I suppose an argument could be made that it was built on hard work and ingenuity in much the same way that you can say politicians really are better at something than everyone else. It's just not necessarily the thing you'd want them to be good at. In this case, that would be that the powers we're talking about made some incredible innovations in terms of colonialism and internal methods of quelling the dissent of the aforementioned cheap (or enslaved) labor.
Of course, it's not at all clear to me that this hasn't been the case for every single past (or emerging) empire. But the "self-made civilization" is maybe even more ridiculous a concept than the "self-made man".
Yes
> religion (which was more unquestionable
No - America was founded as a country on freedom of religion, which is why it ended up with thousands of little groups from a state of polyamorists to some guys who really liked making furniture.
> than say, global warming is today)
Trolling
> extreme version of the modern liberal
Trolling. Also please choose whether Jefferson was an extreme liberal or a conservative prisoner of the prejudices of his time.
> they deserve some credit for their heroic bravery and ideas on liberty
Yes. There was also the question, even at the time, of how well they were going to live up to what they meant on liberty. They wrote "all men are created equal" into the declaration of independence then immediately spent the next 200 years arguing that meant "not all men". Some of the co-signatories were there at the time arguing against slavery, it's just that Jefferson was on the other side of this particular issue.
I'm not aware you are rebelling against our government for the atrocities which exist in the world today.
The rest of your post is dismissive of not asinine, and even against HN guidelines.
Both Washington and Jefferson owned plantations that profited from slave labor. Your comparison with the modern liberal should try to take that fact into account.
The parent comment suggests some glaring flaw in their conception of liberty. Was it a glaring flaw? Yes. But it's important to understand that in the context of their belief system.
Do you eat animal products? Have you any idea what kind of abuses take place? Do you consume products produced by people whose lives are defined by insecure access to healthcare, safety or even nutrition? Do you contribute to the horrendous destruction of our environment? Work in sv? How many homeless people do you step over on your way to work?
It would be better if people got off their moral high horses and stopped taking for granted the liberty and prosperiry they have available to them here in America.
And politicians and bureaucrats certainly profit from those very schemes.
You’re being downvoted because you chose to regurgitate alt-right theology to lay history’s problems at the doorstep of “liberal guilt”
The largest group of benificaries of public education? Whites.
The largest group of beneficiaries of welfare? Whites.
Your ad hominen attack seems especially ridiculous to me as I've never even visited an alt right website or community in my life with the exception of voat--when reddit started mass waves of censorship and politicking--which I havent even since returned to in years.
This is just spin doctoring and propaganda. Otherwise, your "logic" would make this man "Alt-Right." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sowell
There is an empirical basis to question the effects of “liberal guilt.”
https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/11/14/a-legacy-o...
Take the Russian communist revolution of 1917. Had Lenin been an American and the coup/revolution been american... Do you think that by the late 20th century, the US and Soviet Union's positions would have been reversed?
I don't think we can really answer that, but to me, "yes" feels like an old fashioned answer. I don't think a founding philosophy or constitution (or anything really) has such a deterministic effect. I'm more in the "one-damned thing after another" camp.
If you're asking the broader question of whither the (self-proclaimed) state capitalist countries that came out of the retrenchment when those revolutions failed, I think there's still an answer there. They developed differently, used their resources, and prioritized different things than more liberal capitalist ones in ways that you can make some broad claims about. But they did so in a context, as did the liberal and non-aligned/miscellaneous blocs.
Anyway, this is an argument people will still be having 200 years in the future.
Did they? Or was that just something American businessmen liked to scare each other with in a post-war era?
Slavery had a very high human cost and it was also something that prevented the evolution of better options.
Edit: see below for a better explanation
The Roman Empire had a water system and concrete to make the Coliseum. Relied on slave labour up until the end. Made a plant that was used as contraception extinct.
Given the time they stood, I'd say their scientific/mathematical progress was nimble.
Egyptian empire: invented geometry, still had slaves pushing stones up to form pyramids.
The Portuguese and the Spanish conquered half the world, but still relied on manual labour and got behind when the English started using machine labour.
Like it often is with wealth, we're not special - our current empires just had richer parents and bigger accumulated base of inventions. We can build cooler stuff now than our ancestors - but let's never forget that "what makes one step a giant leap is all the steps before"[2].
--
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)#Connec...
[1] - I think I've seen them on dailymotion; of course I don't encourage copyright infringement, it's very important to keep our most important works unaccessible until everyone who might be interested in them dies off and only archaeologists will care.
