Comment by varjag
21 hours ago
Anything can be anything if you stretch definitions far enough. But normally industrialization is seen as distinct and antagonistic to artisanal culture.
21 hours ago
Anything can be anything if you stretch definitions far enough. But normally industrialization is seen as distinct and antagonistic to artisanal culture.
There was a very marked change in the growth rate, which is why economic historians focus on that.
Yes, there were multiple further steps that needed to happen, as you note. But the black plague got the population "unstuck" from a local minimum that they could not grow from, to being able to have cattle plow the fields and eat meat that allowed them to have some surplus to capture the further gains.
It's not that the later gains were inevitable, but that they never would have otherwise happened, and the growth rate started with the plague.
It's like saying the current AI boom started recently, there's no way the steam engine was related. It is a clear causal chain, even though many things had to happen in between.
But before the black plague, at least the "western world" was stuck in Malthusian dynamics where there was no growth in technology or income.
If "multiple steps" take 400 years, then the cause is something else.
The economy went from 0% growth for 100s of years to 3% growth that lasted many hundreds of years.
Yes, at each step keeping the 3% growth needed things to keep going, but the big thing was unleashing the nonzero growth rate, to get unstuck from the local minimum.
2 replies →
What makes that a rule? Can causal chains not last more than X amount of time? What is the cutoff?
4 replies →
A small increase in exponential growth will have a huge effect after 400 years
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