a nearly flat line.

dash2 2y ago

One of the very weirdest things about this article is that it takes absolutely no account of how many people were alive. It is couched entirely in averages. In fact, the author is so serious about this that he can write "it doesn’t seem that any of the deadliest events in recorded history had a transformative negative impact". This includes the Black Death which he thinks killed 10% of all humans! Killing 10% of humans is a transformative negative impact. You must at least have an opinion of whether and when human life is better or worse than death. It matters whether there are 10 million people on earth or 10 billion! If you think only in averages, then anything before the end of the Malthusian regime is going to have only a short-run impact on welfare: any increase in GDP per capita gets dissipated by the resulting population growth. Not thinking in averages would make the flat line before the Industrial Revolution a lot less flat (though the IR would still show a big hockey stick). The human population 12000 years ago was about 4 million. Around 0 AD it was 200 million.[1] This weirdness is almost invisible to people because they have been trained so hard to think in averages. The same mistake is made by people who argue that the coming of agriculture was a disaster. (People got shorter and less healthy! Sure, but one reason for that is there are many, many more people. Again, if you think they would have been better off dead, then fine, but at least make the argument.) I blame Rawls and Harsanyi. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/population-growth?insight=the-world-population-has-increased-rapidly-over-the-last-few-centuries#key-insights https://ourworldindata.org/population-growth?insight=the-wor...

sandbach 2y ago

Anyone interested in a statistical approach to the history of the industrial revolution should read The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848 by Eric Hobsbawm. It's the first in an excellently written series on the history of the 18th century, written for the interested layperson.

AtlasBarfed 2y ago

From the standpoint of the life expectancy chart, the fact that the computer revolution continues the upwards trend despite sharply diminishing returns is probably as significant. The Industrial Revolution was doing the "low hanging fruit" of that. Still unbelievable significant, but the information age (which the medical revolutions are attached to) is doing some unbelievable lifting there. If/when they make serious strides in addressing aging, that will probably be the third (or fourth, the chart doesn't show Hunt+Gather -> Cultivation) major economic revolution. Keep in mind our life expectancy will probably drop without some biotech revolution. Climate change and demographic bombs are fueling dangerous wars, and we haven't even had to deal with really bad climate change impacts from heat and mass population movements/drought on the scale of billions.