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Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

> 30-fold increase of prosperity of ordinary people

And here I thought the 30-fold increase of prosperity of ordinary people came about because we now have ubiquitous access to what, in pre-industrial times, was considered unlimited amounts of energy.

Stop producing electricity, stop burning coal, stop pumping oil, and you'll very quickly see prosperity regress to pre-industrial levels, regardless of what economic deity you worship.

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There is a lot to that of course, but the technology to exploit those energy sources were developed in the era of dawning free enterprise, right in the few countries that led the movement.

Not at any other time through thousands of years of civilization or five large continents.

Those countries were in the middle of reaping the economic windfall of a century of colonial theft and exploitation, combined with relative internal stability, all in the context of advancements in metallurgy that took millennia to develop (All the while having large coal reserves... And a shortage of wood, because they've just finished clear-cutting their forests.)

For some reason, the industrial revolution did not develop in any other societies over the centuries that shared a similar system of free enterprise with imperial England... Why didn't the various Italian city states industrialize during the Renaissance?

The vast majority of the colonial theft and exploitation came after industrialization, and as a result of it. Once you're 10x wealthier and more technologically advanced than the rest of the world, it will be conquered, one way or another.

And while individuals got very rich from colonizing, and rulers got much pride from ruling vast new lands, the colonizing societies as a whole did not really get richer from it. There are benefits from colonies, but there are also costs.

Of course, Spain and Portugal did build vast preindustrial colonial empires in the New World. Not by being (very) much more advanced, but mostly by the incredible luck of having much better immune systems! The fact that 80-90% of the New World people just spontaneously died on encountering Europeans, for reasons none of the sides understood, is one of the most astonishing events in history to me!!

So they (mostly Spain) had a few centuries of weird prosperity in mountains of gold and silver, while still having a primitive mercantilist economy. Once capitalism and the industrial revolution started elsewhere, they were left in the dust, their pretty metal stashes no match for liberated human ingenuity.

You do ask a good question. Why did the stars align in 1760s England, and not in the several other places in history that seemingly had most of the ingredients? I've seen it asked a few times, and never answered. I won't pretend that I, some random programmer with opinions on a web forum while eating breakfast, have the answer either...

We can get by without coal (and oil once most cars run on electricity) as long as we embrace nuclear.

I'm not making a claim about our environmental future, I'm making a claim about where our present prosperity comes from.

People frequently credit our economic system for uplifting us from pre-industrial squalor.

It's like a young millionaire praising a daily exercise regiment, and hot yoga three times a week for his success, and not the fifty million dollar trust fund he inherited at the age of 18. It helps, but it's not the important part.

Agree with your argument, it was unnecessary to nitpick your choice of examples.

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