spinning jenny

72 results back to index

Makers by Chris Anderson

3D printing, Airbnb, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, business process, carbon tax, commoditize, company town, Computer Numeric Control, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deal flow, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, DIY culture, drop ship, Elon Musk, factory automation, Firefox, Ford Model T, future of work, global supply chain, global village, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, IKEA effect, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, planned obsolescence, private spaceflight, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, spinning jenny, Startup school, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Y Combinator

And not simply a huge increase in the number of new inventions but a radical transformation in the process of invention itself.14 In June 1770, Hargreaves submitted a patent application, number 962, for a version of the spinning jenny that could spin, draw, and twist sixteen threads simultaneously. The delay between this patent application and his first prototypes meant that others were already using the jenny by the time his patent was granted, making it difficult for him to enforce his patent rights. Even worse, the machine made enemies. Starting in Hargreaves’s native Lancashire, the spinning jenny’s magical multiplication of productivity was initially, as you might expect, little welcomed by the local artisans, whose guilds had controlled production for centuries—they hated it.

…

For some reason it kept spinning, and something about the contraption still working in the unfamiliar orientation triggered a vision in Hargreaves’s mind: a line of spindles, side by side, spinning multiple threads of cotton from flax simultaneously. When he returned home, he started whittling up just such a machine from spare wood, with the spindles connected by a series of belts and pulleys. Many versions later, he had invented the spinning jenny, a pedal-powered device that could allow a single operator to spin eight threads at the same time (jenny was Lancashire slang for “machine”). The machine amplified the output of a single worker by a factor of eight at the start, and could easily be expanded beyond that. And this was just the beginning.

…

First, unlike silk, wool, and hemp, which were used in many of the earlier machines, cotton was a commodity that could reach everyone. It was simply the cheapest and most available fiber in the world, even more so once the expanding British trade empire brought bales of the stuff from India, Egypt, and the New World. Second, the spinning jenny, being driven by a series of belts and pulleys, was designed to distribute power from a central point to any number of mechanisms operating in parallel. Initially that was human muscle power, but the same principle could use much stronger motive forces—first water, then steam—to drive even more spindles.

The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention by William Rosen

Albert Einstein, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, computer age, Copley Medal, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, delayed gratification, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, fudge factor, full employment, Higgs boson, independent contractor, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, iterative process, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, moral hazard, Network effects, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Simon Kuznets, spinning jenny, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Not only was Richard Hargreaves’s original spinning jenny destroyed57 in 1767, but so also was his new and improved version in 1769. Nor was the phenomenon exclusively British. Machine breaking in France was at least as frequent, and probably even more consequential, though it can be hard to tease out whether the phenomenon contributed to, or was a symptom of, some of the uglier aspects of the French Revolution. Normandy in particular,58 which was not only close to England but the most “English” region of France, was the site of dozens of incidents in 1789 alone. In July, hundreds of spinning jennys were destroyed, along with a French version of Arkwright’s water frame.

…

While visiting a friend, Hargreaves observed a spinning wheel that had been knocked down; with the wheel and spindle in a vertical position, rather than their then-traditional horizontal one, they continued to revolve. In a flash, Hargreaves imagined25 a line of spindles, upright and side by side, spinning multiple threads simultaneously. Nearly fifty years later, the first description of the spinning jenny (“jenny” is a dialect term for “engine” in Lancashire) appeared in the September 1807 issue of The Athenaeum, in which readers learned that the first one was made “almost wholly with a pocket knife.26 It contained eight spindles, and the clasp by which the thread was drawn out was the stalk of a briar split in two.”

…

As would be subsequently revealed, Kay had invented the new spinning machine in much the same way that John Lombe had invented the silk mill. Given the rather fluid attitudes of the day concerning intellectual property, it’s probably too much to say that he stole the design, but he certainly borrowed it, from a Lancashire reed maker and weaver named Thomas Highs, who may even have a claim on the invention of the spinning jenny (Highs’s daughter, Jane,33 always maintained that it was named for her). Whatever his contribution to the jenny, he was clearly responsible for the design of the machine that Kay reproduced—from memory—for Arkwright, since two years before, Highs had hired the clockmaker to turn his wooden model into a working machine made of iron.

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey

3D printing, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shock, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, pink-collar, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, safety bicycle, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Turing test, union organizing, universal basic income, warehouse automation, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Indeed, the novelty of his invention was called into question, as his patent was challenged.12 The other key invention was James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny. Hargreaves is said to have conceived it when he watched a spinning wheel fall to the floor and, while revolving, seem to do the spinning by itself. What is certain is that the machine was very simple. It was a rectangular frame on four legs with a row of vertical spindles on one end. Like the water frame, it was an invention that required no scientific breakthroughs. Its great advantage over the spinning wheel it replaced was that it allowed a single worker to spin several threads simultaneously. Although the spinning jenny was around seventy times more expensive than a spinning wheel, it was still much cheaper than building an Arkwright mill; it took up little space and did not require a factory setting.13 The fact that it didn’t require much alteration to the production process was probably one reason for its rapid adoption.

…

Arriving in the manufacturing suburb of Saint-Sever, they destroyed the machines that had been installed there. A long series of similar incidents followed, casting a long shadow over the country. At the newly established Calonne and Company, thirty machines were smashed by infuriated rioters. And in the suburbs of Rouen, more than seven hundred spinning jennies were destroyed. Some industrial pioneers, like George Garnett, tried to fight back, but the crowds were too large. And unlike in Britain, there were no troops to help. French industrialists and inventors could not put much faith in the willingness of the government to safeguard their interests, since it also feared that rebelling craftsmen would exacerbate the general state of unrest in the country.56 Such political uncertainty undermined the willingness to invest in machines and industrial pursuits, which stifled economic progress in France.

…

Although the spinning jenny was around seventy times more expensive than a spinning wheel, it was still much cheaper than building an Arkwright mill; it took up little space and did not require a factory setting.13 The fact that it didn’t require much alteration to the production process was probably one reason for its rapid adoption. Though the spinning jenny did not facilitate the rise of the factory system directly, it did so indirectly. Samuel Crompton, who began spinning with a jenny as a boy, was among those who set out to improve it. The result was the Crompton mule, invented in 1779, which combined the draw bars of Hargreaves’ jenny with the rollers of Arkwright’s water frame.

Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass by Mary L. Gray, Siddharth Suri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, blue-collar work, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, hiring and firing, ImageNet competition, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine translation, market friction, Mars Rover, natural language processing, new economy, operational security, passive income, pattern recognition, post-materialism, post-work, power law, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Second Machine Age, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two-sided market, union organizing, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Economists and industrial theorists of the day thought that piecework was a technological inefficiency that would fade out as mass manufacturing scaled up. For example, the spinning jenny, invented in 1770, was a single machine, powered by water, with as many as 120 spools hooked to a wooden frame cranking away to spin, draw out, and twist fibers. The machine could replace dozens of human hands working hundreds of hours to create the same amount of cloth for weaving. And Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, invented in 1792, could deseed cotton and prepare it for the spinning jenny 25 times faster than a single person working by hand. Together, these two inventions ramped up production and mainstreamed consumption of cotton in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution.

…

U.S. slave owners needed five times the number of slaves by the start of the Civil War because of the spike in demand for cotton and the desperate need for humans to continue to do what machines could not. Technologies like spinning jennys didn’t eliminate the need for human labor so much as they repurposed and shuffled labor demands to a new set of temporary workers. Children became valuable pieceworkers in textile mills, because their small hands could reach between moving spools to clear lint and other debris that slowed down the machines. But the capacity to work alongside these machines, bridging the gap of automation’s last mile, was written off as “unskilled.” Working the spinning jennys was considered manual labor that required no thinking at all, even though early accounts of children deftly moving from one heavily vibrating machine to the next indicate that the work took both mental and physical finesse.

…

Yes, the permatemps case became a landmark example for legal and business leaders to illustrate how one should or should not implement temporary workers and independent contractors.But it did nothing to resolve the plight of the millions of people doing jobs that fall outside of the formal definitions of “full-time work.” MURKY WATERS OF EMPLOYMENT CLASSIFICATION As the ebb and flow of teenagers tending spinning jennys, human computers calculating moon shots, and call center operators in India staffing service calls suggest, technological advancement has always depended on expendable, temporary labor pools. Tracing the continuities rather than radical breaks from this past put ghost work in context. As history illustrates, hiring people on the assumption that they will be around only for the duration of a finite project or that the presumed efficiencies of an automated process can replace those workers is not radically new.

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

THE MACHINERY Stocking frame: Machine used by framework knitters to produce stockings, lace, and knit goods. Invented in Nottingham in 1589. Handloom: Machine used to weave woollen and cotton cloth. The earliest looms date to the fifth century BCE. Spinning jenny: Invented by James Hargreaves in 1764, the device reduced the labor required to spin wool into yarn. Water frame: Patented by Richard Arkwright in 1769, the machine applied waterpower to the design of the spinning jenny and further automated the process of producing yarn. Gig mill: Also called the gigging machine, this device automatically raised the nap of woven fabric to draw out the ends of the fibers, making it easier to finish, or smooth, the cloth.

…

The massive demand for English cloth continued to inspire innovations in both the machinery that made a worker’s life easier, and more disruptive technologies that promised a dramatic increase in the rate of production. In 1733, an apprentice craftsman named John Kay patented the flying shuttle, a device that let a single weaver, instead of two, work a broadloom. In the 1760s, a weaver and cotton spinner named James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, which let a single worker spin multiple threads into yarn with the crank of a handle—previously it took six. Just a couple years later, Arkwright built his water frame, applying hydropower to the spinning device and assuring the production of vast volumes of yarn. To cap off the remarkable decade, James Watt patented his steam engine, in 1769, promising a more efficient and affordable power source for the turning spindles and clattering shafts all across the country.

…

They were all too aware of the kind of innovations that were accelerating the Industrial Revolution. In 1710, cloth merchants had taken to using unpaid apprentices on their own stocking frames instead of paying skilled workers fair wages. After weeks of fruitless negotiation, the stockingers smashed a hundred of the hosiers’ machines. In 1768, after James Hargreaves unveiled his spinning jenny, a band of cotton spinners broke into his shop and destroyed it. He’d developed the device in secret, fearing precisely this outcome, and was forced to leave town before he tried to commercialize it. In 1779, angry workers burned one of Arkwright’s factories to the ground while town officials looked on in sympathy—with the workers.

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator

Regarding printed Bibles, they said that only the devil himself could produce so many copies of a book so swiftly.7 But the particular character of the changes that took place during the Industrial Revolution was different from the past. Their intensity, breadth, and persistence gave a fresh severity to the familiar worries. AUTOMATION ANXIETY This anxiety that automation would destroy jobs spilled into protest and dissent. Consider the experience of James Hargreaves, the modest man who invented the spinning jenny. An illiterate cotton weaver, he retreated to a remote village in Lancashire, England, to build his device in peace. This was a machine that would allow thread to be spun from cotton far more swiftly than with human hands alone, a valuable innovation at a time when turning raw cotton into useable thread was a growing business.

…

The Productivity Effect Perhaps the most obvious way that the complementing force helps human beings is that new technologies, even if they displace some workers, often make other workers more productive at their tasks. Think of the British weavers who were fortunate enough to find themselves operating one of Kay’s flying shuttles in the 1730s, or one of Hargreaves’s spinning jennies in the 1760s. They would have been able to spin far more cotton than their contemporaries who relied on their hands alone. This is the productivity effect.29 We can see this productivity effect at work today, too. Take a taxi driver who uses a sat-nav system to follow unfamiliar roads, an architect who uses computer-assisted design software to craft more complex buildings, or an accountant who uses tax computation software to handle harder, more intractable calculations.

…

Google’s assorted Internet services, for instance, require two billion lines of code: if these were to be printed out on paper and stacked up, the tower would be about 2.2 miles high.12 Writing good code requires talented—and expensive—software engineers. The average salary for a developer in San Francisco, for example, is about $120,000 a year, while the best engineers are treated as superstars and receive pay packages to match.13 Today, when we recount economic history, we punctuate it with people like James Hargreaves, the inventor of the spinning jenny. In the future, when people tell the history of our own time, it will be filled with names like Demis Hassabis, of DeepMind, and other software engineers, as yet unknown. As for processing power, many of the new systems require extraordinarily powerful hardware to run effectively. Often, we take for granted quite how demanding even the most basic digital actions we carry out can be.

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits by Richard Davies

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Anton Chekhov, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, big-box store, cashless society, clean water, complexity theory, deindustrialization, digital divide, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, gentleman farmer, Global Witness, government statistician, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, it's over 9,000, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, large denomination, Livingstone, I presume, Malacca Straits, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, pension reform, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, rolling blackouts, school choice, school vouchers, Scramble for Africa, side project, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, spinning jenny, subscription business, The Chicago School, the payments system, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, uranium enrichment, urban planning, wealth creators, white picket fence, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

In the early 1700s spinning – twisting natural fibres together to create the yarn used in weaving – was the bottleneck in cloth production: weaving was so much faster that five spinners were needed to supply each weaver. Clothing was labour-intensive and costly to make: a shirt took around 580 hours, 500 of which was spent spinning. (If a shirt were made in the US at today’s minimum wage using the technology of the eighteenth century it would cost more than $4,000 to produce.) Hargreaves’ machine, the Spinning Jenny, was a frame on which one spinner could fill eight spools of yarn, boosting their output hugely. Fearful about their jobs and wages, a group of spinners in nearby Blackburn found out where Hargreaves lived, broke into his house and smashed up all his machines. The fear that fewer spinners would be needed per yard of cloth was justified.

…

So far Starship Technologies’ robots have completed 100,000 miles of training as they test drive in Tallinn, London and California, the data from each outing feeding back into a massive shared brain in the Estonian nerve centre. The warning from Estonia’s leading inventors is not to take false comfort. The basic technology underlying AI shows that it is one to take seriously. Robots’ artificial brains are powered by transistors that sit on computer chips and, just as the Spinning Jenny did, chips are improving at an astonishing rate. In 1965 Gordon Moore, then 36, predicted that computer chips would double in power every two years. The forecast, now known as Moore’s Law, was remarkably accurate: between 1971 and 1989 the number of transistors on Intel chips (a company Mr Moore helped found) rose from 2,300 to 1.2 million.

…

A NEW BRIDGE IT STARTS WITH THE STATE After 25 years of betting on technology, the Estonian economy shows where the threats and opportunities of digitization show up. A technology pessimist can certainly make a case: the X-Road data-exchange system is now seen as the ‘backbone’ of the country and is like a threshing machine or Spinning Jenny for the modern economy. The digitization of government services means that human-to-human interactions – which involve booking appointments, travel and queuing – have been cut out of life here. Studies suggest that this generated an annual saving of 6,400 working years by 2014, with an ever-upward trend.

Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert

agricultural Revolution, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, company town, Corn Laws, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, European colonialism, flying shuttle, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, imperial preference, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, race to the bottom, restrictive zoning, scientific management, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, vertical integration, women in the workforce, work culture

Despite more women in ever more households working longer hours on the spinning wheel, the supply was insufficient. After Kay’s invention it took four spinners to supply one weaver. Many artisans tried to find ways to circumvent this bottleneck, and by the 1760s productivity increases became possible with James Hargreaves’s invention of the spinning jenny. The jenny consisted of a hand-operated wheel that would rotate a number of spindles within a frame, while the spinner would use her other hand to move a bar back and forth to extend the thread and then to wind it on the spindles themselves. This machine was at first able to spin eight separate threads, later sixteen or more, and as early as 1767 it had tripled a spinner’s speed.

