>Ricardo wrote:
> >
>> I have come to the conclusion that China's hydraulic lock-in and
>> long term patter of development cannot be fully grasped without a
>> clear appreciation of the ecological dynamic of the Yellow River.
>
>I'm finding these posts intensely interesting but what's frustrating is that
>I still haven't got a handle on the notion of lock-in and the more I ponder
>it the less I see it; but I'm simply learning from you and hesitate to
>speculate about what makes me uneasy in the absnece of much more data. I
>guess my problem comes down to not quite believing that you've etsbalished
>more than a kind of mentality, a mass or more properly, an elite psychology
>which consitututed lock-in: the elites were trapped not so much by scarcity
>of capital which could be diverted from hydraulic maintenance as by a moral
>investment in the past and by a political need to stabilise society in the
>conservative ways characteristic especially of the Ming. Because in fact
>there was plenty of surplus available to redirect into take-off; if you
>compare with the English Industrial Revo you see there that the high-growth
>manufacturing industries were sectorally insignificant at the start and the
>amounts of capital which take-off required were relatively quite small
>(relative to what was avaialble, or to elite luxury consumption). So you end
>up wondering about the wider context of Chinese and Japanese failure to
>capitalise on early technological advances, and even the tendency to lose
>them and to regress.
>
>In short, there are some links missing here, somewhere.
>
>Mark Jones
You've already answered your question yourself. What's missing is
capitalists compelled to M-C-M'.
Yoshie
