At 19:41 13/09/2012, REH wrote:
And England had all of those resources from America, Asia and Africa
to run their little kingdom..
No, Ray. I cannot think of a single basic resource (save two) which
we didn't supply all by ourselves from our own small island for the
first two-thirds of the industrial revolution -- say, up to about
1870 -- by which time the main infrastructure had been laid down. The
only exceptions I can think of are:
1. Guano islands (that is, Pacific islands of bird droppings and no
inhabitants) which we plundered for phosphate fertilizer. But then
America was at it, too, even to the extent of annexing as many
islands as possible by law (1856).
2. Raw cotton from America. But then America slave-owners were making
quite as much profits as cotton spinning factories in our northern cities.
Keith
(REH) 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+crisis/7233960/story.html#ixzz26LvAUCJ9>http://www.ottawacitizen.com/business/What+slow+growth+wasn+result+cause+crisis/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
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
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