…

This was in some ways surprising, since for centuries manufacturing in these parts of the world had defined the cutting edge of global cotton production technology. Way back in 1313, Wang Zhen had written a description of a “machine for spinning hemp thread” that came quite close to Hargreaves’s spinning jenny and Arkwright’s water frame. Developing new spinning machines was certainly within the grasp of Chinese artisans, or, for that matter, their French or Indian counterparts. Moreover, trade in cotton and cotton textiles was the most important facet of an increasing commercialization of the Chinese economy between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries.23 Despite these promising preconditions, neither China nor India—nor, for that matter, England’s closest European competitor in technical education, Prussia—came close to dominating as many nodes within the global cotton production complex as Britain.

…

Like the Yucatecan town of Valladolid, it had fallen into the vortex of a globe-spanning capitalist economy linking peasants in the Black Forest and on the Yucatán Peninsula, slaves on the banks of the Mississippi and, as we will see, consumers on the shores of the Río de la Plata.4 Hitched behind a well-matched team of entrepreneurs hungry for profits and rulers lusting for power, the mechanized cotton industry successfully colonized the Wiesental, Valladolid, and an ever-larger swath of the world. In 1771, the spinning jenny came to the French city of Rouen, only six years after it had been introduced in the United Kingdom. In 1783, Johann Gottfried Brügelmann, a putting-out merchant in Ratingen near Düsseldorf, did not have enough yarn for his weavers, a problem that would have been impossible to solve just a few years earlier; now he invested 25,000 reichstaler, gathered about eighty workers, and with the help of a British expert created the first spinning factory in the German-speaking lands.

How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets by Andy Kessler

Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, animal electricity, automated trading system, bank run, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Bretton Woods, British Empire, buttonwood tree, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, GPS: selective availability, Grace Hopper, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Multics, packet switching, pneumatic tube, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, proprietary trading, railway mania, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, systems thinking, three-martini lunch, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, UUNET, Wayback Machine, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Making thread or yarn, on the other hand, remained old fashioned. Shear a sheep, and then wind the wool on a spinning wheel. Invented who knows how many centuries before, as quaint as could be. But as weavers demanded more yarn of higher quality, they substituted cotton from the New World for expensive wool. Along came the Spinning Jenny. Invented in 1764 by James Hargreaves, it combined eight and eventually 80 spindles of wool into a thread strong enough to sew with. Hargreaves got the idea (or at least according to legend) when his daughter Jenny knocked over the family spinning wheel and had to chase it through the house. When local spinners heard of the invention, they broke into his home in Lancashire and busted the Jenny up, the wooden one.

…

These so-called Luddites were not the first and certainly not the last group to feel threatened by automation. But all you have to do is look at Arkwright’s Water Frame factory and cottages to figure out that automation creates plenty of new jobs. Still, the yarn from a Water Frame was thick and the thread from the Spinning Jenny was coarse. One can only imagine how itchy clothing was in 1775, not just clothes from wool but cotton as well. Royalty still insisted on silk, it beat scratching and twitching all day. Comfortable clothing was yet another thing that separated the rich from the poor. 32 HOW WE GOT HERE Tailors were interested in a yarn that was strong, smooth and soft, to replace expensive silk.

…

Boulton & Watt steam engines to the rescue. The Spinning Mule was a breakout device. It was just what the textile business needed: cheap, smooth material. And of course, it was just what Boulton and Watt needed, something to soak up lots and lots of horsepower. *** The Carding Engine stripped the fibers into cardings. Spinning Jennies created thread. Water Frames created yarn. Spinning Mules turned out smooth yarn and thread. Looms were still run by hand. So, around the time Watt was extending his steam engine patent 25 years to 1800, all but the weaving step of textile manufacturing was under mechanical power that steam engines could run.

Stuffocation by James Wallman

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Black Swan, BRICs, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, high net worth, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Hargreaves, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, McMansion, means of production, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, post-materialism, public intellectual, retail therapy, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, spinning jenny, Streisand effect, The future is already here, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, World Values Survey, Zipcar

If you thought about this idea for a moment, it sounded an awful lot like the industrial revolutions of recent years. When James Hargreaves had invented the spinning jenny in Lancashire in the 1760s, for instance, the spinner could now spin yarn twenty times more efficiently than if she had been using her old spinning wheel. That new spinning jenny not only revolutionized how quickly a spinner could produce yarn. It also meant the spinning wheel would now only be useful for burning. It had become, in a word, obsolete. And as Hargreaves’s jenny had replaced the wheel and made it useful only as firewood, so, a few years later, the spinning jenny became obsolete – as the new spinning frame made much stronger yarn.

Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World by Anthony Sattin

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, digital nomad, Donald Trump, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, invention of writing, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, Jessica Bruder, Khartoum Gordon, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nomadland, open borders, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, spinning jenny, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, traveling salesman

Hargreaves’s business relied on a steady supply of spun cotton, but spinning was another of those labour-intensive cottage industries. To speed up the process and ensure a regular supply of spun cotton, in 1765 Hargreaves designed the ‘Spinning Jenny’, a machine capable of spinning several wheels at the same time. Along with Tull’s mechanical planter and a range of inventions that mechanised other labour-intensive processes, the Spinning Jenny allowed British manufacturers to produce more textiles and at lower cost than their rivals in Europe. Success breeds success and these creative processes inspired a sequence of mechanisations and then digitisation that has culminated, in our time, in virtual offices and meetings, cloud storage and the ability to see and speak to people on the other side of the world via a thin screen held in the palm of a hand.

…

Success breeds success and these creative processes inspired a sequence of mechanisations and then digitisation that has culminated, in our time, in virtual offices and meetings, cloud storage and the ability to see and speak to people on the other side of the world via a thin screen held in the palm of a hand. But some threads in this long line of development were more problematic than textile weaving. The ‘mechanicall contrivances’ that Robert Boyle mentioned did more than transform productivity and output; they provoked a social revolution. Take the Spinning Jenny, for instance. Because the machine was too large for most cottages, where thread had previously been spun, investors wanting to buy into the spinning business needed to construct special ‘jenny buildings’ and employ spinners. Most of the new buildings were not in the countryside, where yarn had traditionally been spun, but in towns and cities, which were closer both to labour and to transport links.

