Thank you for this very in-depth comment. I will reply to your points in separate comments, starting with:
According him, the end of the feudal system in England, and its turning into a modern nation-state, involved among other things the closing off and appropriation, by nobles as a reward from the kingdom, of the former common farmlands they farmed on, as well as the confiscation of the lands owned by the Catholic Church, which for all practical purposes also served as common farmlands. This resulted in a huge mass of landless farmers with no access to land, or only very diminished access, who in turn decades later became the proletarians for the newly developing industries. If that’s accurate, then it may be the case that the Industrial Revolution wouldn’t have happened had all those poor not have existed, since the very first industries wouldn’t have been attractive compared to condition non-forcibly-starved farmers had.
This is very interesting and something I haven’t seen before. Based on some quick searching, this seems to be referring to the Inclosure Acts (which were significant, affecting 1/6th of English land) and perhaps specifically this one, while the Catholic Church land confiscation was the 1500s one. My priors on this having a major effect are somewhat skeptical because:
The general shape of English historical GDP/capita is a slight post-plague rise, followed by nothing much until a gradual rise in the 1700s and then takeoff in the 1800s. Likewise, skimming through this, there seem to be no drastic changes in wealth inequality around the time of the Inclosure Acts, though share of wealth held by the top 10% slightly rise in the late 1700s and personal estates (note: specifically excludes real estate) of farmers and yeomen slightly drop around 1700 before rebounding. Any pattern of more poor farmers must evade these statistics, either by being small enough, or by not being captured in these crude overall stats (which is very possible, especially if the losses for one set of farmers were balanced by gains for another).
Other sources I’ve read support the idea that farmers in general prefer industrial jobs. It’s not just Steven Pinker either; Vaclav Smil’s Energy and Civilization (my review) has this passage:
Moreover, the drudgery of field labor in the open is seldom preferable even to unskilled industrial work in a factory. In general, typical factory tasks require lower energy expenditures than does common farm work, and in a surprisingly short time after the beginning of mass urban industrial employment the duration of factory work became reasonably regulated
It’s probably the case that it’s easier to recruit landless farmers into industrial jobs, and I can imagine plausible models where farmers resist moving to cities, especially for uncertainty-avoidance / risk-aversion reasons. However, the effect of this, especially in the long term, seems limited by things like population growth in (already populous) cities, people having to move off their family farms anyways due to primogeniture, and people generally being pretty good at exploiting available opportunities. An exception might be if early industrialization was tenable only under a strict labor availability threshold that was met only because of the mass of landless farmers created by the English acts.
Thank you for this very in-depth comment. I will reply to your points in separate comments, starting with:
This is very interesting and something I haven’t seen before. Based on some quick searching, this seems to be referring to the Inclosure Acts (which were significant, affecting 1/6th of English land) and perhaps specifically this one, while the Catholic Church land confiscation was the 1500s one. My priors on this having a major effect are somewhat skeptical because:
The general shape of English historical GDP/capita is a slight post-plague rise, followed by nothing much until a gradual rise in the 1700s and then takeoff in the 1800s. Likewise, skimming through this, there seem to be no drastic changes in wealth inequality around the time of the Inclosure Acts, though share of wealth held by the top 10% slightly rise in the late 1700s and personal estates (note: specifically excludes real estate) of farmers and yeomen slightly drop around 1700 before rebounding. Any pattern of more poor farmers must evade these statistics, either by being small enough, or by not being captured in these crude overall stats (which is very possible, especially if the losses for one set of farmers were balanced by gains for another).
Other sources I’ve read support the idea that farmers in general prefer industrial jobs. It’s not just Steven Pinker either; Vaclav Smil’s Energy and Civilization (my review) has this passage:
It’s probably the case that it’s easier to recruit landless farmers into industrial jobs, and I can imagine plausible models where farmers resist moving to cities, especially for uncertainty-avoidance / risk-aversion reasons. However, the effect of this, especially in the long term, seems limited by things like population growth in (already populous) cities, people having to move off their family farms anyways due to primogeniture, and people generally being pretty good at exploiting available opportunities. An exception might be if early industrialization was tenable only under a strict labor availability threshold that was met only because of the mass of landless farmers created by the English acts.