First came Gregory Clark’s blockbuster, A Farewell to Alms, which offered a novel theory why the Industrial Revolution happened in England. (Short answer: superior breeding, in the words of the Cato Institute’s Jason Kuznicki.) Then came Clark’s fellow economic historian, Joel Mokyr, with his own magisterial history of the Industrial Revolution, The Enlightened Economy. Trevor Butterworth reviews it for the Wall Street Journal today here. This stuff is hot hot hot!
For good reason. The Industrial Revolution may be the singular event in the history of our species – or any species for that matter. Until 200 years ago, you either struggled to get enough to survive or worried about getting killed for it if you succeeded. Now, thanks to the material abundance produced by the Industrial Revolution, humans are free to think on loftier things. (You know, Eat, Pray, Love.) How it happened is one of the most important riddles the social sciences can solve.
What of the availability of cheap high-energy resources being a necessary condition of the Industrial Revolution? (I believe that this is the position that John Michael Greer takes, that without such energy, the technical innovation that took place during the Industrial Revolution would not have happened and spread.)
If manufacturers could make their factories fully automated, would there be enough of a popular backlash to prevent them from doing so?
Who controls the capital? And for what do they use it?
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