…

Karma 281–2 Circe 69 circularity 127, 149–50, 152, 165, 196, 197, 203 see also wheel of fortune, turning cities borders/walls 38, 39–40, 42, 81–2, 141, 150, 285–6 ill-effects of 139, 150, 152, 198, 231 Plato’s ideal 83–4 Clark, William 272 Clavijo, Ruy González de 212–13, 220 climate changes 17, 33, 37–8, 55, 58–9, 81, 107–8, 151 cobalt oxide 192–3 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 188 ‘collective brain’ 302–3 Collinson, Peter 245, 246, 247 colonialism 25, 26, 238, 258–9, 267 Columbus, Christopher 239 comitatus 57, 97–8, 130, 138 compasses 240, 244, 258, 265 Constantine 109 Constantinople (Istanbul), Turkey 105–6, 116, 133, 231 Cook, Captain James 254–9 Cooper, Merian C. 287–8 Cooper-Schoedsack Productions 287–8 cost of progress 15–16, 84, 146, 148, 151, 254–9, 277–8, 290 Crazy Horse 280 Croesus 73, 87 crow symbol of wisdom 282 Crusades 168–9, 169–70, 170–1, 179, 186, 220 Ctesiphon, Iraq 132, 140 cultural exchange/transfer 54, 63–4, 73, 159, 192–5, 210 cuneiform 41–2 Cunliffe, Barry 47–8 Custer, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong 280–1 Cyrus the Great 73, 86–8, 117 Dadu (Beijing), China 158 Damascus, Syria 31–2, 134, 135, 138, 139, 186, 210, 214–21 Dance of Death, The (Wolgemut) 203 Darius I 74–5, 76, 88–92 Darwin, Charles 283 Daylam 151 de’ Mussi, Gabriele 199–200, 201 Decameron, The (Boccaccio) 201–2 Deleuze, Gilles 7, 46 Delhi, India 237 democracy 167, 194, 227 Descent of Man (Darwin) 283 Dharawal Aborigines 256–9 Dictionary of the English Language, A (Johnson) 249, 250–1 Diodorus Siculus 76 diversity 61, 73, 79, 83–4, 86, 102, 109, 128, 159, 303 dogs 24, 287 dopamine 29–30 DRD4-7R gene 28–31, 31, 304 Duby, Georges 194, 195 East India Company 241 Edeko 105–6, 112 Eden 15–16, 16–17, 138 Edfu, Egypt 60 education 59, 194, 247–8, 298 Edward I 179 Edward III 194 Egypt 26, 58–65, 61, 65, 138, 191, 193, 204–5, 214, 222, 306–7, 307–8 Einkorn wheat 33, 36 Eisenberg, Dan 29, 30, 31, 304 Elizabeth I 239 Elliot, Daniel Giraud 281 empires defining ‘empire’ 81–2 Macaulay’s speech on 265–6 ‘rise and fall’ cycle 130–1, 146–7, 151–2, 182, 197, 222–3, 228–9 see also specific empires Endeavour, HMS 255–9 Enkidu 43–6, 46 Enlightenment 239–44 Enoch, city of 35, 38 equine revolution see horses Eridu, Iraq 39 Esän Dawlat Begim 236 etymology of nomad 3–4 Euphrates river 15, 38–9, 140, 141, 148 extinctions 33–4 Faraj ibn Barquq, al-Nasir 214, 215 Ferdowsi 300–1 Fereydun 295–301, 304–10 Fergana Valley 101, 235–6 Fermor, Patrick Leigh 231–2 Fernández-Armesto, Felipe 24, 259 figurines and statues 18, 38, 54, 60–1, 133, 252–3 Flavius Orestes 105 Flecker, James Elroy 212 floral/vegetation ornaments/designs 17, 79, 149, 193, 221, 229, 233, 237, 238, 259, 309–10, 309 Florus 104 foxes/dogs 24, 287 Franklin, Benjamin 244–9, 267–8 Frankopan, Peter 103 freedom of conscience 109, 157–8, 169, 177–8, 187, 189, 193, 213, 221, 227, 298 freedom of movement 74, 86, 129, 141, 187, 189, 213–14, 221, 227, 297–8 Gabriel 134 Galileo Galilei 240, 243 Gama, Vasco da 239 Gan Ying 104 Ganges river 15 Gaozu 98–9 Garden of Eden 15–16, 16–17, 138 gardens of paradise 15–16 genetics 28–31, 304 Genghis Khan achievements 157 background and rise as Temujin 153–6 death 167 and Khwarazm 159–64 legal code 189 life on same level as people 166–7 religious beliefs 169 in Western memory 156–7, 161, 164 see also Mongol Empire genocide 277–8, 281 geography–history link 46–7, 58, 128 George II 278–9 Germany 286 Gibbon, Edward 110, 157–8, 208 Gila Monsters 284 Gilgamesh, Epic of 41–6, 285 Gindibu 129 goats 9 Göbekli Tepe, Turkey 17–24, 24, 25, 26, 32–4, 37 gods/goddesses Abrahamic faiths 32, 34–5, 132–3, 134–5 Aztec 152 Bedouin 133 Egyptian 59–61, 63 Greek 69, 71, 72, 84, 86 Hindu 55 Mesopotamian 39 Mongolian 156, 169 Nabataean 133 Persian 75 Scythian 80, 86 gold and silver articles 53, 66, 71, 87–8, 92, 103, 114, 116, 176, 177, 210 Golden Horde 189, 199 Goldsmith, Oliver 262 Goodwin, Jason 231 Goths 109–10 Grass (Cooper-Schoedsack Productions) 287–90 grave goods 7, 49, 54, 66–7, 71, 92, 103 Great Wall of China 96–7 Greece 65–71, 71–2, 82–3 greed 260 gunpowder 240, 258, 265 guns 268, 280 Gurganj, Turkmenistan 162–3 Guyuk Khan 169, 172 Hafez 211 Haider Khan 289 Han Empire, China envoy to Rome 104 Modu’s marriage proposal 99–100 trade 100–1, 101–2, 103–4 Xiongnu, conflict with 95–7, 98, 100 Xiongnu, peace with 98–9 Xiongnu, trade with 100–1 Zhang’s missions 101–2 Hangzhou, China 284 Hargreaves, James 261 Harrison, Marguerite 287–8 Harun al-Rashid 141–3, 147 Hatshepsut 63 Heracles 86 Heraclitus 151 Heraclius 133, 135 Herat, Afghanistan 221 Herder, Johann 46, 58 hero worship 69, 208 Herodotus background 72 customs 35, 301, 309 Egyptians 58 Mesopotamia’s agriculture 139 nomad–settler relationship 117 Olbia 92–3 Persian invasion of Scythia 86–8, 89–92 Persian Royal Road 74 Persians 73, 75, 78, 86–8, 89–92, 117 Scythians 85–8, 89–92, 93–4 Hisarlik, Turkey 67 Histories, The (Herodotus) 72, 94–5 see also Herodotus history–geography link 46–7, 58, 128 history, highway of 24–7, 116–17 History of the Art of Antiquity, The (Winckelmann) 252, 253 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The (Gibbon) 208 Homer 26, 55, 65, 66, 67–71, 285 Honoria 114–15 Hornaday, William 281 horses burials 49, 53, 91, 185 chariots, pulling 50, 62, 64 domestication 48 extending human mobility 49, 54 Fergana Valley 101–2, 236 humans riding 48–9 images of 50, 105, 170 Indus Valley, use in the 56 messenger systems, use in 74, 191 Mongols’ use of 153, 185, 207 Native Americans’ use of 272 redundancy during Industrial Revolution 283, 290 Scythians’ use of 80, 89, 97 trade in 54, 57, 93, 100, 101–2 Horus 60–1 House of Wisdom, Baghdad 144–5, 184 Hubal 133 Huitzilopochtli 152 Hulagu 178–9, 180–7, 187, 188 Hungary 49, 168, 171 Huns 106–7, 110–16, 116, 137–8 Hyacinth 114–15 Hyksos 62–4, 65, 65 Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, Muhammad 267 Ibn Abi al-Yusr 186 Ibn al-Ala, Abu Amr 149 Ibn al-Athir 164 Ibn Arabshah, Ahmad 210, 211, 215, 218, 219, 220 Ibn Barmak, Khalid 140–1 Ibn Battuta 32, 198–9, 200 Ibn Khaldun Arabs 128, 129, 135, 137, 145 asabiyya 130–1, 137 background 124 Barquq 205 Berbers, living among 124–5 Black Death 202–3 burial 229 change 119 in Damascus 215–18 Egypt, return to 219 Faraj 214–15 geographies 128 Harun 142 as historian 222 image of 132 as judge 222 Mongols 197 Muqaddimah, The 125–6, 126–7 nature–nomad relationship 129, 130 seer’s prophecy 203–4 settlement, ill-effects of 139, 145, 146–7, 151, 152 Timur 216–18, 219 wants of settlers/nomads 248 wheel of fortune of dynasties, turning 127, 146–7, 152, 197, 222–3, 228–9 Ibn Rushd (Averroes) 130 Ibn Salama castle, Algeria 123, 124, 126, 142, 203 Ibn Saud, Muhammad 267 Ibn Tumart 131 Idanthyrsus 89–91 identity 69, 137, 148, 155, 166, 232–3 idleness 245–6, 246–7 Iliad (Homer) 26, 66, 67–9 Imbrie, Major Robert 289 Inanna 39, 41 India 57, 102, 104, 237, 241, 267 Indian Notebooks (Thoreau) 271, 275 Indians see Native Americans Indo-European languages 3, 50–2, 54, 55–6, 80, 97, 262–3 Indo-European nomads, early 52–5, 56–8, 65, 66, 67, 72–3 Indra 55 Indus Valley 33, 54–8, 102 Industrial Revolution 259–65, 266, 285 Innocent IV, Pope 172 Iroquois 247–8, 249 Isfahan, Iran 234–5 Isis 60 Islam 134–5, 137, 193, 230, 299–300 see also Arab Empire Istanbul, Turkey 231 see also Constantinople (Istanbul), Turkey Italy 190, 198–9, 201–2, 214, 252 Iyrcae 93 Jackson, Andrew 273 Jani Beg 199 Jefferson, Thomas 272 Jehan, Shah 237–8 jewellery and ornaments 53, 66, 71, 80, 85, 105, 177, 212, 229, 253, 298 John Sigismund 232–3 Johnson, Dr Samuel 249–51, 251 Jones, William 50–1, 262–3 Jordanes 115 Josephus 15 journeys 2, 27–8, 69–70, 303–4 Juvaini, Ala-ad-Din Ata-Malik 180, 186 Kaaba, Mecca 133 Kabul, Afghanistan 237 al-Kafa (Feodosia), Crimea 198–200, 200–1 Kant, Immanuel 46 Karakorum, Mongolia 165–7, 167–8, 169–70, 174–7, 180 Karsakpay inscription, Kazakhstan 209 Kashan, Iran 178 Keynes, John Maynard 125 Khadija 134 Khalid ibn al-Walid 136, 138 Khanbaliq (Beijing), China 188, 192 Khosrow II 132–3, 135 Khwarazmid Empire 159–64 Kitab Na’t al-Hayawan 170 Kitchener, General Horatio Herbert 308 Kubilai Khan 178, 187, 188, 193, 195, 196, 282 Kubla Khan (Coleridge) 188 Kubra, Shaykh Najm al-Din 164 Kuh-e-Mehr (Mountain of Mercy/Mithra), Iran 75 Kurds 19, 232 kurgans 52–3, 91, 92 Laffer Curve 125 Lakota Sioux 273, 279–81 Laws (Plato) 83–4 Layard, Austen 300–1 Lewis, Meriwether 272 Li Ling, General 95–6 Lichfield, Staffordshire 249, 250 Life of Timur (Ibn Arabshah) 210 Linnaeus, Carl 245 Liu Cong 108 lotus flower 79 Louis IX 172 Lü 99–100 Lubana 144 Lucian 57, 72 Luri tree of life carpet, Iran 17 Lydians 73, 87 al-Ma’arri 146 Macaulay, Thomas 265–6 Mackintosh-Smith, Tim 123–4, 225 Madrassa al-Adili, Damascus 215–16, 218–19 Maikop mound, Russia 53–4, 54 Mamluks 169, 186, 187, 214–15, 222 al-Mamun 142, 144, 147 Manafi’ al-Hayawan (Ibn Bakhtishu) 158 Manetho 62 manifest destiny 267, 274, 279–80, 288 al-Mansur 139–40, 141, 143, 147 al-Maqrizi 204 Maragheh, Iran 181 Marco Polo 167, 187–8, 190, 191, 195–6, 198 Marlowe, Christopher 207, 208, 216, 218 Mashad, Iran 221 Massagetae 72, 80 al-Masudi 127 Maximinus 105–6, 111–12 May, Timothy 251 Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems (al-Masudi) 127 Mecca, Saudi Arabia 133–4, 139 Medes 73, 85, 86, 88 memory, ambition to live in 56, 65, 69, 208–9, 236, 237 Mesopotamia 38–9 see also specific places messenger systems 74, 103, 191 Messiaen, Olivier 285 Mexica 152 Mexico 272, 274 Mighty Dead, The (Nicolson) 67–8 Mihal, Köse 230 Mirbad, Iraq 148 mobility see freedom of movement Modu 97–8, 98–100, 102–3 money, paper 194 Mongke Khan 173–6, 178–9, 187 Mongol Empire arts and sciences 165, 176, 177, 211–12, 221, 222, 222, 229 Black Death 199–201, 205 conquests and spread 158, 162–4, 165, 179, 180–7 cultural exchanges 192–5, 210 decline 197–8, 205–6, 214, 229 democracy 167, 194, 227 diversity 177, 189, 198–9 education 194 Europe, expansion into 168, 171 European embassies to 168–75, 212–13 extent 165, 188–9 freedom of conscience 157–8, 169, 177–8, 187, 189, 193, 199, 213, 221, 227 freedom of movement 187, 189, 213–14, 221, 227 freedom to trade 189–90, 221 gods 52, 169, 172, 178, 193 horses, importance of 158 identity 155 Karsakpay inscription 209 and Khwarazm 159–65 laws 189, 194 Marco Polo’s visit to 187–8 merchant navy 195–6 meritocracy 194 Neo-Mongols 235–8 paper 194 peace 190, 213–14 post-houses 191–2 quriltai of 1206 155 taxes 175–6, 190–1 tombs 211 trade 159–60, 189–92, 195–6, 199, 211–12, 213–14, 227 travel, ease of 191–2 Uighurs, alliance with the 159 viceroys 188–9 wealth 196, 221–2 in Western memory 156–7, 161, 164, 168, 180–1, 207–8 written records 161, 209–10 see also specific people; specific places Morteza Quli Khan 289 motor cars 283, 290 mountains as sacred places 74–5 Mughal Empire 237–8, 238 Muhammad II, Shah 159–60, 160–4 Muhammad, the Prophet 26, 132–3, 134–7, 137 Muqaddimah, The (Ibn Khaldun) 125–32, 202–3 see also Ibn Khaldun Muslim ibn Walid 142 al-Mustasim 181–3, 184–5 Mycenae, Greece 66–7, 71 Naissus (Niš), Serbia 106 Native Americans battles with European settlers 273, 277–8, 279–81 bison 271–2, 274 disappearance 281–2 Franklin’s views 246–8 George II, audience with 278–9 horses, use of 272 pre-colonial presence 241, 269, 271 pushed out by European settlers 268, 270–2, 273 symbols 249, 277, 282, 284 Thoreau’s views 270–1, 275–6 uniting against European settlers 269 nature–nomad relationship 3, 8, 15–16, 23, 129, 228, 258–9, 277, 282, 299 nature–settler relationship 42–6, 241–4, 253, 269–70, 272, 275–6, 281, 283, 285, 286 navies 195–6, 239, 240 Neo-Mongol Empire 235–8 Neolithic Evolution 32–5 Neolithic Revolution 23–4 Nevali Cori, Turkey 18 Newsom, Gavin 277–8 Nicolson, Adam 67–8 Nicolson, Harold 291–2, 293 Nile river 15, 58–65 Nineveh, Iraq 41–2, 81 nomad–nomad conflict 87–8, 89–91 nomad–settler conflict 225 Arabs 135–7 Beja 308 Goths 110 Huns 106, 111–12 Hyksos 62–4 Mongols 158, 160–5, 180–6, 214–20, 237, 251 Native Americans 268, 270–1, 273–4, 275–6, 279–81 Ottomans 231 Persians 145 Visigoths 111 Xiongnu 95, 96–7 nomad–settler cooperation 61, 65, 83–4, 107, 117, 123–4, 303–4 see also trade nomad–settler relationship stories Cain and Abel 32, 34–5, 61, 123, 243 Gilgamesh and Enkidu 42–6 Osiris and Seth 59–61 nomad, defining 3–4 nomad, exclusion/inclusion in dictionaries 250 Nomadic Alternative, The (Chatwin) 302 ‘nomadic gene’ (DRD4-7R) 28–31, 31, 304 Northwestern University, Illinois 28–31 Novgorod Chronicler 171 Novum Organum (Bacon) 239, 240 Nowruz festival 75, 294 oak leaves and acorns 309 octopus brooch 71 Odoacer 115–16 Odysseus 67–8, 69–71 Odyssey (Homer) 26, 67, 69–71 Og, son of Anak 127 Ogodei Khan 167–8, 169, 187 Olbia, Ukraine 92–3 Olympic Games, ancient 71–2 oral tradition 25–6, 27, 82, 86, 258, 282 Ordos culture 105 Origin of Human Races, The (Wallace) 283 Orkhon Valley, Mongolia 165–8 ornaments see jewellery and ornaments Osiris 59–60, 61 Osman 230–1 O’Sullivan, John 267, 268, 274 Otrar, Kazakhstan 160, 220–1 Ottomans 207–8, 220, 230–3, 233, 238, 266–7 overhunting 33–4, 281 ox figurine 54 Pan 84 paper 145, 194 paradise 15–17, 22 Parthians 101, 102, 104, 140 Pascal, Blaise 240–1 In Patagonia (Chatwin) 301 peacock motif 290 Pegolotti, Francesco Balducci 190 Persepolis, Iran 75–9, 79, 88–9 Persian Gulf 141, 148 Persians Abbasids see Abbasid Empire Achaemenids see Achaemenid Empire administration of Arab Empire 146, 148 Afshar goat image 9 Alexander the Great, conquest by 77 Arabs, conquest by 136–7 art 235 Bakhtiari see Bakhtiari Bisotun inscription 74–5, 88, 92 books 158, 170 Byzantines, conflict with 134, 136 cobalt oxide 192–3 Ctesiphon 132, 140 cultural exchanges 73, 210 Greece, relations with 71–2 Manafi’ al-Hayawan (Ibn Bakhtishu) 158 Mongols, conquests by 179–86, 206, 210 nomadic character 73–4, 117, 266, 291–4 nomadic tribes 72–3 paradise garden 16 Pars/Fars 73 Parthians 94, 101, 102, 104, 140 Persepolis 75–9, 79, 88–9 Persian plateau 72–3 Reza Shah 290–1 Royal Road 141 Sackville-West’s time in 291–4 sacredness of mountains 74–5 Safavids 233–5, 235 Sasanian 74, 132–3, 141 Scythians, inability to conquer the 86–92, 150–1 Shahnameh (Ferdowsi) 300–1 Simurgh (Phoenix) 158 trade 192–3 written records, paucity of 26, 71 Petrarch 202 Philip, Master 170 Pir Muhammad 229 Plato 82–5, 129–30 Pliny the Elder 103–4 Plymouth, Massachusetts, USA 241 Polk, James K. 274 Pontic–Caspian steppe 48, 49, 52–3, 109 population growth 17, 33, 59, 261–2, 263, 274, 284, 286, 294 Potbelly Hill, Turkey 17–24 pottery see ceramics prejudices, Western history’s 7–8, 8–9, 24–6, 110–11, 156–7, 161, 180–1, 207–8, 210, 252–4 Prester John 169, 171 printing 238, 240, 265 Priscus 106, 107, 111–14, 138 Proto-Indo-European (PIE) languages 52 Qara Qorum see Karakorum, Mongolia Qashqai 77–8 Qazvin, Iran 179–80 Quran 15, 26, 134–5 railways 274–5, 276–7 ram’s head and horns 11 Ramses III, Pharaoh 60–1 Rashid al-Din 196 Reagan, Ronald 125 religious tolerance see freedom of conscience Renaissance 253 Rendille 28 Report on King David 170 Reza Shah 290–1 Rig Veda 52, 55 Rimbaud, Arthur 303–4 Roerich, Nicholas 53 Roman Empire 102, 103–4, 105–7, 109–16, 136, 284 Roth, Joseph 286 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 260, 278–9 Rukn al-Din Khurshah 180, 185 Rumi 164–5 Saadi 181, 294 Sacha the dog 287 Sackville-West, Vita 291–3 Safavid Empire 233–5, 235, 238 Safi ad Din, Sheikh 233–4 Sahlins, Marshall 16 Salisbury, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess 283 Samarkand, Uzbekistan 108, 145, 162, 211, 212–13, 220–1, 237 Samburu 28 Sanskrit 50–1, 55–6 Sarmatians 72, 80, 104, 107 Sasanian Empire 132–3 Schliemann, Heinrich 66–7 Schmidt, Klaus 18, 19–22, 23, 25, 34 Schoedsack, Ernest B. 287–8, 289 science 127, 181, 222, 222, 243–4, 245, 254, 255, 283 scorpion symbol 126 Scythes 86 Scythians archery 80, 88, 89 art and ornaments 85, 92, 103, 105, 253 burials/tombs 91 customs 80–1 gods/goddesses 80, 86 Herodotus’ descriptions 85–8, 89–91, 93–4 horses, importance of 80, 89, 97 nomadic character 80, 89, 90, 97, 150–1 Persia’s inability to conquer 86–92, 150–1 rise of 79–80, 81 trade 105 Xiongnu, similarities to the 97, 98, 103 Secret History of the Mongols, The (Rachewiltz) 161 seed planters 260–1 Seljuqs 151–2 Serdica (Sofia), Bulgaria 105–6, 106–7 Seth 59–61, 61, 63 settlement beginnings of 22, 23–4, 32–3 benefits 35–6, 59, 309 detriments 30–1, 45–6, 139, 147, 152, 197, 285–6, 299 Franklin’s views 246, 247–9 and monumental architecture 25 see also cities settlers’ views of nomads Franklin’s 245, 246–8 nostalgia and romanticism 258–9, 287–90, 291–3 scorn and superiority 40, 84–5, 110–11, 265–6, 273–4, 275–6, 279–80, 282–3 Shahnameh (Ferdowsi) 300–1 Shalamzar Palace, Iran 289 Shamhat 43–4 Shami, Nizam al-Din 209–10 Shang-Tu, China 188 Shatt al-Arab 148 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 149–50 Shih Chi (Sima Qian) 94–5 ships 195–6, 200, 205, 206, 239, 240, 241, 254–7 Sidonius, Saint 117 silk 94, 101, 103, 191, 192, 234 Silk Roads 100–1, 103–4, 190–1, 192, 196, 200, 221 silver articles see gold and silver articles Sima Chi 108–9 Sima Qian 80, 92, 94–6, 98, 101 Sinauli, India 57 Sitting Bull 280 Siyavash and family, Iran 1, 2 Sky Father 39, 52, 71, 75, 92, 156, 169 slavery 172, 199, 210, 220, 267–8 Sloane, Sir Hans 254 Smith, George 41–2 Smyrna, Turkey 220 social hierarchies 40–1, 59 social order 40, 59, 63, 82, 83, 84 Socrates 83, 84 Sogdians 101 ‘Song of the Acorn’ (Bakhtiari tribe) 295 Songlines, The (Chatwin) 4, 302 Spain 22, 124, 125, 212, 272 Spargapises 87 specialisation, rise of 40, 59 spinning 259–61 Spinning Jenny 261 stag ornament 85 statues see figurines and statues Steppe, Great Eurasian cultural memories 57, 67, 69, 114, 138 customs/beliefs/rituals 80e–1 Herodotus’ descriptions 93–4 horses, importance of 46–50, 80, 98 Indo-European languages 50–4 kurgans 52–3, 91, 92 migration from 56–8, 67, 81, 108–9, 109–10, 151–2, 230 people of see specific tribes trade 53–4, 92, 105 Stewart, John 11 stories see oral tradition Suleiman the Magnificent 232–3, 235, 237 Susa, Iran 76, 77 al-Tabari 132 Tahiti 256, 259 Talas, Kyrgyzstan 145 Tamburlaine the Great (Marlowe) 207 Tatar Tonga 159 taxes 112, 123, 125, 134, 162, 175–6, 190–1, 232 technology 8, 241–2, 259–61, 274–5, 276–7, 285, 290 Tehran, Iran 289, 290–1, 294 Temujin 153–6 see also Genghis Khan Tengri see Sky Father Tepe Hesar ram’s head and horns, Iran 11 Theodosius II 106–7 Thesiger, Wilfred 130 Thoreau, Henry David 269–71, 274–7 Thousand and One Nights, The 51, 142 Tigris river 15, 38–9, 139–40, 141, 148, 183 Timaeus (Plato) 129–30 Timbuktu, Mali 123 Timur (Tamburlaine) ambitions 208–9 ancestor of Mughals 237–8 background 206–7 Damascus, conquest of 214–19 death 220–1, 222 eye-witness accounts 209–10, 212–13, 216–18 Ibn Khaldun’s meetings with 216–18 Karsakpay inscription 209 luxury 210, 212–13 Samarkand 210–12, 220–1 titles 206 trade 211–12, 213–14 in Western memory 207–8 Tiresias, prophet 69–70 Todd, H.

