

Robert Allen: Why the Industrial Revolution Was in Britain - cwan
http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2009/10/robert_allen_on.html

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pg
I've spent a lot of time studying this question. The high bit is that it would
have been surprising if it hadn't been. Britain was already the most advanced
country in the world by all the usual measures, like literacy, per capita
income, etc.

The question of why it didn't happen in the Netherlands is interesting. At one
point I thought it was because the Netherlands lacked natural resources like
coal and rivers. But it turns out they were already out of contention by the
time the Industrial Revolution started. The Netherlands were prosperous in
1650 but a wreck by 1750. The main reason seems to have been high taxes,
driven by the (ultimately impossible) goal of maintaining military parity with
England and France, which had much larger populations.

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bh23ha
I have to agree with the latest theory that Britain had the _unique_
combination of expensive labour and cheap energy.

It was unique to Britain for reasons having to do with coal and trade with the
colonies, but the bottom line is only when you have cheap energy and expensive
labour does it make sense to invest in machinery.

Only under those circumstances is it economical.

Even today companies in China who have tried to use more advanced machines to
replace workers have found out it is less profitable. There is nothing magic
about machines, they have to be more profitable then the alternative. And when
labour is cheaper, you just use human labour, what ever is cheapest and works.

For those who prefer to read: <http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3570>

~~~
pg
Even if that were a necessary condition, it wouldn't be sufficient. You also
have to have an economy where investment in machinery makes sense. (I.e. your
investment won't be confiscated by corrupt officials or destroyed by
invaders.)

Also, humans only compete with machines in a few types of work. For example,
you could not use human power to drive most of the things we drive with
engines: cars, trains, ships, planes, etc.

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jbert
> For example, you could not use human power to drive most of the things we
> drive with engines: cars, trains, ships, planes, etc.

True, but not relevant to the initial, successful commercialisation of the
technology. The mobile power plants are a whole step beyond the "lets
mechanize labour".

Newcomen engine: 1712, Stephenson's Rocket 1829.

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baguasquirrel
Awesome quote at about 62 minutes: "...This is all getting boring right? The
point of this is: invention is _boring_. Invention is not a great intellectual
breakthrough. Invention is not exciting reconceptualization. It's doing all of
these hard little things."

A bit sobering for us folks who think Haskell/Clojure/Insert-high-level-
language-here is going to change the world. Not that these tools aren't
valuable, as they increase productivity (which is kind of a big deal when good
engineers cost $100k a year), but on the flip side, it was then as true then
as it is true now that you just had to do the grunt work of experimenting with
your product.

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sfnhltb
Although on the other hand you have to factor in the "General Purpose
Technology", even within IT - some things are generally applicable and cause a
great leap forward - things like Lotus 1-2-3, GUI/mouse, RDBMS, html/web, etc.
(using older examples as the older a technological leap forward is, the more
unambiguously you can identify it clearly as being a step change rather than
an iterative improvement or of limited applicability). Of course in the same
way all these are followed up by thousands of small iterative improvements and
boring stuff to slowly creep utility forward while waiting for the next big
leap.

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cuerty
The topic "Why the industrial revolution was in Britain" it's one of the
firsts ones in the History class that I took at university. The short answer
it's "because the glorius revolution":
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glorius_revolution>

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redcap
Sorry, I don't think that's sufficient. While it's sure that the political and
hence scientific environment in britain was much better than continental
europe, the above video makes it clear to me that the primary factors were the
high cost of labour and the low cost of energy.

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petewarden
I see no video on the link, but I was intrigued and found this post by Robert
Allen on the same subject: <http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3570>

~~~
JeffL
I didn't see the video at first, either, but when I hit refresh, it decided to
show up.

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jseliger
I can't see the video, but I'm somewhat skeptical of the claim implied in the
title: people have been arguing about the Industrial Revolution's causes
practically since the Industrial Revolution. My favorite recent book on the
subject is A Farewell to Alms (see <http://jseliger.com/2007/09/10/a-farewell-
to-alms> ), but there are countless others.

