pktechgirlbackup | the competition theory (Reply)

Before I get into Farewell to Alm's central discussion- why did the industrial revolution happen when it did, and why in England?- I want to discuss the hypothesis I learned and accepted as a child: competition. Take guns. Guns were a disruptive technology: they were inferior to long bows in terms of killing things, but could be used with almost no training. If you were a noble, you were probably against this, because it could lead to uppity ideas on the part of the peasants. Unless you were involved in a war with another noble, at which point being able to create soldiers without years and years of training (and consumed food while producing nothing when not at war) suddenly seemed like a fantastic idea. And even if you decided the payoff wasn't worth it, once the noble across the way did, you could either go along with it or get conquered. So guns spread across Europe. But China (and Japan) had a much more top down hierarchy, and could enforce the no-gun equilibrium. Less destructive war probably seems like a good thing, but most awesome new technologies have, at the very least, the potential to change the distribution of winners and losers. And eventually Europe's faster rate of innovation overcame China's head start. Europe had more governments because it had a more even distribution of arable land, so you couldn't monopolize a resource- people would just walk 100 miles and start over. They wouldn't like it, but it was an option if things got bad enough.

Now that I think about it, there are holes in this theory. Like, say, the Mongols. And the fact that while the "small areas surrounded by death are easier to control" idea works for Japan, China is really quite large. Although the amount of capital improvements to needed to rice farm did make people more stationary.