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism by Joyce Appleby

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, land bank, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, PalmPilot, Parag Khanna, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

The goal was to mechanize the movements made by the hands and arms of the spinners and weavers. Four men, working independently, transformed textile making with their inventions of the spinning jenny, the spinning mule, and the power loom, all designed to speed up the process of turning wool into thread and thread into cloth. Their differing success epitomizes the mixed fate of inventors. Both James Hargreaves and Thomas Arkwright came up with the spinning jenny, a simple device that multiplied the spindles of yarn spun by one wheel. Once it was in operation, the number of additional spindles went quickly from eight to eighty.

…

A year later, in 1785, he patented a power loom that used steam power to operate a regular loom for making cloth. It became the prototype of the modern loom. Although Cartwright built a weaving mill, he went bankrupt. Samuel Crompton invented the spinning mule, which, as the name suggests, combined two inventions, the spinning jenny and the power loom. He had to sell the rights to his mule because he was too poor to pay for the patenting process. Steam power gave the British the competitive edge in textile making, particularly cotton. They could undersell almost all Indian and Chinese producers. The market for cotton was global, and England’s fabrics were so cheap that they were able to break open many of the world’s protected markets.

…

They took the name of an earlier resister, Ned Lud. These Luddites declared war on the machines that violated venerable work routines and banished comfort and conviviality from the workplace. Actually woolen clothmakers in the west of England had earlier embarked on a serious effort to thwart clothiers from introducing the spinning jenny. Menacingly, this device could do the work of twenty spinners. These craftsmen had the advantage of a long tradition of regulation in the woolen trade, so they called upon Parliament to enforce laws that had been on the books for generations. After a decade of petitioning, lobbying, and pamphleteering clothmakers finally secured a parliamentary inquiry.

Running Money by Andy Kessler

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, Apple II, bioinformatics, Bob Noyce, British Empire, business intelligence, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, Charles Babbage, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, flying shuttle, full employment, General Magic , George Gilder, happiness index / gross national happiness, interest rate swap, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Long Term Capital Management, mail merge, Marc Andreessen, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, packet switching, pattern recognition, pets.com, railway mania, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez canal 1869, Toyota Production System, TSMC, UUNET, zero-sum game

So much so that in 1755, a mob broke into John Kay’s house and destroyed one of his flying shuttle looms. While weaving got faster, making thread or yarn was still old-fashioned. Now weavers demanded more yarn of higher quality. Cheap cotton from the New World began to make inroads against itchy wool and even comfortable but expensive silk. In 1764, James Hargreaves invented the Spinning Jenny, which Pressure Drop 65 wound strands of cotton into thread. Around the same time, Richard Arkwright invented and patented a device named the Spinning Frame to wind thread into bundles of yarn. Although the Spinning Frame was originally designed to be hand cranked, Arkwright ended up needing horses to operate it, and even they proved not to be powerful enough, so he moved the whole thing riverside, changing the machine’s name to a Water Frame.

…

Although the Spinning Frame was originally designed to be hand cranked, Arkwright ended up needing horses to operate it, and even they proved not to be powerful enough, so he moved the whole thing riverside, changing the machine’s name to a Water Frame. Around 1785, Arkwright was visited by Boulton and became one of the early manufacturers to use Watt’s engine. Make power cheap enough, and someone new will figure out how to use it. The yarn from a Water Frame was thick, and the thread from the spinning jenny was coarse. Common folk wore clothes that were basically like burlap—what they wouldn’t have done for smooth underwear. One can only imagine how itchy clothing was in 1775. Royalty still insisted on silk. Comfortable clothing was yet another thing that separated the rich from the poor. An inventor named Samuel Crompton crossed the Jenny and the Water Frame and invented the Spinning Mule.

…

., 172 Sloan Foundation, 172 smelting, 52–53 Smith, Adam, 54, 279 Smith, Junius, 93–94 Social Security, 261 software, 118, 120, 196–99 company blowups, 177–78 investment factors, 136, 146, 197 payment for, 137 Soho Manufactory, 55 Sony, 44, 206, 251, 253, 277 Soros, George, 10, 14, 117, 163, 164, 166, 168, 169, 261, 276, 295 Soros Management, 112, 113, 293 Southwest, 292 spinning frame, 65, 66, 125 spinning jenny, 64–65 spinning mule, 65, 125, 272 Sprint, 72 Sputnik I, 101 Sri Lanka, 246 Ssangyong, 3–6, 166, 208, 234, 260 Stac, 97 standard of living, 234–35, 246, 256, 279 Stanford Research Institute, 120, 185, 187 Stanford University, 152, 187, 191 steam engine, 64, 78, 91–95, 183 industrial significance of, 55–56, 58–59, 65–67, 68, 123, 125, 190, 271, 272 microprocessor parallel with, 125 Watt designs, 53–55, 57, 89, 91, 95, 125–26, 190 steam locomotive, 92 steamships, 92, 93–95, 183 Steen-Seligman Happiness Index, 280, 282 Steinhardt, Michael, 10 Stephenson, George, 92 stock market, 10, 180, 208, 256–58, 261, 262, 269 art of stock buying and, 181–82 British, 92–93 bubble, 209–16, 223–27 burst of bubble, 227, 234, 248, 290–93 drop in, 166, 168, 169, 224–25 foreign investors in, 29, 275, 276 function of, 89–90 industrial economists and, 237 intellectual property’s profitability and, 269 international economic role of, 279 on-line trading, 84–85 September 11 attacks and, 288 shorting, 171 software blowups, 177 theory of efficient, 176 stock options, 261 Stockton and Darlington Railway, 92 stress, 280, 282, 287 Suez Canal, 94 Sullivan, Scott, 225 Sun Microsystems, 191, 194, 245 Sure Thing, The (film), 218 Index Taiwan, 68, 204, 251, 252, 281 low manufacturing costs, 130–35, 136, 148, 175, 235, 259 offshore subsidiaries and, 251, 252 U.S. debt and, 257 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, 130, 131–35, 148, 252, 259 Take Two Interactive, 176–77 tariffs, 272, 277–78 Tartikoff, Brandon, 196 TASS, 169 taxes, 254, 272, 288 T-bill, 254 technology, 16, 42–43, 73, 168, 290 changes from, 67–68, 79 development factors, 79 human relationship with, 246–47 lowered prices from, 187 textile manufacture, 64–65 top market cap companies, 111 See also intellectual property; specific technologies technology stocks, 11, 109, 223–27, 228–29, 293 telecommunications industry, 61–62 Telecosm conference, 183 telegraph, 187 telephone, 183–84, 185–86 teleputer, 193, 194 Telesave, 72–73 television sets, 127, 158, 277 Teligent, 179 Texas Instruments, 11, 101, 126, 128, 154 textile manufacture, 64–68, 78, 89, 272 311 Thailand, 117, 234, 270 13-D filings, 204 Tiger Management, 11, 112, 113, 117, 276, 292–93, 295 yen and, 162–66, 168, 169 TimeWarner, 194, 223, 229 Titanic (ocean liner), 95 Token Ring, 191 Tolkien, J.

The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World by Tim Harford

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, colonial rule, company town, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, European colonialism, experimental economics, experimental subject, George Akerlof, income per capita, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, Larry Ellison, law of one price, Martin Wolf, mutually assured destruction, New Economic Geography, new economy, Patri Friedman, plutocrats, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

This seems like an unusually straightforward case, but on closer inspection the same turns out to be true of many of the Industrial Revolution’s technological advances. Cotton-spinning machinery, for example, did not require any scientific knowledge, just a careful process of development and experimentation plus a little creativity: Legend has it that the spinning jenny was inspired by a traditional medieval spinning wheel that fell over and kept spinning while lying on the ground. The inventors of spinning machines such as the spinning jenny and the water frame launched serious research programs; they knew exactly what they hoped to achieve, and just needed to solve a series of modest engineering problems. They expended this considerable effort rationally—and those in France or China rationally did not—because the financials added up: Allen’s calculations show that British workers were at that time the most highly paid in the world, whether measured against the price of silver, of food, of energy, or of capital.

…

They expended this considerable effort rationally—and those in France or China rationally did not—because the financials added up: Allen’s calculations show that British workers were at that time the most highly paid in the world, whether measured against the price of silver, of food, of energy, or of capital. That meant that they were big consumers of imported cotton, but also that a labor-saving device would pay dividends. In Britain, a spinning jenny cost less than five months’ wages, while in low-wage France it cost more than a year’s wages. It was cheap French labor that accounted for the machine’s slow take-up on the continent, not the superior scientific ingenuity or commercial acumen of the British. That was even more true of steam engines.

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

The sudden surge in growth that occurred first in northwest Europe has been dubbed the “Industrial Revolution”, but it was neither sudden nor solely about industry; Deirdre McCloskey’s term “The Great Enrichment” is a better description (see chart).17 The conventional narrative that we learn at school teaches us that this process happened, in Britain, around 1760, and involved a series of gadgets like the spinning jenny and the steam engine. But, like a dog gnawing an old slipper, historians have worried away at this narrative. They have argued that signs of faster economic growth appear much earlier than 1760, while a decisive take-off to a more rapid growth rate was not really visible until the early 19th century.

…

Arnold Toynbee, a historian, popularised the term Industrial Revolution in a series of lectures (and a subsequent book) in the 1880s. When this author was at school, the revolution was dated to around 1760, largely based in England, and was linked to a series of inventions including textile machinery like the spinning jenny and the steam engine developed by James Watt. But the picture is a lot more complex and uncertain than the school textbooks suggested. In the mid-18th century, around 70% of humans were still living in “agrarian empires” of one kind or another, whether in China, India, Japan, Russia, or under the Habsburg monarchy.1 The term “revolution” implies a sudden change but that is not what the numbers (such as we have) appear to suggest.

…

What has been unprecedented about the modern era has been the sheer number of innovations and the speed with which they have been spread. In part, this has been down to the self-reinforcing nature of these changes. For example, invention of the “flying shuttle” improved the productivity of weavers. That created the demand for more raw material in the form of spun thread. Sure enough, the spinning jenny, the water frame and the mechanical mule all emerged in the 1760s and 1770s, massively improving the productivity of spinners. As the efficiency of textile production improved, the price of finished goods fell and this increased demand for the product. Manufacturers were able to benefit from economies of scale.

The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh

Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, carbon footprint, climate fiction, Donald Trump, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, megacity, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, Naomi Klein, non-fiction novel, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, Ted Nordhaus, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban planning

Strangely this question is almost never explicitly posed in accounts of the history of global warming. Yet these histories do often offer an implicit answer to the question of why the non-Western world was slow to enter the carbon economy: it is simply that the technologies that created this economy (e.g., the spinning jenny and the steam engine) were invented in England and were therefore inaccessible to much of the world. In this view industrialization comes about through a process of technological diffusion that radiates outwards from the West. This narrative is, of course, consistent with the history of global warming over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the carbon-intensive economies of the West pumped greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at ever accelerating rates.

…

Harris, What’s Wrong with Climate Politics and How to Fix It (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 109. 126 to much of the world: Thus, for example, vulcanologist Bill McGuire cites 1769 CE as a key date in the history of the Anthropocene because that was the year when Richard Arkwright invented the spinning jenny, a machine that would serve as a critical link in the transition to carbon-intensive forms of production: ‘Arkwright’s legacy,’ writes McGuire, ‘is nothing less than the industrialization of the world.’ See Bill McGuire, Waking the Giant, Kindle edition, loc. 363. For Timothy Morton, on the other hand, the key moment is April 1784, a date about which, he asserts, ‘we can be uncannily precise’ because that was when James Watt ‘patented the steam engine’.

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

A succession of advances in agriculture, from crop rotation to the mechanical reaper, created a much larger agricultural surplus in the countries where they were adopted. In Britain, the enclosure movement, under which lands that were previously communal and accessible to all were appropriated for private landowners, displaced a sizeable share of the rural population. At the same time, the adoption of new manufacturing technologies, including the spinning-jenny and steam engine, created enormous numbers of jobs in booming urban industries such as textiles and metalworks. As populations flooded into early industrial cities such as Manchester, they quickly became crowded and unsanitary. With the invention of the railway, it became possible to move many more goods and heavier loads over longer distances far more quickly.

…

One explanation emphasizes a shift in agricultural practices and land rights that increased the profits available for landholders to invest in manufactured goods and freed up the necessary supply of labour to produce those goods. Others see a series of technological breakthroughs, including the spinning-jenny and the steam engine, as the root cause, as these innovations made it possible to produce far more goods with the same amount of labour. What is not in doubt is that, once the process of industrialization was set in motion, it was cities that drove it forward. Early industrial cities like Manchester or Glasgow acted as matchmakers for workers desperate for employment and capitalists eager for profit.

Investment: A History by Norton Reamer, Jesse Downing

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, book value, break the buck, Brownian motion, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial innovation, fixed income, flying shuttle, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Henri Poincaré, Henry Singleton, high net worth, impact investing, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the telegraph, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, means of production, Menlo Park, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical arbitrage, survivorship bias, tail risk, technology bubble, Teledyne, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, underbanked, Vanguard fund, working poor, yield curve

For instance, Johannes Gutenberg’s revolutionary printing press of the fifteenth century clearly facilitated the diffusion of knowledge that made the Industrial Revolution—and its necessary technological innovations and inventions—possible in the first place. Among the other facilitating technologies of the Industrial Revolution was James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny, a spinning frame with multiple spindles that vastly increased production volume in the textile industry. Combined with the flying shuttle, the spinning jenny took the textile industry into the next competitive era. James Watt’s late eighteenth-century steam engine changed most industries using mechanical power, especially transportation and agriculture, quite significantly.

…

See Singapore International Monetary Index Simonide, 24 Singapore International Monetary Index (SIMEX), 170–72 Singleton, Henry, 7 Small Business Act of 1958, 278 Small Business Administration, 275 Index 433 smart-beta funds, 302 Smith, Adam: South Sea Bubble and, 68–69; theories of, 70, 79, 326; The Wealth of Nations, 36, 69 snowball effect, 94 social change, 320–25 Social Security: private investment accounts, 116; private pensions and, 109–10; retirement age and, 59, 107 societas, 50–51 societas maris, 53–54 societas publicanorum, 51, 56, 64 Société Générale, 172–74 Socrates, 18–19, 24 Soros, George, 263 South Sea Bubble, 67–69, 87 sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), 128–31, 145 S&P 500. See Standard & Poor’s 500 speculation: art, stamps, coins, and wine, 283; in derivatives, 221; excesses, 197; impacts of, 232; value and, 4–5 spinning jenny, 71 split-strike conversion, 151–52 sponsor, 286–87 Stabilizing an Unstable Economy (Minsky), 214 Stagecoach Corporate Stock Fund, 284–85 Standard & Poor’s 500 (S&P 500), 187, 228, 285, 305–6, 309 Stanford, Allen, 153–56 Stanford, Leland, 155 Stanford Financial Group, 154 Starbucks, 277 State Street Corporation, 299 State Street Global Advisors, 299 State Street Investment Trust, 141 statistical arbitrage, 267 steam engine, 71 steamships, 90 Stefanadis, Chris, 94 sterling, 65 stock company, 134 stock exchanges: national or international, 94; new, 96; regional, 94–95 stock market: dislocations, 205; in England, 86–87; in Paris, 85 stock ownership: age and, 93–94; direct and indirect, 91, 93; gender and, 93–94; regulations prohibiting too much, 123; study of, 96; in United States, 90–94, 97 stock ticker, 89–90; network, 95 stones (horoi), 27, 60 Strong, Benjamin, 200–203, 206, 226 strong-form efficiency, 249 Studebaker-Packard Corporation, 111 sub hasta (public auction), 50 subprime, 39 subprime-mortgage lending, 223 Suetonius, 59 sugar consumption, in England, 75, 77 Sumerian city-states, 15–16 supply curve, 229 Supreme Court, 108 survivorship bias, 252 swap spread, 266 Swensen, David, 296, 328 SWFs.

