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Comment by HarryHirsch | Hacker News Reader

There is this common pattern that industrialization is accompanied by urbanization and disruption of rural social networks. You've got young men moving to rapidly growing cities, and of course there's a market for the sex trade with that. You could see this in England and Germany. The Belgian Congo was orders of magnitudes worse. I think it's a tenable position.

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This makes as much sense as saying slavery exists because the Earth formed from space dust.

Not really. Traditional societies are often better at providing basic economic security to their members than market economies, so the members of those societies will reject the market in favor of their own social structures.

When someone like a colonialist wants to introduce the market economy to an area organized into traditional societies, he has to first undermine and destroy those societies, so their people have no choice but to participate in his market as a laborer or else starve.

That is a rather rose colored view of traditional societies (of what exactly - treating all traditional cultures as homogeneous as opposed to roughly technologically analogous is itself deeply disrespectful exoticism), are they agrarian? Pastoral? Hunter gatherer?

The claims are ignorant of actual the colonial processes, history, and economic earlier resource extractive/cash crop and early how industrialization actually works including a conflation of market economy with enclosure of the commons or control of the food supply to remove subsistence options.

Those people had to deal with starvation, disease, warfare, and cannabilism constantly. This is not an opinion there is archeological evidence showing the percentage of people who died violet deaths https://slides.ourworldindata.org/war-and-violence/#/1

A really good book on this is by Steven Pinker from Harvard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur...

You have it backwards - the rural disruption lead to the industtialization enmasse. Given what it took for rural populations be "sustainable" and not urbanize that isn't neccessarily a bad thing either.

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