
How the West Got Rich - SonicSoul
http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-west-and-the-rest-got-rich-1463754427?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits
======
Animats
That's the WSJ.

Of course, what really did it was steam, iron, and steel. Until the 1800s,
economic growth in Europe was about half a percent a century. Didn't matter
whether you had a king or a Parliament. A few coastal cities had figured out
how to do shipping efficiently and were doing OK, but that had been happening
on and off since Roman times. Those were sometimes city-states run by
merchants, and were the closest thing to capitalist empires before the
Industrial Revolution. That didn't scale; there wasn't much to ship yet.

Then came steam engines. It took a century to get that right. The first
Newcomen steam engine, in 1712, was a dud, mostly because there was nothing to
make a good boiler and cylinder with yet, so an extremely inefficient low
pressure system had to be used. It took a century to get to Watt's engine.
That was good enough for locomotives, and finally things started to spin.

The big moment was the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, in
1830. This was the moment when railroads got out of beta. People could, for
the first time, buy a ticket and go someplace. Within a few decades, railroads
were everywhere in Europe and growing in the US and India.

The Next Big Thing was steel. Steel has a long history, but until 1880, it was
an expensive niche product, like titanium today. Then came the Bessemer
process. Suddenly there was something strong and cheap from which you could
make stuff.

None of this came out of the merchant city-states. The Hanseantic League
didn't develop railroads. The Mediterranean maritime states didn't develop
heavy industry. The most capitalist organizations on Earth at the time did a
lot for art and architecture, but didn't start the Industrial Revolution
early.

For a different view, learn how the East got rich. Read "How Asia Works".[1]
This is a good study of how some of the east Asian countries went from the
18th century to the 21st in a few decades. The early stages required some
degree of central planning, and specific incentives.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/How-Asia-Works-Success-Failure-
ebook/...](https://www.amazon.com/How-Asia-Works-Success-Failure-
ebook/dp/B00B3M47VC)

~~~
evgen
Don't forget canals. They were the transport infrastructure beta test for
England. With canals it finally made economic sense to extract more and
produce more than the immediate local economy could use. Canal building also
prepared the public to invest/speculate on the new infrastructure and provide
capital the government was unable or unwilling to risk. Railroads poured fuel
on the fire, but the first spark came from canals.

------
woopwoop
There is a compelling argument that liberty, or at least efficient markets,
inhibits technological innovation. The reason is that there is no incentive to
innovate when there is robust competition, since the advantage gained by an
innovation will be competed away before the investment into the innovation can
be recovered. In other words, why bother to invent if you are just going to be
copied anyway?

------
m0llusk
A highly detailed and relevant discussion of this subject can be found in the
robustly researched work Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism and the Economics of
Growth and Prosperity by William Baumol, Robert Litan, and Carl Schramm:

[http://sites.kauffman.org/capitalism/](http://sites.kauffman.org/capitalism/)

------
rumiarabi
So no mention of Imperialism and the vast transfer of wealth from indigenous
peoples to their colonial oppressors? Not even a nod? We're rich because we're
so free and liberated and gosh if these third world knuckleheads would just
get it together they'd be just as rich! A+ WSJ.

~~~
jack9
No, it was some fantastical idea that capitalism is inherently productive.
Nevermind that those idea sex pots (what a shitty analogy) would have fallen
on their face when you tried to run a steam engine through an existing
infrastructure. The wide open plains and untapped resource mining and abundant
water and farmlands is the economic plunder wave the US has been riding.

This is a 0 value fluff piece about rainbows with pots of gold at the end.

~~~
SonicSoul
I admit I was conned by this article to seem legitimate. Can you recommend
some posts/articles/books that are not fluff pieces on this subject? really
trying to understand this subject