The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 by David Edgerton

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, British Empire, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, creative destruction, deglobalization, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, global village, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, interchangeable parts, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, means of production, megacity, microcredit, Neil Armstrong, new economy, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the long tail, Upton Sinclair, urban planning

A good example is the cotton-spinning machine that dominated the most important cotton industry existing in 1900 – the ‘mule’ spinning machine of the British cotton industry. The ‘mule’, invented in the early nineteenth century, was so-called because it was a hybrid of two different types of spinning machines – it used the stretching motion of the spinning ‘jenny’ and the roller action of the ‘water-frame’. Each twentieth-century mule had around 1,500 spindles, and each pair of mules was operated by the male spinner and his two assistants, called the ‘big piecer’ and the ‘little piecer’. The spinning mule was at the centre of what was a globalised industry.

…

.: Small is beautiful 191 science museums 28, 29, 38, 104 science parks 192 scientific revolution 3 scientists government 192–3 nature of xiii scramjet ix Scud missiles 154–5, 156 sea transport, cheap 115 Second World War 1, 34, 34, 127, 142, 155 artillery-intensive 144 battle of France 150 battleships x, 93, 148–9 casualty rates 146 conquest of Malaya 150–51 conventional and atomic bombing 12–18 dispersal of forces in space 147–8 horsepower x, 34, 35–6 motor torpedo boats 68 a physicist’s war 138 R&D 197 repair organisations 99 transfer machines 85 US atomic bomb project 198, 199 service industries 70–74 extension of 53 IKEA 72 shift from industry 52 Seversky, Alexander de 104 sewing, domestic 81 sewing machines 50, 55, 58–60 sexual revolution 22, 24 Shakuntala Express 96 shanty towns xii, 40–43, 49, 207 Sheffield 173 shellac records 7 Shenzhou-5 capsule 137 shipbreaking 207–8, 208 Shippingport nuclear reactor, Pennsylvania 20 ships container 74 cruise 49–50 efficiency 68 inventive activity in 190–91 lascar employment 135–6 maintenance 91–5 ocean-going x, 28 refits 91–2 reserve technologies 11 sailing 91, 95 world merchant fleet 73–4 Siemens 130, 196 significance 1–27 assessing aviation and nuclear energy 11–19 assessing technologies 4–5 malaria 25–7 small technologies and big effects 22–5 spin-off 19–22 technological choice 8–11 use is not enough 5–8 Silicon Valley, California, USA 133, 186, 195–6 Sinclair, Upton: The Jungle 168–9, 173–4 Singapore 91, 150 Singer Sewing Machine Company 57, 58, 59, 71, 130 Sino–Japanese War, second 140, 179 slaughterhouses 168–73, 171, 175 small arms 143–6, 190 smallpox 163 Smith, Kline French 196 Smithsonian Institution, Washington 104 Sobibor extermination camp, Poland 179 society civil 22 seen as slow to adapt to new technology vii, viii transition from industrial to post-industrial society 3 Soho, London 47 Solvay process 190 sound reproduction 7 South Africa national industrial development 118 output per head 207 petrol production 122 South America guerrilla rebellions 152–3 torture in 157 South Vietnamese army 152 Soviet bloc 118, 126, 129, 133, 145 Soviet Union agriculture 79 car production 69 China produces Soviet technology 44 dams and hydro-electric projects 127 economic growth 110, 112, 206, 207 engineers 102 entry into the Second World War 17 family farms 62–4 foreign technology and socialism 126–9 German invasion of 34, 35–6 Great Terror 179 hydrogenation 121 imitation of foreign technologies 112, 136–7 links with China (1949–60) 131 a multi-national state 131 R&D 110, 128, 137 rifles 144–5 soldiers’ deaths in Second World War 144 television 131 space rockets 1, 2 Spain 122 aviation 125, 126 economic growth 109, 112 executions 176 Francoist 118 imitation of foreign technologies 112 nationalistic and autarchic 131 R&D 109, 121–2 spare parts 79, 96 Speer, Albert 14, 18 spermicides 23, 25 spin-off 19–22, 190 Spin-off magazine (NASA) 21 Spindles Board 38 spinning ‘jenny’ 36 spinning mule 36–8, 47, 60 spinning wheels 54, 60, 63, 107 Sputnik 128, 189 SS 182 Stalin, Joseph 104, 125, 152 Stalinets (tracked Caterpillar 60) 126 Stalingrad tractor factory 126 Stalinism 73, 126, 127 ‘Stalin’s falcons’ 104 Standard Oil 121 Stanford University 186 Star Wars programme 155 state and boundaries 117 and engineers 101–2 funding of big, controversial technologies 22 television 131 statistical offices 5 steam engine 3 reciprocating 3, 29 steam power ix, 2, 3, 29, 105 steam turbine 3 steamships xiv, 113 steel ix, 2, 19, 44, 68, 73, 127, 208–9 sterilisation 23 Stopes, Marie 23–4 Suame Magazine, Ghana 83 Suez Canal 134 suicide, and reserve technologies 11 sulphonamides 163 Swift meat packers 171, 172 Switzerland 80 synthetic ammonia 119 System 360 196 T Ta 183 fighter aircraft 125 Tabun nerve gas 153, 164 Taiwan 45, 109, 136, 177, 207–8 Tamil Tigers 153 Tank, Kurt 125 tanks 159 tank warfare 141–2 tape recorders 7 tariffs 117 Taxol 187 Taylorism 72 TB (tuberculosis) 25 tea-making machines 38 techno-globalism 105, 113–17 techno-nationalism 103–8 Asia and 136–7 technological boosterism 4 technological choice 8–11 ‘technological dualism’ 44 technological futurism vii–viii, xiii–xiv technological importance, assessing 4–5 technological nationalism 117 technological retro x technological revolution 74 technological sharing 111 technology museums 28, 29, 38, 104 technology transfer 111, 127 Tefal 20 Teflon (PTFE) 19–21 Tehran, Iran 154 Telefunken 131 telegraphy xiv, 3, 6, 7, 19, 113, 193 telephone xiv, 6, 7, 55, 193, 195 telephony 3 television ix, 3, 7, 31, 32, 55, 59, 103, 111, 130–31 ‘terotechnology’ 77 Texas Instruments 195 textiles ix, 2, 28, 60, 65, 105 Thailand 177 Thermo-King 170 Three Gorges dam, China 128 tide predictors 7 time 28–51 creole technology 43–5 decline of the ‘mule’ spinning-machine 36–8 horses, mules and oxen 32–6 not Alphaville but bidonville: technology and the poor megacity 39–43 remodelling the boat 47–9 retro and reappearance 49–51 times are changing 31–2 transport 45–7 time between overhaul (TBO) 88, 89 Time magazine 170 timelines, technological vii, ix, x, 29, 31, 212 Tirpitz (battleship) 149 Titanic 50 Togliatti, Palmiro 127 Togliattigrad, Soviet Union 127 Tokaev, Colonel Grigory 125 tools disappearance of 29 Ghananian car repairers 83 of household production 56–7 and small trades 60–62 torture 156–7, 212 Trabant car 10, 129 tractors animal power replaces 36 displacement of horses xiii, 62 Fordson 62, 63, 126 maintenance 79 number on US farms 55 oxen replace 36, 207 USA 62 USSR 63, 126–7 trade global 115 interwar years 115 names 57 ‘traditional technology’ 28–9 trains see railways transfer machines 85–6 transistors 195 Treblinka extermination camp, Poland 179 trucks British truck production 69 Jiefang 126 Model AA 126 number on US farms 55 Tu 4 bombers 123 Tunisia 169 Turkish Navy 92 Tutsis 41–2, 182–3 typhus 26, 162, 163 Tyson Foods 175 U Ukraine: Carpathian foothills 48 Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) 122 Unamuno, Miguel de 133 Unilever 166 Union Cold Storage 172 Union Stockyards, Chicago 168 United Arab Republic (UAR) 125 United Fruit Company 134 United Nations 18, 79, 122, 129 United States agricultural horsepower xiii, 33 attitude to blacks 132–3 aviation 104, 111 car production 111 domination of world production/innovation 112 economic growth 206 energy use levels 209 executions 165, 176, 178, 182 family farms 62 and guerrilla armies 153 horsepower in First World War 35 Korean War 13 mechanised agriculture 34 modification of cars 97–8 the most motorised nation in the world 69 patents 200 post-war atomic programme 18–19 R&D spending 108, 110 railways 5–6 rifles 144 space programme 19, 20 television 131 torture techniques 157 uptake of new technologies 32 wheat and cotton exports 65 universities 185–7, 192 University of Goettingen 186 University of Oxford 186 UNIX operating system 195 uranium bomb 164 urbanisation, new 40, 207 Uruguay 170–71, 171, 172, 173 Uruguay (liner) 124 US Air Force 95 US Army Air Force 12 US Army Corps of Engineers 11–12, 198 US Food and Drug Administration 201 US Navy 68 US Steel Corporation 127 US Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) 14–15 USAAF (United States Army Air Forces) 12, 18 use-centred history ix–xii alternatives for technologies x–xi appearance, disappearance and reappearance of technologies x genuinely global ix, xi–xii gives a radically different picture of technology ix involves rethinking of the history of all technology xii the most significant technologies x novel technological worlds xi–xii refutes some conclusions of innovation-centric history xii rethinking of the history of all technology xii V V-2 rocket x, 17–18, 142, 154, 181 V-agents 164 vacuum cleaners xiv, 55 vehicles, electric vs petrol-powered 9–10 Veinticinco de Mayo (aircraft carrier) 94–5 Venerable, HMS 94 Vengeance, HMS 95 Vestey family 172 Vickers 130, 154 video recorders 55 Vietcong 152, 163 Vietnam war 94, 145, 146, 151–2 Vikrant, INS 95 vinyl records 7, 50 Volkswagen Beetle 44, 70 Golf 70 VX agent 164 W Wal-Mart 71–2, 74, 137 Walla Walla County, Washington xiii Walter Rau floating factory 166 Walton, Sam 72 war 138–59, 212 casualty rates 146 civilianisation of 138–9, 145–6 the conventional story 139–42, 140 industrialisation of 138–9 Iraq and the past 153–6 old weapons and killing in war 142–6 paradoxes of lethality 146–8 power and effect – unused and unusable weapons 148–9 technological and economic determinism in war 150–53 torture 156–7 war, technology and the history of the twentieth century 157–9 Warsaw Pact powers 149 washing machines xiv, 4, 32, 55 water ancient dependence on the control of 76 treatment/supply systems 4 wax cylinders 7 Weber, Albert 165 Wehrmacht 35–6 Wellcome 196 Wells, H.

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation by Edward Glaeser, David Cutler

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of penicillin, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, future of work, Future Shock, gentrification, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global village, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, job automation, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge worker, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Richard Florida, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, superstar cities, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech baron, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, union organizing, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

The combinations of private and public action that reduced the risk of illness from mass production and distribution in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries provide examples of how to lower the risks that cities face today. During the early Industrial Revolution, mechanical innovations like the flying shuttle, the water frame, and the spinning jenny revolutionized the manufacturing of fabric for clothing, one of humanity’s most basic needs. Those innovations meant a switch from labor to capital-intensive production and from weaving at home to working in large factories. The machines were expensive, and they became more efficient as industrial establishments grew larger.

…

The Peels of Manchester illustrate the intertwined nature of industrial job creation and public hygiene. The first Robert Peel, who lived from 1723 to 1795, was an innovator of products, such as his “parsley” patterned calicos, and production techniques. He employed his neighbor, James Hargreaves, who invented the spinning jenny. Peel’s embrace of labor-saving devices made him a target of Luddite anti-machine violence, but the new technology made him productive and wealthy enough to own twenty-three mills. His son, also Robert, whom we shall just call Peel, lived from 1750 to 1830 and became even wealthier. He was one of an estimated ten British millionaires in 1799 and employed over fifteen thousand workers, including over one thousand young apprentices.

…

Over the past twenty years, much anxiety has emerged over the future of work in an age of machine learning and robotics. What remains for humans to do in a world in which machines can seemingly do everything? The replacement of human beings by mechanical devices is not some new trend. Robert Peel the elder was doing just that when he earned the wrath of local craftsmen with his spinning jennies. But Peel’s technological innovations didn’t lead to joblessness, any more than efficient Boulton and Watt steam engines led to a conservation of coal. The great English economist Stanley Jevons noted 150 years ago that more efficient engines led to more coal consumption, because people figured out more uses for steam engines that used less fuel and were consequently less costly to operate.

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines by Thomas H. Davenport, Julia Kirby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Amazon Robotics, Andy Kessler, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon-based life, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, commoditize, conceptual framework, content marketing, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, flying shuttle, follow your passion, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, game design, general-purpose programming language, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Hans Lippershey, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial robot, information retrieval, intermodal, Internet of things, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter Thiel, precariat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, speech recognition, spinning jenny, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, tech worker, TED Talk, the long tail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

First, machines relieved humans of work that was manually exhausting and mentally enervating. This was the story of the late industrial revolution, which, having pulled all those workers off farms and into factories, proceeded to make most of them unnecessary with contraptions like the flying shuttle, the spinning jenny, and the power loom. And it’s a process that continues around the world. Consider Foxconn, the Chinese manufacturing subcontractor to global electronics brands like Apple. Starting in 2011, it started putting robots on the lines to perform welding, polishing, and such tasks—ten thousand of them that first year.

…

The Future of Stepping In Is Bright We think that anyone who’s capable of stepping into automated decision systems should do so. In general, the future for this group is very bright. It’s as if we’re in the early days of the industrial revolution, and there are very few mechanics for the power looms and spinning jennies that inventors have come up with. Those who know how to set up, get running, and maintain these new machines are going to be in huge demand. We certainly haven’t found any people with this focus and set of capabilities that are out of a job today. Perhaps we should include here the obligatory complaint that there aren’t enough STEM graduates, at least in the United States, to fill out the ranks of the stepping-in role in the future.

The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History by Kassia St Clair

Apollo 11, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, butterfly effect, Dmitri Mendeleev, Elon Musk, flying shuttle, Francisco Pizarro, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, gravity well, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Neil Armstrong, North Ronaldsay sheep, out of africa, Rana Plaza, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, spinning jenny, synthetic biology, TED Talk, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Virgin Galactic, Works Progress Administration

In 1760 the Journal for the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce offered rewards for ‘a machine for spinning six threads of Wool, Cotton, Flax, or Silk, at one time, and that will require but one person to work and attend it’. They soon got their wish: over the course of a century the Spinning Jenny, the Water Frame and the Power Loom and a host of other inventions exponentially increased the rates of production. Think of the Industrial Revolution and coal and steel will spring to mind, but it would be more accurate were we to picture instead the busy whir of threaded looms and cavernous factories choked with cotton dust.

