Honestly, you should just go read Acemoglu’s “Power and Progress” as the other comment suggested. It’s written for a popular audience. Many of these assertions are wrong and intentionally elide huge swathes of the actual history. I dunno who would bother to engage with these wall text posts you make on here.
You're complaining about less than a dozen paragraphs while telling me to read a 560-page book?
This seems like the money quote:
the broad-based prosperity of the past was not the result of any automatic, guaranteed gains of technological progress… Most people around the globe today are better off than our ancestors because citizens and workers in earlier industrial societies organised, challenged elite-dominated choices about technology and work conditions, and forced ways of sharing the gains from technical improvements more equitably
But this is just the same point I've been making: If you have competitive markets, this is what happens naturally because customers will prefer to patronize businesses that share the gains of technological progress with customers and employees will prefer to work for the ones that share the gains of technological progress with workers. The ones that try to keep all the gains for themselves get outcompeted -- as long as there is competition.
The problem -- which they largely recognize -- is that if you don't have competition, which has been the case in many instances throughout history, the incumbents become abusive. But since this is only possible when they have insufficient competition, that is the problem we have to solve.
Well, if that’s your point, then you’re largely wrong, misinterpreting that paragraph, and again should read this book and more about this history in general. I’m complaining, again, about you arguing from your ideological priors without any real engagement with the scholarship or history.
The consequence of industrialization was creating new social and political formations (primarily the classes called Labor and Capital and their corresponding representation in nascent democracies vs. prior feudal dynamics). While market economies, really more the birth of Capitalism in general, was necessary for creating those classes and competing interests, it was not sufficient for creating the progress you cite. That had more to do with worker organization against exploitation, specifically in the energy economy, which gave them massive leverage over the emergent political formations (see Timothy Mitchell’s work Carbon Democracy). That’s why the blurb explicitly states: workers in earlier industrial societies organised, challenged elite-dominated choices about technology and work conditions, and forced ways of sharing the gains from technical improvements more equitably.
It’s honestly bizarre to debate someone about the contents of a book they haven’t read, nor seem to even engage with a basic summary of. There are lots of compliant chatbots you can talk to if you only want to be in dialogue with whatever you already believe to be true.
Comments
Honestly, you should just go read Acemoglu’s “Power and Progress” as the other comment suggested. It’s written for a popular audience. Many of these assertions are wrong and intentionally elide huge swathes of the actual history. I dunno who would bother to engage with these wall text posts you make on here.
You're complaining about less than a dozen paragraphs while telling me to read a 560-page book?
This seems like the money quote:
But this is just the same point I've been making: If you have competitive markets, this is what happens naturally because customers will prefer to patronize businesses that share the gains of technological progress with customers and employees will prefer to work for the ones that share the gains of technological progress with workers. The ones that try to keep all the gains for themselves get outcompeted -- as long as there is competition.
The problem -- which they largely recognize -- is that if you don't have competition, which has been the case in many instances throughout history, the incumbents become abusive. But since this is only possible when they have insufficient competition, that is the problem we have to solve.
Well, if that’s your point, then you’re largely wrong, misinterpreting that paragraph, and again should read this book and more about this history in general. I’m complaining, again, about you arguing from your ideological priors without any real engagement with the scholarship or history.
The consequence of industrialization was creating new social and political formations (primarily the classes called Labor and Capital and their corresponding representation in nascent democracies vs. prior feudal dynamics). While market economies, really more the birth of Capitalism in general, was necessary for creating those classes and competing interests, it was not sufficient for creating the progress you cite. That had more to do with worker organization against exploitation, specifically in the energy economy, which gave them massive leverage over the emergent political formations (see Timothy Mitchell’s work Carbon Democracy). That’s why the blurb explicitly states: workers in earlier industrial societies organised, challenged elite-dominated choices about technology and work conditions, and forced ways of sharing the gains from technical improvements more equitably.
It’s honestly bizarre to debate someone about the contents of a book they haven’t read, nor seem to even engage with a basic summary of. There are lots of compliant chatbots you can talk to if you only want to be in dialogue with whatever you already believe to be true.