[2] - http://www.ovff.org/pegasus/songs/toast-for-unknown-heroes.h... / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zotaRLROtw
> Like it often is with wealth, we're not special - our current empires just had richer parents and bigger accumulated base of inventions. We can build cooler stuff now than our ancestors
Yes, totally agree. But what I'm saying is that those old empires didn't have technological evolution as a goal (maybe the latter ones) hence they didn't really think of it.
Sure, evolution and ideas take time, but it seems it took much less time once the right mindset was in place.
Right. But come to think of it, that mindset is, too, a technology. It took a while to develop, and its evolution seems to be intertwined with the inventions humans made over time, and the shape societies took.
Hrm... Would you consider that independent of technical or causal (scientific) knowledge? Is it values, or more than just that?
I don't have a fully fleshed out model in my head just yet, but I imagine it like this: humans seem to have a pretty fixed emotional and cognitive makeup. What changes is the landscape in which we operate - what technologies are available, what customs exist in our times, what are the core "cultural memes". Kind of like water flowing downhill - a simple process in itself, but where it goes and what shape it takes depends on the landscape it's flowing through, and the flow itself shapes that landscape over time.
Another way of viewing this: we humans are like somewhat fixed neurons, but it's the connections we make with each other that change. Connections both to our contemporaries through complex social structures, as well as to the past, through knowledge accumulated in books and traditions, and other artifacts of past cultures.
Briefly addressed here: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5rnjg0/state_o...
More:
What do you mean by machine labour here?
If you're referring to steam engines I think you're drawing a causal link that isn't justified. The dates at best line up to early steam engines. They were massively inefficient and used for pumping out mines, they weren't exactly transformative to the nation.
That isn't really the point, yes it was the 'age of steam' but in reality it made a few marginal mines profitable. There were no steam trains, no steam ships, no wide spread mechanisation.
Britain wasn't some backwater that was propelled ahead of spain due to accidentally discovering steam power. It was already a power in it own right, with trading networks and markets for these raw materials, that was the impetus for the development of steam.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_power_during_the_Industr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Savery#Application_of_t...
Coal mining was a thosand times greater than metal mining by the late 18th / early 19th century:
Coal was so abundant in Britain that the supply could be stepped up to meet the rapidly rising demand. About 1770-1780 the annual output of coal was some 6.25 million long tons.
Versus:
Despite the collapse of the copper mining industry in 1866, the tin industry was still riding high producing 10,000 tons of tin a year - about half the world's production.
http://www.miningartifacts.org/English-Mines.html
Coal production 1700 - 1900:
1700 : 2.7 million tonnes
1750 : 4.7 million tonnes
1800 : 10 million tonnes
1850 : 50 million tonnes
1900 : 250 million tonnes
http://historylearning.com/great-britain-1700-to-1900/indrev...
More on copper:
During the middle of the 18th Century the quantity of British copper sold was over 700,000 tons.
https://www.copper.org/education/history/60centuries/raw_mat...
Plus that's 700,000 tons of copper, copper ore typically contains 2%? Copper, so your 700,000 tons of copper represents 35 million tons of ore. I'm undecided whether relative weight is even a good comparator. Sure value of output would be the best comparison?
You seem to be referencing Savery engines that weren't successful, whereas I'm referencing Newcomen engines that were. Can we agree that unsuccessful engines weren't a factor in Britain overtaking Spain?
The immediate applications of coal may not have been yet more steam power (that waited for Watt in ~1770 and more especially expiry of his patents in 1800), but it was applied to space heat and cooking, glassmaking, and smelting of various metals, though most especially iron. It also freed up limited domestic and importe lumber for shipbuilding.
This at a time when other factors such as Spain's plunder of New World gold an silver were leading to rampant inflation and an early example of what's now called "Dutch Disease". Spain itself has comparatively little coal (mostly in the north), whilst the major industrial powers of 19th century Europe, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, all had major domestic coal deposits, crucially: located near coasts or rivers. At a time when cargo moved almost exclusively by water, this was absolutely essential.
By comparison, in the US, despite vastly greater coal deposits, wood (generally locally available) remained the primary fuel until the development of railroads (and high-strength steel rather than iron rails, to handle heavily loaded coal cars without splitting, also dependant on coked coal fuel), in the 1880s.
