IIRC, the aeolipile provided less than 1⁄100,000th of the torque provided by Watt’s steam engine. Practical steam engines are orders of magnitude more complex than Hero’s toy steam turbine. It took a century or more of concerted effort on the part of inventors to develop them.
Lost Futures
Karma: 339
I also have an additional query regarding the stocking frame:
Did Queen Elizabeth I really inhibit the development of the stocking frame? The common narrative is yes. Wikipedia seems to think so, but I stumbled across a post disputing this claim. The same post also makes some pretty bold claims:
By 1750 — the eve of the Industrial Revolution — there were 14,000 frames in England. The stocking frame had by that time become very sophisticated: it had more than 2000 parts and could have as many as 38 needles per inch (15 per centimeter).
Sounds like a remarkably complex and diffused pre-industrial machine.
Why didn’t clockwork technology get applied to other practical purposes for hundreds of years?
Could the stocking frame count? I’m uncertain of its exact inner workings, but it does represent a fairly complex, practical machine invented before the industrial revolution. Seems plausible parts of it were derived from clockwork technology?
Why is hating humanity acceptable?
A good starting point to answer this would be to ask another question, “Is misanthropy more common today than in the past?”
I suspect three factors play a big role:
Lack of historical weight—Genocide and ethnic hatred only became acknowledged as the evils they are after the horrors of the 20th century. Run-of-the-mill misanthropy has rarely been the driving force behind large-scale atrocities. This makes the taboo it holds much weaker.
Doomer mindset—The average person today, particularly those in young adulthood, seems to have a more negative outlook on society, progress, and life in general. Frustration over climate change and other manmade disasters may also contribute. Misanthropy can easily manifest from these feelings.
Isolation—Speaking of society, misanthropy is probably closely correlated with a sense of disconnectedness from society. With civic engagement dropping and loneliness rising, misanthropy may be an outlet to vent frustration.
Anyone else shown DALL-E 2 to others and gotten surprisingly muted responses? I’ve noticed some people react to seeing its work with a lot less fascination than I’d expect for a technology with the power to revolutionize art. I stumbled on dalle2 subreddit post describing a similar anecdote so maybe there’s something to this.
For comparison, according to pg. 11 of The Census of Manufacturers: 1905, the average 16+ male wage-earner made $11.16 per week and the average 16+ woman made $6.17.
Is it true that 19th-century wheelwrights were extremely highly paid?
I’m quite skeptical of the claim that wheelwrights made $90 a week in 1880s.
San Francisco Call, Volume 67, Number 177, 26 May 1890: A job listing offers $3.50 a day for wheelwrights. Another offers $75(!) but I suspect this is for a project rather than a daily (or weekly) wage.
San Francisco Call, Volume 70, Number 36, 6 July 1891: Two job listings offer $3 a day for wheelwrights. Another offers $30 to $35 for a “wheelwright: orchardist” but again I suspect this is commission work rather than a daily wage.
San Francisco Call, Volume 96, Number 135, 13 October 1904: Two wheelwright job listings offer a daily wage of $3 and $3.50 respectively. And from the San Francisco Call, Volume 96, Number 46, 16 July 1904, three additional job listings for wheelwrights all offer compensation between $3 and $3.50 a day.
Whew, I think we’ve figured it out.
Even working daily with no rest, an average wheelwright in San Fransisco from 1890-1905 probably made no more than $25 weekly. Of course with a rising wave of mechanization, it’s possible wheelwright wages were previously higher. After all, from 1890 to 1904, their wages do seem to be declining accounting for inflation. And maybe SF wheelwrights were simply paid less than average. Even still, $90 in 1880 seems unlikely for an average American wheelwright.
TL;DR
Wheelwrights in the 1880s almost certainly made far less than $90 a week. Probably not even $45 a week.
Found an obscure quote by Christiaan Huygens predicting the industrial revolution a century before its inception and predicting the airplane over two hundred years before its invention:
The violent action of the powder is by this discovery restricted to a movement which limits itself as does that of a great weight. And not only can it serve all purposes to which weight is applied, but also in most cases where man or animal power is needed, such as that it could be applied to raise great stones for building, to erect obelisks, to raise water for fountains or to work mills to grind grain …. It can also be used as a very powerful projector of such a nature that it would be possible by this means to construct weapons which would discharge cannon balls, great arrows, and bomb shells …. And, unlike the artillery of today these engines would be easy to transport, because in this discovery lightness is combined with power.
This last characteristic is very important, and by this means permits the discovery of new kinds of vehicles on land and water.
And although it may sound contradictory, it seems not impossible to devise some vehicle to move through the air ….
While ultimately land, water, and air vehicles wouldn’t be powered by Huygens’s gunpowder engine, it remains a remarkably prescient forecast. It should also give AI researchers and other futurists some hope in their ability to predict the next technological revolution.
Georgists, mandatory parking minimum haters, and housing reform enthusiasts welcome!
Recently I’ve run across a fascinating economics paper, Housing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation. The paper’s thesis contends that restrictive housing regulations depressed American economic growth by an eye-watering 36% between 1964 and 2009.
That’s a shockingly high figure but I found the arguments rather compelling. The paper itself now boasts over 500 citations. I’ve searched for rebuttals but only stumbled across a post by Bryan Caplan identifying a math error within the paper that led to an understatement(!) of the true economic toll.
This paper should be of great interest to anyone curious about housing regulation and zoning reform, Georgism, perhaps even The Great Stagnation of total factor productivity since the 70s. (Or just anyone who likes the idea of making thousands of extra dollars annually.)
