I find the comparison between the growth of Britain during the Industrial Age and that of Asia in the last 40 years always a strange thing. They are very different and yet so many economist and historian seems to want to find parallels and learn lessons from it. The result is always disappointing, and yet, as the article says “it’s almost impossible to stop thinking about”.
So let me do it as well: This article goes into great detail about British spindles. Would you visit a city like Leipzig today, they remember how machine and cheap labour took away spinning from the United Kingdom (visit baumwollspinnerei). Very much like Asia took away other industry from Europe in the last 40 years. Transport cost dropped, labour was cheaper, no political pressures, etc. and access to markets kept growing. Their education focused on the quality of machinery and eventually today the German economy provides quality machines to factories all over the world. Their education and innovation centered around making machines better.
Comparison does not always stack up and has unexpected results.
I would advise students today to learn complex systems. The idea that we can compare things of the past and different regions, like an accountant, is not going to help.
On further introspection, I do have one gripe. The conclusion says that nothing is definite in the economic progress in comparison between China and the US – but you just spent quite a bit of time illustrating the differences in production between the UK and the US and why innevitably US production won out by the time of WW1 – but we’ve also seen a similar shift in productive processes favouring the particular conditions of China – cheap labour, but also access to cheap resources. Labour is fundamental in understanding how value is created, and as such even minimum wage resource production in the US is going to be simply incapable of producing resources at a quantity needed to compete with Chinese equivalents. The author says that US tech is currently superior – but China’s catching up very quickly in that regard.
I don’t see why you shouldn’t make the conclusion that, as things stand, China’s economy is going to surpass that of the US’ and they’re probably going to get into high tech industries relatively soon.
3 comments
A good read but no idea why I read it tbh
That was a fun read.
I find the comparison between the growth of Britain during the Industrial Age and that of Asia in the last 40 years always a strange thing. They are very different and yet so many economist and historian seems to want to find parallels and learn lessons from it. The result is always disappointing, and yet, as the article says “it’s almost impossible to stop thinking about”.
So let me do it as well: This article goes into great detail about British spindles. Would you visit a city like Leipzig today, they remember how machine and cheap labour took away spinning from the United Kingdom (visit baumwollspinnerei). Very much like Asia took away other industry from Europe in the last 40 years. Transport cost dropped, labour was cheaper, no political pressures, etc. and access to markets kept growing. Their education focused on the quality of machinery and eventually today the German economy provides quality machines to factories all over the world. Their education and innovation centered around making machines better.
Comparison does not always stack up and has unexpected results.
I would advise students today to learn complex systems. The idea that we can compare things of the past and different regions, like an accountant, is not going to help.
On further introspection, I do have one gripe. The conclusion says that nothing is definite in the economic progress in comparison between China and the US – but you just spent quite a bit of time illustrating the differences in production between the UK and the US and why innevitably US production won out by the time of WW1 – but we’ve also seen a similar shift in productive processes favouring the particular conditions of China – cheap labour, but also access to cheap resources. Labour is fundamental in understanding how value is created, and as such even minimum wage resource production in the US is going to be simply incapable of producing resources at a quantity needed to compete with Chinese equivalents. The author says that US tech is currently superior – but China’s catching up very quickly in that regard.
I don’t see why you shouldn’t make the conclusion that, as things stand, China’s economy is going to surpass that of the US’ and they’re probably going to get into high tech industries relatively soon.