…

This was a small, aerodynamic piece of wood that could be quickly propelled from one side of the loom – through the serried ranks of the warp – to the other, dragging the weft threads with it as it went. This increased the speed of weavers so dramatically, that afterwards it took four spinners to supply just one weaver. To correct this imbalance, inventors focused on improving the speed of spinners. In 1764 James Hargreaves created the spinning jenny; five years later came Richard Arkwright’s water frame; and a decade after that, the steam-powered mule was set in motion by Samuel Crompton. All exponentially improved the quantity of spun yarn. In 1785, Edmund Cartwright’s power loom became the first steam-powered weaving machine. So much labour- and time-saving mechanisation meant that, for the first time in history, cloth-making was being taken from hands and homes and transferred to machines and factories.27 For industrialists and merchants, of course, this made financial sense.

The Enlightened Capitalists by James O'Toole

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bletchley Park, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, business process, California gold rush, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, collective bargaining, company town, compensation consultant, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, desegregation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, end world poverty, equal pay for equal work, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, means of production, Menlo Park, North Sea oil, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Vanguard fund, white flight, women in the workforce, young professional

In distinction, his lifelong rival, humanist Thomas Jefferson, saw such children as potentially virtuous, self-sufficient citizens in need of an education to prepare them for democratic participation in their communities. By and large, Hamilton’s view would prevail in America and Britain over the subsequent century. Britain, circa 1800 The mid-eighteenth-century introduction of such laborsaving devices as James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny, Richard Arkwright’s water frame, and Samuel Crompton’s spinning mule greatly reduced the time it took to spin thread from cotton and to make it into cloth, functions previously performed at home by women using distaffs and spindles and, later, spinning wheels. By 1800, cotton cloth would be more efficiently mass-produced in gigantic mills far larger even than the one Defoe had described six decades earlier.

…

Manchester in 1789 was the Silicon Valley of its time, and Owen found himself at the innovative center of the Industrial Revolution. Not surprisingly, he wanted to play a part in the exhilarating technological and business changes going on around him. By the time he was eighteen, he was junior partner in a firm that manufactured the latest technologies of the era—such as Arkwright’s water frame, Hargreaves’s spinning jenny, Crompton’s mule, and Edmund Cartwright’s power loom—all used in the production of high-quality cotton cloth. He soon went off on his own and established himself as a successful self-employed businessman. But he was ambitious, and when he read a notice soliciting applicants for the post of factory manager at a large mill, he applied.

…

., 430 Taylorism, 81, 106–7 Tesla Motors, 460 Texas Instruments (TI), 257 textile mills Britain’s exports of cloth and, 4–5 child labor, 5 child labor in, 4–5 closing of British, 1806, 14 creation of wealth and, 4 Defoe’s description, 4 “immiseration” of mill workers, 5 J&J’s cotton mill, 148 Johnson advocates minimum wage, 151 living conditions of workers, 5 Owen’s reforms at New Lanark mills, 6–30 power loom, 9 spinning jenny, 4, 9 spinning mule, 4, 9 water frame, 4, 9 Thatcher, Margaret, 435–36 Theory Y, 431 Thigpen, Peter, 191, 192 Santone factory closing and, 198–99 Thompson, J. Walter, 146 Time magazine, on Bradshaw, 305 Tindell, Kip, 455 Tinker, Grant, 311 Tisch, Laurence, 311–12 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 395–96 Tom’s of Maine, 360–75, 432 Colgate-Palmolive Company buys controlling interest in, 371–75, 392, 395 community relations, 362, 365, 366, 370, 371, 374 company credo, 363, 365 company ownership and, 365, 368, 369–70 company’s mission, 362–64 “corporate tithing,” 364–65, 366, 372 education on values and priorities, 363 employees, 365, 366, 372 environmental practices, 360, 367, 368 expansion and growth, 361, 364–67 future of, 374–75 hiring women and minorities, 364 need for capital, 369–70, 374 participative management, 367 product recall, 364, 369 products, 367 recycling and, 367 size of, late 1980s, 364 Townsend, Claire, 285, 286 Townsend, Joan Tours, 280, 285 Townsend, Robert “Bob,” 264, 279–87, 427, 428, 436, 477 American Express and, 280, 282 as Avis head, 281, 282, 283–84 background and personal life, 280 Bennis on, 286–87 business philosophy at Avis, 281 commercial slogan for Avis, 279 death of, 286 ethics and, 285 fighting unionization, 284 humanistic philosophy of management, 284 influence of, 286–87 intellectual influences on, 430 ITT acquires Avis, 284–85 life after Avis, 285–87 long-term thinking and, 281–82 “management by adultery,” 286 “Operation Mars,” 280 organizational “guerrilla warfare” and, 282–85 Radica and, 285–86 Up the Organization, 279–80, 283, 285, 286 “Trees” (Kilmer), 148 Trillin, Calvin, 382 Trollope, Anthony, 282 Truman, Harry, xvi Trump, Donald, 278, 467, 489n TRW, 424 “Try Reality” (Johnson), 150–51 “Two and a Half Cheers for Conscious Capitalism” (O’Toole and Vogel), 454, 455–56 Uber, 473, 474, 475 UN Global Compact, 451 Unilever.

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, Akira Okazaki, antiwork, behavioural economics, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, British Empire, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Costa Concordia, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, crony capitalism, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, Ford Model T, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, George Akerlof, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Harrison: Longitude, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, land reform, liberation theology, lone genius, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, open economy, out of africa, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, pink-collar, plutocrats, positional goods, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, rent control, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, very high income, wage slave, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yogi Berra

Neither focuses on what actually increases real income, which is bettered production. The robots themselves are made by people who buy cars. Compared with horses, cars themselves are “robots.” Yet the advent of cars did not produce mass unemployment because of insufficient demand for the output of blacksmiths and horse traders. Fundamentally, all tools—a blast furnace and a spinning jenny, or for that matter an Acheulean hand ax or a Mycenaean chariot wheel—are “robots,” that is, contrivances that make labor more productive. Reich listed in 2014 the usual lineup of villains allegedly driving down American wages: “Automation, followed by computers, software, robotics, computer-controlled machine tools and widespread digitization, further eroded jobs and wages.”7 No they didn’t.

…

Property laws are necessary but they are nothing like sufficient for the startling betterment that begins in the Industrial Revolution and eventuated in the still more startling Great Enrichment of the past 150 years—all of which, embarrassingly for the North-Acemoglu orthodoxy in economic history and development, happened a century or more after the allegedly sharp improvement of property rights out of 1688. A society can be individualistic in a thoroughgoing way but still honor only noblemen, not letting ordinary people have a go at spinning jennies and desktop computers. Roman sculpture (as a conventional if not obviously sound line in art history claims) was “individualistic” in a way that Greek sculpture, which is said to have dealt in ideal figures, was not. Yet at Rome, as in Shakespeare’s England, rank told above all. * Aristocratic England before its embourgeoisement was, on the whole and in its theory of itself, hostile toward betterment tested in trade.

…

The ethical and rhetorical change that around 1700 began to break the ancient restraints on betterment, whether from the old knights or the new monopolists, was liberating and it was enlightened and it was liberal in the Scottish sense of putting first an equal liberty, not an equal outcome. And it was successful. As one of its more charming conservative enemies put it: Locke sank into a swoon; The Garden died; God took the spinning-jenny Out of his side.21 43 Ideas Made for a Bourgeois Revaluation It is merely a materialist-economistic prejudice, I say yet again, to insist that such a rhetorical change from aristocratic-religious values to bourgeois values must have had economic or biological roots. John Mueller, the political scientist and historian at Ohio State whose thoughts on “pretty good” democracy and capitalism I have used, argues in another book that war, like slavery or the subordination of women, has become slowly less respectable in the past few centuries.1 Important habits of the heart and of the lip change.

Losing Earth: A Recent History by Nathaniel Rich

An Inconvenient Truth, carbon tax, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, energy security, green new deal, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, the scientific method

It was not so simple a question as it appeared. In the middle of the eighteenth century, when fossils were first burned to generate energy on an industrial scale, an unprecedented disjunction occurred in the course of civilization. Humanity lost control of its technology. The new, world-moving inventions—the spinning jenny, the coke-fueled furnace, the coal-fed steam engine—invited dangers that their creators had not anticipated and, increasingly, could not avoid. The black smoke erasing daylight from London and Yorkshire offered an early example of unintended consequences; the Dust Bowl revealed that the short-term benefits of mechanization could lead to the frivolous discounting of ancient wisdom; and the wide adoption of gasoline-powered automobiles showed the power of technological advancement to breed mass delusion, as in 1943, when residents of Los Angeles, swimming in smog, believed the city to be under chemical attack from the Japanese.

Liberty's Dawn: A People's History of the Industrial Revolution by Emma Griffin

agricultural Revolution, Corn Laws, deskilling, equal pay for equal work, full employment, gentrification, informal economy, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, labour mobility, spinning jenny, Thomas Malthus, trickle-down economics, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor

And it is one of enduring relevance in our own times as other parts of the globe industrialise at a galloping pace. 4017.indd 4 25/01/13 8:21 PM introduction: ‘a simple naritive’ 5 As the moment when one small European nation left behind its agrarian past and entered decisively on the path to modernity, the industrial revolution has quite rightly attracted the attention of generation after generation of historians. But most of this work has focused on the great men and machines that turned Britain into the workshop of the world: James Hargreaves, Richard Arkwright, James Watt, George Stevenson, Isambard Kingdom Brunel; the spinning jenny, the water frame, the steam engine, the locomotive engine, the railways. These individuals and their achievements transformed Britain into an industrial nation and fully deserve the attention they have received. But so too do the ordinary men, women and children who worked the machines, hewed coal for the steam engines, and built and drove the trains.

…

Here is Toynbee describing the advent of industrialisation: We now approach a darker period – a period as disastrous and as terrible as any through which a nation ever passed; disastrous and terrible because side by side with a great increase of wealth was seen an enormous increase of pauperism [and] the degradation of a large body of producers . . . The steam-­engine, the spinning-­jenny, the power-­loom had torn up the population by the roots . . . The effects of the Industrial Revolution prove that free competition may produce wealth without producing well-­being.40 Toynbee ushered the expression ‘industrial revolution’ into the English language, and his social interpretation of that newly named event continued to inform opinion through much of the twentieth century.

An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000 by John Steele Gordon

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial independence, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Ida Tarbell, imperial preference, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, margin call, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, postindustrial economy, price mechanism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

An entrepreneur would give workers the necessary materials and then pay them by the piece for completed work. It took, on average, four spinners to supply one loom. But John Kay’s invention of the flying shuttle in 1733 upset the balance because it made weaving much faster. Either more spinners or a faster way of doing the spinning was needed. In 1764 James Hargreaves introduced the spinning jenny, which could spin eight threads at a time, and five years later James Arkwright improved on it with the water frame, so called because it was powered by a waterwheel. This mechanization made thread abundant, and, now to speed up the weaving, the Reverend Edmund Cartwright developed the power loom in 1785.

…

., 182 South, 101, 373, 375 cotton trade in, 85–86, 89–90, 97 economy of, 94–96 slavery and identity of, 87–88 tariff debate and, 96–97, 292–93 see also Civil War, U.S. South Carolina, 62, 82–83, 85–86 nullification crisis and, 97 South Carolina colony, 24 Soviet Union, 361, 362, 375–76, 391, 403, 413 collapse of, 414–15 space race, 403–4 Spain, xv, 8–11, 15, 22, 23, 63–64 spinning jenny, 88 Sputnik, 403–4, 410 stagflation, 383 Staggers Act, 392 Stalin, Joseph, 354, 377 Standard Oil, 255–59, 263 standard time, 235–36 steamboats, 135–40, 162 monopolies in, 137, 142–45 steam engine, 132–34, 140, 141, 409 steam turbine, 305–6 Stedman, E. C., 213 steel industry, 240–49, 324, 371 Carnegie and, 242–43, 247–48 consolidation and mergers in, 262 expansion of, 259 Homestead strike and, 253–54 vertical integration in, 246–47 Steiger, William, 394–95 Stephenson, George, 147, 150 Stevens, John, 147 Stevens, Robert Livingston, 147 Stewart, A.

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, guns versus butter model, Hans Lippershey, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Pearl River Delta, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey

The second and third of these increased in quantity in the nineteenth century,* but it was the qualitative improvement that really mattered – the fact that total output exceeded the combined increments of workers and mills. In terms of supply, then, the Industrial Revolution was a hunt for efficiency. James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny (1766), Richard Arkwright’s water frame (1769), Samuel Crompton’s mule (1779), Edmund Cartwright’s steam-powered loom (1787) and Richard Roberts’s self-acting mule (1830): these were all ways of making more thread or cloth per man-hour. The spinning jenny, for example, allowed a single worker simultaneously to spin cotton yarn with eight spindles. Thanks to these innovations, the unit price of British cotton manufactures declined by approximately 90 per cent between the mid-1790s and 1830.7 The same applied to the other key breakthroughs in iron production and steam-power generation.

This Sceptred Isle by Christopher Lee

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, failed state, financial independence, flying shuttle, glass ceiling, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Northern Rock, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, urban decay