If there’s interest, I’d like to write a full-length post diving deeper into this paper and examining its wider implications.
Good post George. But I’m surprised by this assertion:
You could imagine a country deciding to ban self-driving, autonomous drones, automated checkouts, and such, resulting in a massive loss to GDP and cost to consumers. But that cost is expressed in… what? restaurant orders? Starbucks lattes? Having to take the bus or, god forbid, bike or scooter? slower and more expensive amazon deliveries? There’s real value somewhere in there, sure, where “real” needs could be met by this increasing automation, but they don’t seem to be its main target.
That’s hard for me to fathom. Self-driving cars, autonomous drones, and automated checkouts will have a far greater impact on society and the economy than just GDP stats and slightly lower-cost consumer goods. Mass adoption of self-driving cars alone would make big waves. The option of having cheap transportation anywhere on demand is a major boon for people in poverty. As autonomous vehicles become more commonplace, consider how many parking spaces in America could be replaced with more stores, housing, etc...
17th century Netherlands contains another interesting case. The depletion of peat, a primary energy source for the Dutch between the 16th and 17th centuries, directly contributed to the end of the Dutch Golden Age and economic stagnation, even decline. The Dutch economy could perhaps have continued growing had it embraced coal as peat supplies depleted, but no such switch occurred. According to The Rise and Decline of Dutch Technological Leadership by Karel Davids:
The Dutch succeeded in raising output per capita to an unheard-of extent for a prolonged period of time by making increased use of a stock of energy resources, instead of a flow, in the form of large deposits of peat. Eventually, however, the Netherlands did not escape the ‘limitations experienced by all organic economies’, namely relatively low maximum levels of energy input and productivity growth, given the ‘extreme inefficiency of the process of photosynthesis in converting solar energy into a form accessible to living creatures’. Increased reliance on peat postponed the day of reckoning, Wrigley argues, but it also implied that Dutch industries, thriving for a long time on cheap heat energy, found it difficult to compete once the depletion of peat stocks led to rising prices of fuel. In contrast with eighteenth-century England, the Dutch Republic did not to make a transition to a ‘mineral-based energy economy’, which allowed a outlet from the traditional constraints on energy input and productivity growth.
Davis Kedrosky argues that the Dutch government, rather than market forces, prevented a switch to coal. Nonetheless, this does appear to be an example of major economic damage caused by resource depletion.
Great post Zvi. I’m shocked Wikipedia failed to create an article for The Foreign Dredge Act prior to your efforts. Two other American shipping issues worth examining are the relative lack of automation in American ports and their inability to operate 24⁄7. Both of these issues have been traced back to unions and sometimes used as anecdotes in the grander pro-market narrative that unions are bad and impede productivity. However, many Western European ports have had far greater success with port automation and 24⁄7 operations despite the strength of their unions. Clearly, something is different in America.
The American shipping industry is behind and dysfunctional. It’s rather disheartening to see how little has been fixed even after a historic general supply chain crisis.
Imagining a scenario where the Dredge Act is repealed and EA plays a noticeable role in this seems rather optimistic. That said, I don’t imagine the political blowback from such an event would be significant unless something goes horrendously wrong optics-wise for a few reasons.
Economic issues tend to be less controversial in the current political climate than culture war issues
Wonkish economic reforms that require some technical understanding are usually ignored by the general public and thus even less politicized, especially if they pertain to a specific industry out of public view
Left-leaning organizations advocate for specific market-friendly reforms frequently with little audience pushback. (Eg. Vox has repeatedly advocated for the repeal of the Jones Act, taking the same side as CATO and Heritage.)
That said, focusing on the deleterious environmental effects of the Foreign Dredge Act of 1906 is a smart move to help onboard liberals. Another angle worth investigation would be to examine to what extent, if at all, the act unfairly impacts people on racial or class lines.
Name: Machine Thinking
Type: YouTube channel
Link: https://www.youtube.com/c/machinethinking/
Description: Over a dozen videos analyzing the technology behind the industrial revolution. Loosely speaking it’s a channel dedicated to progress studies. The 1751 Machine that Made Everything is a particularly good video.
Positives:
Unique; haven’t come across any other channels similar
Detailed and technical
Establishes the importance of industrial technology in building our modern world of abundance (progress mindset)
Good narrator voice
Negatives:
The subject matter will be dry for some
Low production value
Thanks for the explanation Gwern. Goodhart’s law strikes again!
As Adam said, trending with Moore’s Law is far slower than the previous trajectory of model scaling. In 2020 after the release of GPT-3, there was widespread speculation that by the next year trillion parameter models would begin to emerge.
It’s interesting that language model scaling has, for the moment at least, stopped scaling (outside of MoE models). Nearly two years after its release, anything larger than GPT-3 by more than an order of magnitude has yet to be unveiled afaik.
Alternatively, afaik adrafinil is unscheduled and metabolizes into modafinil.
Agreed, per Sam Altman’s statements, improving performance without scaling is also OpenAI’s plan for GPT-4. And Gopher is far less capable than a human brain. It’s just the “synapses as parameters” analogy that irks me. I see it everywhere but it isn’t reliable and (despite disclaimers that the analogy isn’t 1 to 1) leads people to even less reliable extrapolations. Hopefully, a better metric will be devised soon.
What “civilizational development”, as you refer to it, would you say that The Netherlands lacked during the Dutch Golden Age? What hindered them from industrializing 200 years before England?