The Great Enrichment and what comes next

Great Debates
1

The Great Enrichment is a term for the unprecedented increase in wealth that has occurred over the last 200 years or so.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/fee.org/articles/the-great-enrichment-was-built-on-ideas-not-capital/ampYou

“ the Great Enrichment increased real income per head, in the face of a rise in the number of heads, by a factor of seven — by anything from 2,500 to 5,000 percent .”

Anyone with a sense of human history whatsoever can tell you that we have just lived through the most amazing period in it. There has never been such a huge change, I would say for the better, to take place in so short a time.

Mccloskey has identified the cause, and there is little hope in disputing it:

“ The Great Enrichment, in short, came out of a novel, pro-bourgeois, and anti-statist rhetoric that enriched the world. It is, as Adam Smith said, “allowing every man [and woman, dear] to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice.”

But human society seems to be regressing rhetorically. Success is viewed as simply a result of atoms ping-ponging around in the universe. Socio-economic pre-determinism is gospel.

I’m not optimistic for a leveraging and expansion of the Great Enrichment. Based on the prevailing rhetoric of the ascendant public figures from Trump, to Fauci, to any “expert” quoted in a mainstream media source, western society is headed for stagnation.

2

That’s a bad link. here’s the correct one:

To be honest, it reads like an undergraduate essay from a ‘B’ student.

But there may still be something worth debating here, about future societies and technology.

3

Thank you.

Do you have an alternate explanation for the Great Enrichment? Do you deny it happened? Was it inevitable? Is it a commonplace?

4

No, no, and no. But all this is pretty obvious and simplistic. It’s not some new or controversial idea. My reaction was, ‘Yes, and so what?’

So people are wealthier than in the past because of ideas and technology, not capital. And?

5

What is original is the focus on a change in rhetoric causing enrichment and not:

Natural resources
Capital accumulation
Technology
Property rights
Exploitation of the proletariat
Racial purity
God’s preference
Strong government
Democracy
The Transatlantic Slave Trade
Yadda
Yadda
Yadda

6

It’s been impressive, sure, but for most amazing period in human history my money’s still on the half-millennium from, say, 3500-3000 BCE. Literacy, rapid proto-urbanization and spread of agriculture, globalization of trade, horse transport, wowza.

IMHO people in 1800 might not have had any idea of the particular sorts of dazzling magical technology that were going to emerge by 2021, but they had a reasonable picture of global conditions and trends. For sheer mind-bending amazement, commend me to the mid-4th-millennium person looking at the literally reshaped world of 500 years later.

Yes, although not everybody during that period shared equally in the overall income increase, and many groups in many societies actually ended up effectively poorer.

Like they say about per capita statistics in general: If you put Bill Gates in the same room with a homeless pauper, the per capita wealth of the occupants of the room is $64 billion, but the pauper as an individual still doesn’t have any money.

Probably unlikely, at least on a similar scale, given how much of the Industrial Age economic expansion was based on newly powerful access to huge reservoirs of valuable resources, along with huge reservoirs of “waste sinks” to absorb the unwanted by-products of increased production.

At present, while we’re not running out of innovation and discovery, we’re running out of both easily obtained virgin raw materials and convenient places to dump the waste. That’s naturally going to slow down the pace of expansion in direct wealth generation.

I have no idea why this author considers “property rights” and “good science”, for example, to be “material causes” rather than “ideas”. Obviously, concepts of rights and scientific theories are ideas.

7

They are ideas but not ideas about the bourgeoisie. Scientific progress was not where the great enrichment came from. There was no great enrichment in Persia for example.

With property rights I sort of agree with you. It is hard to disambiguate pro-bourgeois rhetoric from ideas about property rights.

8

Fossil fuel.

The increase in wealth you describe pretty much coincides with our development of using fossil fuel. Energy has always been one of the resources we consume in producing and transporting goods. When we discovered a large supply of stored energy, we drastically lowered the costs of production and transportation. This translated into a substantial increase in wealth.

9

I disagree with this. There was plenty of long-distance trade before 3500 BCE, mixed agriculture and hunting before that, large communities gathering at certain times of year and undertaking massive projects.

Society had been developing long before and the changes were incremental.

Someone from 3500 BCE would quickly be at home in 3000 BCE (or even 300 BCE), but someone from 1800 would be utterly lost and bewildered in modern society.

10

Sure there was, once colonialism got out of the way, at least. Per capita income in Iran increased sevenfold just during the 20th century.

Yup. Also, differential equations.

What really made the new theories of the so-called Scientific Revolution “monetizable” in terms of economic development was the emergence of much more precise models in Newtonian mechanics, fundamentally based on infinitesimal calculus. Much of the eighteenth century was spent working out the detailed computational models underlying mathematical applications to everything from ballistics to naval design to power looms. Then the nineteenth century, backed by its abundance of coal and later petroleum, spat on its hands and got to work manufacturing all the things.

Yeah, I’m not arguing that any of these things (except fully functional literacy and maybe horse transport) were totally new at the time.

Nah. An educated Englishman from 1800, say would adapt to modern American life far more quickly than someone in a similar situation jumping the latter half of the 4th millennium. Hell, they’d already be able to read pretty much anything in their own language, just as we can still easily read novels like Tom Jones. Once they figured out how to manipulate a few gadgets, they’d be just as functional as most of us. They wouldn’t understand the underlying principles of the electronics, of course, but neither do most contemporary people, even educated ones. Certainly, many “sophisticated” ideas of modern society such as stocks, insurance, transgender, atheism, depression, journalism and feminism would already be quite familiar to them.

