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by hraxz
23 days ago
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The industrial revolution made life better at mass scale but it certainly didn't make life better for the hand loom weaver who had previously went from working at home by hand to higher output but working hard all day in a factory. From the outside, this all sounds like my father who worked as a mechanic at a flour mill. His job was mostly watching the machine do the work and then fixing the machine when it broke down. 90% of the time it ran fine. Going from working by hand to watching the machine would seem really boring and I guess I can understand the AI hate on here from that perspective. |
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(which why on earth would be applicable? yet this argument is thrown around begging the question [meaning assuming its own validity, begging to be questioned, not suggesting further downstream investigation])
Namely: there was a massive shift from household manufacture in the Indian subcontinent - then home to an estimated quarter of economic activity on earth - to Britain.
Industrialization was about out competing a geopolitical rival of the UK: Mughal India. It succeeded because the Crown adopted policy sabotaging Indian production, not because the capital intensiveness was inherently better. It was merely necessary for England to even aspire to outproduce a country with 20x its own population.
Industrialization was never about the sheer efficiency of the new industrial productive system. That wouldn't have tipped the scales in a matter of one or two decades. In fact, quite the opposite: the incredibly short timescale in this massive geographic shift in economic output necessitated an approach which was costlier, and socially and environmentally damaging.
The machine won out because it was the only way to get the job done. It was a way worse experience for everyone involved. Just look at the British elite's tenure: its 100 years of zenith pale in comparison to the Mughal third of a millennium ride. And now the center of gravity for global industry is shifting back to Asia despite the extremely heavy price paid by Atlantic society and the global environment for the anomaly state which is now waning.