1401 First Lollard Martyr 1403 Percy’s Revolt; Henry Percy killed at Shrewsbury 1406 James I of Scots 1409 Owen Glyndŵr 1411 Foundation of Guildhall in London 1413 Henry V 1415 Agincourt 1420 Treaty of Troyes; Paston Letters 1422 Henry VI 1429 Joan of Arc at Orléans 1437 James II of Scots 1450 Cade’s Rebellion 1453 End of Hundred Years War; Gutenberg Bible 1455 Wars of the Roses begin 1460 James III of Scots 1461 Edward IV c.1474 Caxton prints first book in English 1483 Richard III 1485 Henry VII; founding of the Yeomen of the Guard 1488 James IV of Scots 1492 Christopher Columbus reaches America 1509 Henry VIII marries Catherine of Aragon 1513 James V of Scots 1519 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor 1527 Henry VIII fails in attempt to divorce Catherine of Aragon 1533 Henry VIII marries Anne Boleyn; Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury 1536 Henry VIII marries Jane Seymour; Wales annexed to England 1540 Henry VIII marries and divorces Anne of Cleves; marries Catherine Howard 1540 Henry VIII, King of Ireland 1542 Mary, Queen of Scots 1547 Edward VI 1549 First Book of Common Prayer 1553 Mary I 1556 Cranmer executed 1558 Elizabeth I 1561 Mary, Queen of Scots returns to Scotland from France 1562 British slave trade starts 1567 James VI, King of Scotland 1571 First anti-Catholic Penal Law 1580 Drake’s circumnavigation 1587 Mary, Queen of Scots executed 1596 Robert Cecil, Secretary of State 1600 British East India Company incorporated 1601 Essex executed 1603 James I 1603 Ralegh treason trial and imprisonment 1611 Authorized Version of the Bible 1616 Death of William Shakespeare 1618 Ralegh executed; Thirty Years War starts 1625 Charles I 1632 Lord Baltimore granted patent for the settlement of Maryland 1641 The Grand Remonstrance issued 1642 Civil War starts; Battle of Edgehill 1643 Battle of Newbury 1644 Battle of Marston Moor 1645 New Model Army established 1649 Charles I executed; massacres at Wexford and Drogheda 1651 Charles II crowned at Scone; Hobbes’ Leviathan published 1655 Jamaica captured 1658 Cromwell dies 1660 Charles II; Declaration of Breda; Pepys begins his diary 1662 The Royal Society; Boyle’s Law 1666 Fire of London 1670 Hudson’s Bay Company 1673 Test Act 1678 Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress 1685 James II 1689 William III and Mary II 1690 Battle of the Boyne 1692 Massacre of Glencoe 1694 Bank of England 1695 Bank of Scotland 1702 Queen Anne 1704 Battle of Blenheim; capture of Gibraltar 1707 Union with Scotland 1714 George I 1719 Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe 1722 Walpole, first Prime Minister 1727 George II 1740 War of Austrian Succession; Arne composes ‘Rule Britannia’ 1742 Handel’s Messiah 1746 Battle of Culloden 1751 Clive captures Arcot 1755 Dr Johnson’s Dictionary 1756 Seven Years War 1759 General Wolfe dies at Battle of Quebec 1760 George III 1765 Stamp Act; Hargreaves’ spinning jenny 1767 Revd Laurence Stone’s Tristram Shandy 1768 Royal Academy of Arts founded 1772 Warren Hastings, first Governor General of Bengal 1773 Boston Tea Party 1774 Priestley isolates oxygen 1775 American Revolution – Lexington and Concord 1776 American Declaration of Independence 1779 Captain Cook killed in Hawaii 1780 Gordon Riots; Epsom Derby 1781 Battle of Yorktown 1783 Pitt the Younger PM 1788 Regency Crisis 1789 French Revolution 1792 Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man 1799 Napoleon 1801 Union with Ireland 1805 Trafalgar 1807 Abolition of Slave Trade Act 1815 Waterloo 1820 George IV 1828 University of London founded 1829 Catholic Emancipation Act 1830 William IV 1832 First Reform Act 1833 Abolition of slavery in British colonies Act 1834 Houses of Parliament burned down 1836 Births, Marriages & Deaths Act 1837 Queen Victoria 1838 Public Records Office founded 1839 Bed Chamber Crisis; Opium War 1840 Prince Albert; Treaty of Waitangi 1843 Joule’s First Law 1844 Rochdale Pioneers; first telegraph line in England 1846 Repeal of Corn Laws 1847 Marks and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto 1849 Punjab conquered 1850 Public libraries; Tennyson, Poet Laureate 1854 Crimean War; British Medical Association founded 1855 Daily Telegraph founded; Palmerston PM 1857 Sepoy Rebellion (Indian Mutiny); Trollope’s Barchester Towers 1858 Canning, first Viceroy of India 1859 Darwin’s On the Origin of Species 1861 Prince Albert dies; American Civil War 1865 Abraham Lincoln assassinated 1867 Second Reform Act; first bicycle 1868 TUC 1869 Suez Canal opened; Cutty Sark launched 1870 Death of Dickens 1876 Victoria made Empress of India 1880 Gladstone PM 1881 First Boer War 1884 Third Reform Act 1885 Gordon dies at Khartoum 1887 Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee 1891 Elementary school fees abolished 1895 Salisbury PM 1896 Daily Mail founded 1898 Omdurman 1899 Second Boer War 1900 Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius 1901 Edward VII 1903 Suffragettes 1904 Entente Cordiale 1908 Borstal opened 1909 Old Age Pensions 1910 George V 1914 Irish Home Rule; First World War 1916 Lloyd George PM 1918 RAF formed from Royal Flying Corps; Marie Stopes 1919 John Maynard Keynes’ Economic Consequences of the Peace 1920 Black and Tans; Anglican Church in Wales disestablished 1921 Irish Free State 1922 Bonar Law PM 1923 Baldwin PM 1924 First Labour Government (MacDonald PM); Baldwin PM; Lenin dies 1925 Britain joins Gold standard 1926 General Strike 1928 Women over twenty-one given vote 1929 The Depression; MacDonald PM 1931 National Government; Statute of Westminster 1932 British Union of Fascists 1933 Hitler 1935 Baldwin PM 1936 Edward VIII; George VI; Spanish Civil War 1937 Chamberlain PM 1938 Austria annexed by Germany; Air Raid Precautions (ARP) 1939 Second World War 1940 Battle of Britain; Dunkirk; Churchill PM 1942 Beveridge Report; fall of Singapore and Rangoon 1944 Butler Education Act; Normandy allied landings 1945 Attlee PM; Germany and Japan surrender 1946 UN founded; National Insurance Act; National Health Service 1947 India Independence; Pakistan formed 1948 Railways nationalized; Berlin Airlift; Ceylon (Sri Lanka) independence 1949 NATO; Irish Independence; Korean War 1951 Churchill PM 1952 Elizabeth II 1955 Eden PM; Cyprus Emergency 1956 Suez Crisis 1957 Macmillan PM 1958 Life Peerages; EEC 1959 Vietnam War; Fidel Castro 1960 Macmillan’s Wind of Change speech 1963 Douglas-Home PM; De Gaulle veto on UK EEC membership; Kennedy assassination 1964 Wilson PM 1965 Southern Rhodesia UDI 1967 Pound devalued 1969 Open University; Northern Ireland Troubles; Robin Knox-Johnston first solo, non-stop sailing circumnavigation 1970 Heath PM 1971 Decimal currency in UK 1972 Bloody Sunday, Northern Ireland 1973 Britain in EEC; VAT 1974 Wilson PM 1976 Callaghan PM; first Concorde passenger flight 1979 Thatcher PM; Rhodesian Settlement 1982 Falklands War 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev; Global warming – British report hole in ozone layer 1986 Chernobyl; Reagan–Gorbachev Zero missile summit 1987 Wall Street Crash 1988 Lockerbie 1989 Berlin Wall down 1990 John Major PM; Iraq invades Kuwait 1991 Gulf War; Helen Sharman first Briton in space; Tim Berners-Lee first website; collapse of Soviet Communism 1992 Maastricht Treaty 1994 Church of England Ordination of Women; Channel Tunnel opens 1995 British forces to Sarajevo 1996 Dolly the Sheep clone 1997 Blair PM; Diana Princess of Wales dies; Hong Kong returns to China 1998 Rolls-Royce sold to BMW; Good Friday Agreement 1999 Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly elections 2001 Terrorist attacks on New York 2002 Elizabeth the Queen Mother dies 2003 Second Gulf War 2004 Asian Tsunami 2005 Freedom of Information Act; Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker-Bowles wed; terrorist attacks on London 2006 Queen’s eightieth birthday 2007 Ministry of Justice created; Brown PM 2008 Northern Rock collapse 2009 Market crash; banks partly nationalized; MPs expenses scandal 2010 Cameron PM.

…

While social pleading depended on debate and Parliament’s whim, the industrial upheaval brought added miseries. Take, for example, the plight of hand spinners. In 1765 James Hargreaves, a carpenter and weaver, produced his most famous invention and named it after his wife. It was to be called the spinning-jenny. By using eight spindles driven by a great wheel, Hargreaves revolutionized the methods of the textile industry. And just like those who, 200 years on, viewed automation with dismay, the spinners understood perfectly that their livelihoods would never be the same again. This era was the beginning of what is now called the Industrial Revolution.

…

John ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Smith, William ref 1 Smith-Stanley, Edward ref 1 Smollett, Tobias ref 1, ref 2 Smuts, Jan ref 1 Smythe, Thomas ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Solway Moss, Battle of ref 1 Somers, George ref 1, ref 2 Sophia of Hanover ref 1 Soult, Marshal Nicholas ref 1 South Africa ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6 South America ref 1, ref 2 South Sea Company ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Spain ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10 and Bermuda ref 1 Britain’s wars with ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10 and Convention of Prado ref 1 Empire of ref 1 and Huguenots ref 1 James I/VI’s peace with ref 1 in Napoleonic Wars, see main entry and Treaty of Vienna ref 1 Spanish Armada ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Spanish Succession, War of ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 spinning-jenny ref 1 Spurs, Battle of ref 1 Stainmore, Battle of ref 1 Stalin, Iosif ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Stamp Act ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Stamp Tax ref 1 Statute of Marlborough ref 1 Stephen, King ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Stephen, William fitz ref 1, ref 2 Stephens, James ref 1 Sterne, Laurence ref 1 Stigand, Archbishop ref 1, ref 2 Stirling Bridge, Battle of ref 1 Stockmar, Baron ref 1 Strabo ref 1 Strachey, William ref 1 Stuart, Charles Edward (Bonnie Prince Charlie) ref 1 Stuart, James Edward (Old Pretender) ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5; see also Jacobites Stukeley, Thomas ref 1 Sudan ref 1, ref 2 Sudetendland ref 1 Suetonius ref 1 Suez Canal ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Sunday Schools ref 1 Sunderland, Earl of ref 1, ref 2 Sutton Hoo ref 1 Sweden ref 1, ref 2 Sweyn I (Forkbeard) ref 1, ref 2 Swift, Jonathan ref 1 Switzerland ref 1 Symeon of Durham ref 1 Tacitus ref 1, ref 2 Tahiti ref 1 Tasmania ref 1 taxation ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13; see also Britain: income tax in Taylor, Jeremy ref 1 tenant farming ref 1 Territorial Army ref 1 Test Acts ref 1, ref 2 Tewdwr, Rhys ap ref 1 textile industry ref 1 Textus Roffensis ref 1 Thackeray, William ref 1 Thatcher, Margaret ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Theobald, Archbishop ref 1 Thirty Years War ref 1 Thirty-Nine Articles ref 1 Thistlewood, Arthur ref 1 Thomas, Earl of Lancaster of ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester ref 1, ref 2 Times, first edition of ref 1 Tinchebrai, Battle of ref 1 Tirel, Walter ref 1 tobacco ref 1 Tobago ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Togodumnus ref 1 Tokig of Walligford ref 1 Toleration Acts ref 1 toll roads ref 1 Tolpuddle Martyrs ref 1, ref 2 Tone, Wolfe ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Tories ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10 associations of ref 1 beginnings of ref 1 and Corn Laws ref 1 and Emancipation ref 1, ref 2 thought of as Conservatives ref 1 Torrington, Lord ref 1 Tostig ref 1 Townshend, Charles ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Towton, Battle of ref 1 trade unionism ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Trafalgar, Battle of ref 1, ref 2 Transvaal ref 1, ref 2 Treaty of Versailles/Paris (1783) ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Treaty of Versailles (1919) ref 1, ref 2 Trevelyan, Charles ref 1 Trinidad ref 1 Troy, Thomas ref 1 Trueman, Harry ref 1 Tudor, Margaret ref 1 Tull, Jethro ref 1 Turkey ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Tyler, Wat ref 1, ref 2 Tyrell, James ref 1 Tyrwhitt, Thomas ref 1 Ulster ref 1, ref 2 see also Ireland; Northern Ireland Ulster experiment ref 1 United Irishmen ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6 United States of America: Declaration of Independence of ref 1 first president of ref 1 Irish migration to ref 1 and Monroe Doctrine ref 1 New Deal of ref 1 and War of 1812 ref 1 and World Wars, see First World War; Second World War see also North America USSR ref 1 Utrecht, Treaties of ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Valentinian ref 1 Vaughan, Henry ref 1 Vere, Robert de ref 1 Vesey-FitzGerald, William ref 1 Vetch, Col.

Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don't Talk About It) by Elizabeth S. Anderson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, call centre, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, declining real wages, deskilling, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, manufacturing employment, means of production, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, principal–agent problem, profit motive, Ronald Coase, scientific management, shareholder value, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen

When profits are low, few great fortunes can be accumulated, so nearly all capital owners will have to work for a living.57 No wonder Smith’s pin factory, his model of an enterprise with an efficient division of labor, employed only ten workers.58 The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776. Smith was writing only at the threshold of the Industrial Revolution. The spinning jenny had been invented in 1764, kept secret until it was patented in 1770, and was only beginning to be used in a few factories by 1776. No one could have anticipated the rise of Blake’s “dark, satanic mills” on the basis of such slender evidence. Smith reasonably believed that economies of scale were negligible for the production of most goods.

Rough Guide Directions Bruges & Ghent by Phil Lee

British Empire, gentrification, Kickstarter, place-making, spinning jenny, the market place

Born in 1769, the son of a tanner, Bauwens was an intrepid soul, who posed 12/20/07 1:11:14 PM 123 Shops Aleppo Oudburg 70 T 04 77 33 98 56, Mon noon–5.30pm, Tues–Sat noon–6.30pm. ALEPPO as an ordinary textile worker in England to learn how its (much more technologically advanced) machinery worked. In the 1790s, he managed to smuggle a spinning jenny over to the continent and soon opened cotton mills in Ghent. It didn’t, however, do Bauwens much good: he over-borrowed and when there was a downturn in demand, his factories went bust and he died in poverty. North of the square, on Limburgstraat, stands a monument to the Eyck brothers, Hubert and Jan, the painter(s) of the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb.

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, bread and circuses, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, invention of movable type, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land reform, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, Robert Solow, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, working poor

They were the Luddites, a word that has today become synonymous with resistance to technological change. John Kay, English inventor of the “flying shuttle” in 1733, one of the first significant improvements in the mechanization of weaving, had his house burned down by Luddites in 1753. James Hargreaves, inventor of the “spinning jenny,” a complementary revolutionary improvement in spinning, got similar treatment. In reality, the artisans were much less effective than the landowners and elites in opposing industrialization. The Luddites did not possess the political power—the ability to affect political outcomes against the wishes of other groups—of the landed aristocracy.

…

The new machines were powered by water, but Arkwright later made the crucial transition to steam power. By 1774 his firm employed six hundred workers, and he expanded aggressively, eventually setting up factories in Manchester, Matlock, Bath, and New Lanark in Scotland. Arkwright’s innovations were complemented by Hargreaves’s invention in 1764 of the spinning jenny, which was further developed by Samuel Crompton in 1779 into the “mule,” and later by Richard Roberts into the “self-acting mule.” The effects of these innovations were truly revolutionary: earlier in the century, it took 50,000 hours for hand spinners to spin one hundred pounds of cotton. Arkwright’s water frame could do it in 300 hours, and the self-acting mule in 135.

A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Colonization of Mars, Copley Medal, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, gentleman farmer, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Lao Tzu, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, out of africa, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

Arkwright, the youngest of thirteen children, had first displayed his entrepreneurial talent when he began collecting human hair, dyeing it using his own secret formula, and then fashioning it into wigs. The success of this business provided him with the means to embark on a more ambitious venture, and in 1767 he began developing a "spinning frame." This was a machine for spinning thread in preparation for weaving; but unlike the spinning jenny, a hand-operated device that required a skilled operator, the spinning frame was to be a powered machine that anyone could operate. With the help of a clockmaker, John Kay, from whom he gleaned details of an earlier design, Arkwright built a working prototype and established his first spinning mill, powered by horses, in 1768.

Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Shaped the Modern World - and How Their Invention Could Make or Break the Planet by Jane Gleeson-White

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, British Empire, business cycle, carbon footprint, corporate governance, credit crunch, double entry bookkeeping, full employment, Gordon Gekko, income inequality, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Islamic Golden Age, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Mahbub ul Haq, means of production, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Ponzi scheme, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, source of truth, spice trade, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile

But in fact his system was no more than a cumbersome, complex version of Pacioli’s and has been summarised as follows: instead of two columns in the ledger, make ten; and then in all essential points proceed as directed by Pacioli. Jones and his claims for the labour-saving virtues of his system were so persuasive they almost undid his book’s potential success: in an era of rioting provoked by the introduction of labour-replacing machinery such as the power loom and the spinning jenny, the public worried that the purported efficiency of Jones’s system—‘the most extensively useful invention which had ever made its appearance’—would put bookkeepers out of work. Once Jones had reassured them that no such thing would happen, that no jobs would be lost through the adoption of his system, his book, ‘by unblushing impudence’, went on to find phenomenal success.