For further references, see Vaclav Smil (Energy in World History, Energy and Civilization, also Making the modern world : materials and dematerialization, on material use), Manfred Weissenbacher (Sources of Power), and Gregory Clark (A Farewell to Alms).
Regards copper ores: as of the 18th century, English copper mines averaged 12% concentration, with high-yield mine typically higher. It's modern ores which are of far lower concentration (though 2% would now be considered high). So cut your overburden estimates by a factor of at least six. And yes, mining costs increase directly with the inverse of ore grade. That overburden doesn't move itself.
The references I'm familiar with all hugely emphasise the use of steam-driven pumps in coal mining, particularly for coastal and subsea coal mines. Though other applications existed. And quantities of energy resource mining tend to be prodigious relative to materials mining. Only water exceeds present-day energy minerals in quantity, followed by rock, sand, and gravel (Smil, Making).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_extraction#Concentrat...
"The Spain that the sickly young Charles II (1661-1700) inherited was clearly in decline and there were more losses immediately." [1]
These are both from before the steam engine was invented. I don't think its reasonable blame steam power for the downfall of Spain. The dates just don't really line up, especially not when you look when steam became a major driving force.
Now I agree with your point that the availability of coal was a huge factor in the industrial revolution.
Ps looking up copper ore concentrations, I got the same 12% figure, I thought it questionable as its so far higher than other concentrations. Apparently modern ore has 0.6% copper.
As to what country took title -- I'd have to check an authoritative source, possibly Maddison's data if it has sufficient granularity, but my money would be on France or the Netherlands, rather than England, at least through about 1755 (Seven Years War).
And by the 19th century, it was previously unorganised states such as Germany who'd utterly surpassed Spain, whilst the (now United) Britain benefitted hugely by avoiding the revolutions and wars that wracked Europe through 1848 (and somewhat beyond), as well as control of India (providing saltpetre for gunpowder) and China (general trade, once the Brits discovered the balance-of-trade leveling properties of opium), Canada, and Australia.
Even modest shifting of fuels away from wood gave compelling advantages. Smil credits Dutch use of peat for prt of that nation's success. Transport systems, ag productivity, attitudes toward invention and discovery (Catholic Spain vs Anglican England & Protestant Holland), canal building, political divisions, domestic resource access, colonial access, etc., etc., all played roles.
But after 1800, ability to access an utilise fossil fuels came to dominate, frequently a self-reinforcing process.
Smil, Weissenbacher, et al, make for fascinating reading (see previous).
But that ceases to be competitive past a certain level of technology and value-add. Even slaves in the American South got paid extra for work requiring exceptional skill and attention to detail. It turns out you can't whip people into producing quality past a very basic level.
The legacy of that is still what drives a lot of the economy in the US even today.
No. That's a propaganda fiction used by the Far Left to bring down the current order.
If you really want some explanations for the lower relative wealth of black households, try reading Thomas Sowell.
Coincidentally, of course. (OR, The phrase "opportunity hoarding" comes to mind.)
No to the first. The causation from slavery doesn't reach the current day. There were tremendous gains in literacy rates and per capita wealth of black people after slavery. Then there were later reversals in literacy rates and rates of out of wedlock births which date to the mid 20th century.
https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/11/14/a-legacy-o...
"If we wanted to be serious about evidence, we might compare where blacks stood a hundred years after the end of slavery with where they stood after 30 years of the liberal welfare state. In other words, we could compare hard evidence on "the legacy of slavery" with hard evidence on the legacy of liberals."
As for Jim Crow, some really bad things happened under that, it's true. Those laws were overturned by the civil rights movement.
Incidentally, my family name indicates that my ancestors were also essentially slaves. That form of slavery persisted into the 1800's. No one in my family talks about suffering as a result of that. The notion would just be seen as silly.
Efficiency is not a one way street. You need people with will and knowledge to operate the machinery or further research. Otherwise you will inevitably be eclipsed.
Recent lessons happened to Great Britain (colonies), Europe (know how and funding, war devastation), Ming China (complacency and bureaucracy), Japanese tech dominance (population got old and crammed in), Soviets (political pressure and mismanagement). It is happening to USA right now.
The affluence of Western Europe and the US was not built on hard work and ingenuity so much as the exploitation of cheap labor and the sudden access to deep veins of basic resources or economic/industrial efficiencies which were either already extant but inaccessible without a critical mass of capital, or else were inevitable on an imminent timescale given past development.
Have at it.