11

I still disagree completely. :slightly_smiling_face:

You’re greatly underestimating the cultural shock in one the case, and overestimating it in the other. I think I can make a good case for that, but I don’t want to hijack this thread, and I don’t have time to spend on it today. It might be an interesting discussion for another time, though.

12

Bring it on, sistah. :smiley: I do concede that the cultural continuity in the first case might be more salient than I’ve been making out, but I still maintain that your average Enlightenment/Regency educated person could get up to speed in the 21st century quite readily. However, you’re right, let’s not keep cluttering up this thread with that tangent.

13

[quote=“Kimstu, post:6, topic:939510, full:true”]

It’s been impressive, sure, but for most amazing period in human history my money’s still on the half-millennium from, say, 3500-3000 BCE. Literacy, rapid proto-urbanization and spread of agriculture, globalization of trade, horse transport, wowza.

IMHO people in 1800 might not have had any idea of the particular sorts of dazzling magical technology that were going to emerge by 2021, but they had a reasonable picture of global conditions and trends. For sheer mind-bending amazement, commend me to the mid-4th-millennium person looking at the literally reshaped world of 500 years later.

No. Vast majority of people never felt the change and just continued slinging jmudpies. If you focus on a few metro areas, then maybe a case could be made. The Great enrichment has pushed mind-boggling technology such as the combustion engine, electric motor, medicine, fossil fuels, and computers into the deepest corners of the world. There really is no contest looking at the big picture.

Yes, although not everybody during that period shared equally in the overall income increase, and many groups in many societies actually ended up effectively poorer.

Nah. Look at China for a clear case of one of the Great Enrichment’s great achievements.

14

Fossil fuels are an excellent technological advancement that helped, and continue to be indispensable towards, the compounding of enrichment, no doubt.

Mccloskey has responded to this line of thought:

“ The main problem, however, is that Mr. Morris is dramatically incorrect about the history of the Fossil Fuel Age. His putative cause, the massive use of coal and then oil, came after the egalitarian effect, not before. Steam power from fossil fuel was not the driver of the classic Industrial Revolution of the 18th century or even most of the 19th century. Almost all early factories ran on water power, not on coal. Mississippi steam boats first used wood, not coal. Causes should come before effects, and causes should have causes in turn.”

15

I’d bet that the root cause was probably a combination of the widespread social, political and intellectual changes of the Scientific Revolution of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, and the Enlightenment in the 18th and 19th centuries- the use of reason and the scientific method in particular to analyze and solve problems, combined with a belief that things could be made better through the application of those techniques.

Everything after that is essentially taking advantage of that, or applying those concepts, including the Industrial Revolution and the increase in wealth associated with it- that last one is definitely a trailing indicator, and isn’t indicative of anything else IMO.

16

Nah. Science had been progressing for centuries. There were no exponential enrichments proceeding from the Islamic Golden Age for example.

Entrepreneurs have been solving problems en masse for customers only for 200 years or so. Also without favorable rhetoric and attitudes towards the enrichment of the bourgeoisie, scientific knowledge would have 0 impact on material conditions. It is only when people began to think differently about prosperity that science was put into use to enrich us all.

What people are missing is how out of character the last 200 or so years have been.

17

I believe this reinforces my argument. People have been having ideas for millennia. What reason would there be that ideas would suddenly start having a greater impact in the last two hundred years than they have had in the five thousand years before that?

It seems much more likely to me that the explanation for the vast increase in material wealth that we’ve experienced in the last two hundred years is that it began significantly cheaper to produce material goods. Once that happened, it created a favorable environment for the social and mental infrastructure you’ve described to develop.

As for water power (or wood or wind power or other pre-fossil fuel sources of energy) they were all recognized as limited even in their own era. They might be used in an economic niche but they never would have been used as the basis of a full economy. This is why people were so quick to switch over to coal and then oil.

18

The only references to “The Great Enrichment” I can find are by Deirdre McCloskey or by those referencing her works-nothing independent.

19

There had been scientific advancements, but not widespread adoption of the use of reason and the scientific method.

This had twofold advantages- one, there was a systematic method and approach for determining the way the world works, and two, reason and rational thought became the predominant mode of thought at that time. Previous to that, the prevailing thought was about tradition, superstition and magic.

To put it a different way, after the shift in thought, when someone saw a rainbow, they might wonder why that is the case, and set about figuring it out using the scientific method and rational thought. Before that, it was just accepted as the way it is, and likely the work of God.

When reason as a primary mode of thought became common, a lot of things suddenly became targets for potential solutions, instead of being considered the way things were, and God’s will or whatever.

Fundamentally, there was a LOT of stuff going on from about the 16th century- first there was the Scientific Revolution, then the Enlightenment, and finally the Industrial revolution. Running concurrently with that was the Great Enrichment.

It’s pretty clear that some combination of industrialization and the Enlightenment caused this. But what caused those? The Scientific revolution, I’m guessing- it’s basically the same mode of thought, only stretched into politics, social issues, etc… not just trying to figure out what makes silver tarnish or whatever.

20

I wonder if it even matters?. I might make 2500% more than a blue collar worker living in 1820, but is my standard of living any better?