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Old January 12th 18, 02:40 PM posted to rec.bicycles.tech
AMuzi
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Default DIY China

On 1/11/2018 10:35 PM, Andre Jute wrote:
On Friday, January 12, 2018 at 1:54:04 AM UTC, Emanuel Berg wrote of the Chinese:
Obviously their skill of manufacturing stuff is
beyond doubt, but I wonder if it is limited to
the people doing it, and not a reflection of
their entire society as it was during the
European/American industrial era?


Speak to an economic historian at your university, or read the newspapers or the tracts of 1740's through to the defeat of Napoleon, or speeches in Hansard, or novels even (start with Jane Austen), or read Captain Gronow's Diary and discover that at the very top of society they weren't even aware in any meaningful sense of the change underway, and you will discover rather smartly that the Industrial Revolution left large parts of the country and society untouched, was exceedingly unpopular with the usual crowd (who presently style themselves as "progressives"), and was popular only with the class whose supposedly idyllic life as sharecroppers and laborers on farms the "progressives" claimed it ruined. Your idea that the whole society was involved is miles from the truth in Britain, and I think pretty unlikely to have happened anywhere else. I'm an economist and, though I studied economic history for several years, my specialties are demographics and applied economics at the interf

ace of mass motivation; I made my reputation, after academe, in investment banking and advertising, where such skills are more fittingly rewarded. Generally speaking, though any properly trained economist of course knows something of the economic history of other European countries, especially France and Germany, and the US, the most intensively studied Industrial Revolution is the British one, because it led the way, and basically all the analysis around the world, but especially from the Teutonic and Scandinavian economists (Austrian economists were for a long time the most important), centered on Britain, in large part also because Marx and Engels, the leading critics of laissez faire capitalism, settled there and made the mills their subject of study, mainly because Engels owned and operated a mill and thus had access to its records. (By way of contrast, agrarian or farm economists begin by studying the French thinkers grouped as "Les Economistes", because their analysis proceede
d from the fruit of the land upwards and outwards.)

Andre Jute
https://www.amazon.com/Its-Economy-S.../dp/B0779MGB47



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Andrew Muzi
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