The article claims loaned money is wasted in "useless pageants and tournaments" but pageants might be the opposite of useless in this context. Having regular ev

The article claims loaned money is wasted in "useless pageants and tournaments" but pageants might be the opposite of useless in this context. Having regular events where people travel from near and far to show off their finery encourages the development of technology - and the sharing of information - far in advance of what's necessary in normal day-to-day life. Suppose you're making clothing (or armor, or swords...) and there's one big annual pageant in your region. That pageant constitutes a financial incentive to show off your best work. You now have a reason to save money and build up technological prowess the rest of the year so you can try extra hard to make something extra impressive that one week so the people who wear your stuff at that event will outshine everyone else. Having special show-offish events (generally with an associated crafts fair) leads to an arms race. If one lord has an especially finely-woven blue silk shirt in this years tournament, the next year everybody else HAS to have shirts made that well; the guy who came up with the technique for making it makes out like a bandit and other people copy his techniques. The need to impress others in a limited context produces tech that isn't normally necessary and that tech first spreads to the rest of the elite then trickles down to the masses. Anyway, that's the "crafts fair" theory of how industrial development came about.