On Fri, 1 Oct 2010, Keith Hudson wrote: > Apart from the necessary supply of increasingly cheap fossils fuels, the > industrial revolution (that is when the idea of "economic growth" emerged > and GDP has been worshipped) depended foremost on the mass production of > what were originally hand-made luxury items enjoyed by the land-owning rich > of the agricultural era. Despite what Marx and Engles said about the > increasing impoverishment of the factory workers they were, in fact, > prospering all the way through the 19th century and most of the 20th. As > each new consumer product, hitherto expensive (cotton clothing, porcelain > pots, curtains for the windows, bicycles, etc) became cheaper in successive > swathes then, with hard saving at each stage -- the professional > middle-class (see Samuel Pepys diaries), then the middle-class, then the > working class -- became a cornucopia flowing downwards, and a whole > population working hard and aspiring upwards.
I'm finally moved to comment on this thesis. If I were to contemplate the arc of the western prosperity flowing from the industrial revolution, I would pinpoint the key drivers as being a synergy of several. Obviously key are the extraction of high energy content fossil fules, first coal then oil, in combination with the development of devices to extract and exploit them for motive power and ancillary applications, particularly smelting. But what I would identify as the key additional factor which catalyzed the advance of wealth is the simultaneous advent of vast open frontiers, offering the opportunity of carte blanche application of the new technologies and accompanying explosive population growth. At the same time, intellectual freedom led fairly directly to great advances in public health and sanitation, which brought about such an improvement in the living conditions of the already "fully" populated regions of the world that it was the virtual equivalent of the opening of another frontier, in terms of the resulting increase in population. All this growth and expansion provided the main wealth driver, not in consumer goods, but in major industrial production for housing, transportation and commercial infrastructure: steel rails and girders, brick, concrete, and asphalt; multistory buildings, highways, bridges, ships. I suggest that an entire absense of consumer products may not have caused a substantial reduction in the overall arc of productive activity and accompanying growth of wealth (if we consider housing to be distinct from consumer goods). You can consider the automobile a consumer good, but in its absense, an equivalent flourishing of public transportation would necessarily have resulted. -Pete _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
