And England had all of those resources from America, Asia and Africa to run their little kingdom.. Comparing Poland to the resources from America is strange. Did Poland have an Empire? I realize they did some amazing things with Lithuania predicting all of the Constitutional monarchies etc. the second or third written constitution ever etc. Having listened to Europeans for so long I finally decided to go to Europe last summer and was struck by how small the countries were and how old fashioned the cities. I think it's amazing that a country the size of Italy could be a "world" economy and how much the governing of California and New York with their graft and cronyism reminds me of Europe. California is the fifth or sixth largest economy in the world according to Charlie Rose the other night on the TV. The world is a really interesting place not given to simple description.
REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2012 12:26 PM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: Re: [Futurework] The end of growth? Tyler Cowan agrees with me about the probability of stagnation and about the importance of consumer goods but he doesn't explain the uninterrupted downwards cascade of consumer goods that was required to keep economic growth going during the last 300 years (and the counterflow of social status upwards). Also he sounds very America-biased. Why didn't Europe succeed as well? Russia and Ukraine had (have) equally large regions of grain-growing soil (more fertile than America's). Poland and Germany had (have) vast coal mines. Why should England, a pokey little island with relatively modest agriculture and coal, start the industrial revolution at least a century before anywhere else? Well, I'd tell him if asked. England had a high density of merchant banks in London (echoed in no more than a half-a-dozen other northern European ports and two ports in the Mediterranean). England also had provincial banks which existed nowhere else in Europe or Asia. It was the to-ing and fro-ing of finance between these two types of banks, and the sophisticated development of bill-broking which enabled the earliest industrial projects to get off the ground. Also the industrial revolution never really got into its stride until a fierce 100 year debate had ended with the decision in 1844 that the pound had to be gold-backed in order that credit was generous but also kept within bounds. America has all the virtues that Cowan ascribes to it but, most of all, America was able to copy our model of provincial banks very early on (long before they developed in Europe) and was able to tap into large loans from the London merchant banks (via New York) to get major industrial projects and the railways off the ground. Keith At 13:47 13/09/2012, Ed wrote: Interesting review by Andrew Coyne in today's Ottawa Citizen of Tyler Cowan's "The Great Stagnation". In part, Coynes says the following: ... Cowen argues that slow growth is more the old normal than the new: Median incomes in the United States have been moving sideways for the better part of four decades, as have most measures of productivity. While others have made much the same point, Cowen locates that decades-long slump in a still larger historical frame. Indeed, it may not be the era of stagnation that is the anomaly, but the long period of rapid growth that preceded it. For the first three centuries or so of European settlement, he argues, America enjoyed the benefits of a number of "low-hanging fruit." It had an abundance of arable land, for starters, which settlers could claim for free - and not only land, but resources. As the Industrial Revolution took hold, it had access to a similar abundance of labour, as millions left the farms for the cities; as, later, it could call upon seemingly endless re-serves of skilled labour, as more and more of these new workers went on to get an education. And, perhaps most critically, it profited from a truly astonishing series of inventions, from electricity to the light bulb to the automobile to the telephone. Much the same story could be told of other industrial countries, of course. But nowhere did land, labour and technological progress combine to produce such enormous wealth as in America. Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/business/What+slow+growth+wasn+result+cause+cri sis/7233960/story.html#ixzz26LvAUCJ9 Reminds one of Keith Hudson's argument that growth is based on new consumers goods that everyone wants, but it would appear that Cowan's argument is much broader. Must buy the book. Ed _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com <http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/>
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