The Rare Metals War by Guillaume Pitron

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean tech, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commodity super cycle, connected car, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, energy transition, Fairphone, full employment, green new deal, green transition, industrial robot, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lyft, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Tesla Model S, Yom Kippur War

Easier to identify were the colour-coded minerals that are plotted in all their diversity: chalk and sand quarries alongside limestone and marble deposits. Drawn in black are the coal seams that would make Great Britain vastly wealthy throughout the nineteenth century. At the time William Smith published the Great Map, Great Britain was in the throes of its industrial revolution. In the mills, steam generated thermal energy and powered the spinning jennies that would significantly increase productivity. The same steam power led to the introduction of the locomotive on an increasingly dense railway network, which in turn contributed to the phenomenally swift expansion of trade and progress. But to actuate the locomotive pistons and set its wheels in motion, the steam needed to reach a temperature of close to 350 degrees Celsius.

No Shame: The Hilarious and Candid Memoir From One of Our Best-Loved Comedians by Tom Allen

call centre, period drama, spinning jenny

Instead of applying for popular subjects like history, they knew to apply for obscure ones like Anglo-Saxon Norse and Celtic at one of the brutalist grey colleges round the corner and then just change subject when they got there. I think it’s insider knowledge like this that cements class so rigidly. Sadly, after all this, history had lost its lustre. In the A-Level course we no longer got to do the big dramatic stuff and were spending ages on analysing farming equipment and the importance of the spinning jenny in the Industrial Revolution. I was becoming more and more despondent as I felt truly stuck; I had a job I wasn’t very good at and I’d worked flat out at history A-Level to be told I ‘jumped in too fast’ – what was all this work for? I longed for a means of escape. My uniform for the golf club was a white shirt with a black bow tie.

Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior by Jonah Berger

Apollo 11, assortative mating, barriers to entry, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, double helix, driverless car, fixed-gear, flying shuttle, Google Glasses, job satisfaction, messenger bag, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, PalmPilot, Ronald Reagan, six sigma, spinning jenny, The Wisdom of Crowds, twin studies, white flight, Yogi Berra

Families spun their own cotton and flax and wove them together to make their own textiles. Given the difficulty of forming metal parts, any machines that did exist often used wooden components. Work was manual, hard, and often laborious. With the development of machine tools, the steam engine, and other technologies a slow, steady shift occurred. The flying shuttle, spinning jenny, and other tools allowed weaving to move out of the home and into larger, more dedicated factories. The cotton gin shrank a year’s worth of work into a week. Entrepreneurs began to nurture inventors to create new and more powerful machines. With these technological changes came a new social class.

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

A spinster wasn’t a past-it woman who had ‘failed’ to find a man, she was a valued member of the community, who could, if she wished, support herself independently. * * * Twisting wisps of fibre onto wheels is the kind of process that lends itself to mechanisation. Whatever is repetitive can be done faster by a machine. After thousands of years of women and men spinning by hand, James Hargreaves’ Spinning Jenny (1764) and Samuel Crompton’s Spinning Mule (1779) had the process of spinning a pound of yarn down from 40 hours to 3 hours – and it was soon cut to 90 minutes. Then in 1785 Edmund Cartwright did for weaving what the other boys had done for spinning. The power loom went into the new factories and by the turn of the century the great age of industrialisation had begun

The Ages of Globalization by Jeffrey D. Sachs

Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, circular economy, classic study, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, Commentariolus, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, domestication of the camel, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, European colonialism, general purpose technology, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income per capita, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, out of africa, packet switching, Pax Mongolica, precision agriculture, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rewilding, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, systems thinking, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, zoonotic diseases

We are endangering the planet in ways we have never done before, without a guidebook on how to move forward. The Challenge of Inequality Technological advances contain within them the seeds of rising inequality, as new technologies create winners and losers in the marketplace. The advent of the spinning jenny and power loom displaced and impoverished multitudes of spinners and weavers in India. The mechanization of agriculture impoverished countless smallholder farmers around the world who desperately fled to the cities to find a livelihood. The introduction of robots on the assembly lines of automobile plants have created unemployment and falling wages for workers laid off from those factories.

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, book value, Brexit referendum, business climate, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dark matter, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gentrification, gigafactory, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mother of all demos, Network effects, new economy, Ocado, open economy, patent troll, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, place-making, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, quantitative hedge fund, rent-seeking, revision control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Vanguard fund, walkable city, X Prize, zero-sum game

If they can scale them or, better yet, benefit from inputs of other firms, then TFP rises. 5. See, for example, http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2016/03/barriers-to-productivity-growth.html. Chapter 6: Intangibles and the Rise of Inequality 1. They are called mules because they were a hybrid of two earlier inventions, the water frame and the spinning jenny, a nice demonstration that the synergies between intangible investments—in this case, different types of R&D—are not a recent discovery. 2. Louis Anslow, https://timeline.com/robots-have-been-about-to-take-all-the-jobs-for-more-than-200-years-5c9c08a2f41d#.wh363gjar. See also Bakhshi, Frey, and Osborne 2015. 3.

How to Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson

Albert Einstein, Alexander Shulgin, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, call centre, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deskilling, Easter island, financial independence, full employment, Gordon Gekko, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, moral panic, New Urbanism, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, spinning jenny, three-martini lunch, Torches of Freedom, trade route, wage slave, work culture

People worked, yes, they did 'jobs ' , but the idea of being yoked to one particular employer to the exclusion of all other money-making activity was unknown. And the average man enjoyed a much greater degree of independence than today. Take the weavers. Before the invention in 1 764 of the spinning jenny by the weaver and carpenter James Hargreaves, and of the steam engine in the same year by James Watt, weavers were generally self-employed and worked as and when they chose. The young Friedrich Engels noted that they had control over their own time: ' So it was that the weaver was usually in a position to lay by something, and rent a little piece of land, that he cultivated in his leisure hours, of which he had as many as he chose to take, since he could weave whenever and as long as he pleased, ' he wrote in his 1845 study The Condition of the Working Class in England. ' They did not need to overwork; they did no more than they chose to do, and yet earned what they needed. ' In addition to this autonomous and leisure-filled life, the weavers were also in control of the whole manufacturing process: they produced the cloth and sold it to a travelling merchant.

No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends by Richard Dobbs, James Manyika

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, demographic dividend, deskilling, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, pension time bomb, private sector deleveraging, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Great Moderation, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Zipcar

In a process that is both gratifying and terrifying, the period between historic breakthroughs has been decreasing by orders of magnitude. More than five hundred years passed between Gutenberg’s printing press and the first computer printer. It then took only another thirty years for the 3-D printer to be invented. Two hundred years separated the spinning jenny, the yarn-producing machine invented in 1764, from GM’s Unimate, the world’s first industrial robot.13 It took only a quarter of that time for Shaft, the world’s most advanced humanoid robot, to be invented. As W. Brian Arthur, a former Stanford economist, who pioneered the study of positive feedback and wrote The Nature of Technology, noted, “With the coming of the Industrial Revolution—roughly from the 1760s, when Watt’s steam engine appeared, through around 1850 and beyond—the economy developed a muscular system in the form of machine power.

The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business cycle, clean water, company town, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, Edward Glaeser, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, full employment, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, lump of labour, Mahbub ul Haq, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McJob, Meghnad Desai, microcredit, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, night-watchman state, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, pension reform, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, spinning jenny, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, Tragedy of the Commons, two tier labour market, very high income, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, working-age population

The troops prevented that march from reaching the bigger industrial centres of Rochdale and Manchester, where it might have inflamed a serious insurrection. According to some estimates investment in the Manchester cotton mills had reached £20 million as early as 1816. The owners of capital had a lot at stake. The Lancashire inventors of the mule, Samuel Crompton, the spinning jenny, Richard Hargreaves, and the flying shuttle, John Kay, found themselves under personal attack. Kay had to flee the mob, Crompton was burnt out of his home. Jeremy Rifkin has launched no physical assaults on today’s equivalents of the cotton barons, men such as Microsoft’s Bill Gates, but he makes it clear that he thinks computers are to blame for depriving people of work.

World Economy Since the Wars: A Personal View by John Kenneth Galbraith

business cycle, central bank independence, classic study, flying shuttle, full employment, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, low interest rates, means of production, planned obsolescence, price discrimination, price stability, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, War on Poverty

Most important, in all the earlier stages of development there was no close and predictable correlation between the supply of educated men and the nature of their training and the rate of technological innovation. Inventions were more often the result of brilliant flashes of insight than the product of long prepared training and development. The Industrial Revolution in England was ushered in by the invention of the flying shuttle by John Kay, the spinning jenny by James Hargreaves, the spinning frame by (presumptively) Richard Arkwright and, of course, by James Watt's steam engine. These represented vast improvements in the capital which was being put to industrial use. But only in the case of Watt could the innovation be related to previous education and preparation.

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Book of Ingenious Devices, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, colonial exploitation, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, game design, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, HyperCard, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Minecraft, moral panic, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, Necker cube, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pets.com, placebo effect, pneumatic tube, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, SimCity, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, talking drums, the built environment, The Great Good Place, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Wunderkammern

Ascots and hoop skirts aside, most clothing has some functional value, and certainly our ancestors fifty thousand years ago were making clothes with the explicit aim of keeping warm and dry and protected from potential threats. The fact that so much technological innovation—from the first knitting needles to hand looms to the spinning jenny—has emerged out of textile production can seem, at first glance, more a matter of necessity’s invention. And yet the archeological record is replete with early examples of purely decorative toolmaking: a shell necklace discovered in the Sikul Cave in Israel was crafted more than a hundred thousand years ago.

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity by Byron Reese

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, basic income, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cognitive bias, computer age, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, dark matter, DeepMind, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, estate planning, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, full employment, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Moravec's paradox, Nick Bostrom, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, OpenAI, pattern recognition, profit motive, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

Boatmen destroyed the first attempts at a steam engine, which they felt would put them out of work. So overwhelming was the protest against ribbon looms in Germany that they were ordered burned by the government. When the fly shuttle was invented to make weaving easier, its creator, John Kay, was attacked by a crowd. James Hargreaves, who created another breakthrough in textiles called the spinning jenny, saw his creation burned by yet another mob in England. John Heathcoat, who created technology to make the creation of lace more efficient, saw his entire factory and its equipment torched in broad daylight. In 1811, this hostility toward automation coalesced into the Luddite movement, which consisted of a group of people violently opposed to technology that replaced skilled laborers.

The Classical School by Callum Williams

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, Corn Laws, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, Gini coefficient, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, helicopter parent, income inequality, invisible hand, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, means of production, Meghnad Desai, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, new economy, New Journalism, non-tariff barriers, Paul Samuelson, Post-Keynesian economics, purchasing power parity, Ronald Coase, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income

His father died when he was a baby; his mother raised him. Happily, his childhood was a fairly prosperous and intellectual one. His father had moved in rarefied circles, and Smith matured as a thinker at an exciting time. The industrial revolution had started in the 1760s with the invention of the spinning jenny. France and America were both stirring towards revolution. Scotland was an especially exciting place to be. At the time it had no fewer than four important seats of learning (the universities of St Andrews, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen), compared with a meagre two in England (Oxford and Cambridge).1 The clan system was being dismantled.2 Glasgow was turning from a small provincial town into a great commercial capital.

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet by Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Bartolomé de las Casas, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, European colonialism, feminist movement, financial engineering, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Haber-Bosch Process, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microcredit, Naomi Klein, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, peak oil, precariat, scientific management, Scientific racism, seminal paper, sexual politics, sharing economy, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, surplus humans, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, wages for housework, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War

So long as abundant energy could be extracted, labor and capital costs were saved, and raw materials became cheaper.56 We’re not presenting this as a pure English technological miracle. Some explanations would have us think that there would be no real capitalism without English coal. Indeed, coal’s significance is easily overstated: the major innovations in textile manufacturing, such as the mechanical loom and the spinning jenny, preceded rather than followed steam’s widespread introduction, and as late as 1868, 92 percent of Britain’s merchant fleet was powered by wind, not coal.57 We know enough to realize that capitalism’s frontier is nothing if not inventive. It is possible to imagine an English history without coal, with more energy imported and discovered, and to imagine a nineteenth century even more prone to social revolt and revolution than it was.

The Mystery of Charles Dickens by A. N. Wilson

British Empire, Columbine, Corn Laws, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, George Santayana, Honoré de Balzac, James Watt: steam engine, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sexual politics, spinning jenny, Thomas Malthus

The magnetic property of iron was no longer a mystery – it was something that could be demonstrated and explained in terms of chemistry and physics. From H2O to steam engines was a short step: within decades of the chemists’ theoretical studies there were mechanized factories; the Luddites were trying to put back the clock and destroy the spinning jenny and the powered loom; and railroads were steaming across the fields and plains of Europe and America. A new world had dawned. Mesmer believed it was possible to explain and categorize the human psyche in rather the way that it was possible to classify the inanimate universe. His ‘discovery’ of animal magnetism led to two propositions.

The Map That Changed the World by Simon Winchester

British Empire, gentleman farmer, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, mortgage debt, spinning jenny, the market place, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman

* Smith was to feel somewhat embarrassed in later years about his forebears’ determined ordinariness, and he tried long and hard to prove that through his mother he was a descendant of Sir Walter Raleigh. He convinced no one and eventually abandoned the quest. * James Hargreaves, whose mechanical spinning jenny was destroyed by fearful proto-Luddites, and Samuel Crompton, whose spinning mule was a hybrid of its two predecessors, came only a little later. * William Smith was born during the administration of the sixth and least distinguished, the duke of Grafton, who acted as caretaker between the administrations of William Pitt the Elder and Lord North

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, antiwork, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liberation theology, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, post-industrial society, precariat, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey

Anything between 30 per cent and 90 per cent of the workforce in these countries may be self-employed, many of whom are engaged in subsistence farming. * Yes, that’s the scientist, who also doubled as an alchemist and a stock market speculator. * These included the flying shuttle (1733) and spinning jenny (1764) in the textile industry, coke-smelting (1709) in steel-making and various processes for large-scale sulphuric-acid manufacture (the 1730s and the 1740s) in the chemical industry. * To simplify the story, the 1932 famine happened because too much food was shipped out of the rural areas, following the 1928 agricultural collectivization.

The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets by Thomas Philippon

airline deregulation, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, commoditize, crack epidemic, cross-subsidies, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flag carrier, Ford Model T, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, law of one price, liquidity trap, low cost airline, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, price discrimination, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse automation, zero-sum game

From the Roman Empire to the Industrial Revolution, population growth was slow and productivity growth was nil. The Industrial Revolution earned its name by unleashing unprecedented productivity growth. The First Industrial Revolution began in Britain in the eighteenth century and moved the economy from agriculture toward manufacturing. It involved new machines (the spinning jenny), new energy sources (coal, steam), and a new division of labor in large plants. As countries became richer and agriculture became more productive, populations also grew. Thus, after 1700, population growth and productivity growth both contributed to overall economic growth. Which rate of growth should we consider: overall, or per capita?

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age by Roger Bootle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, anti-work, antiwork, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, blockchain, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, facts on the ground, fake news, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, low interest rates, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mega-rich, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Ocado, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, positional goods, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra

Technology and the engine of growth Before we leave the Industrial Revolution and move on to more recent times, we need to get technological change into perspective. Economic history is full of inventions. And economic history books about the Industrial Revolution are fuller still. All steam engines and “spinning jennies.” This isn’t wrong, but it is partial, and it can be misleading. It is true that productivity is the key to economic growth – certainly to the growth of output per capita, which is the ultimate determinant of living standards. But there is more to productivity growth than inventions and technology.

The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House, 1918-1939 by Adrian Tinniswood

British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, Etonian, gentleman farmer, land reform, off-the-grid, plutocrats, spinning jenny, upwardly mobile

An enormous balustraded and rusticated mansion facing east—always a brave choice in the wind-whipped hills of Derbyshire—Sutton Scarsdale was the work of Francis Smith of Warwick, who remodeled it magnificently in the 1720s. It was bought in 1824 by Richard Arkwright, son of the inventor of the spinning jenny and one of the richest commoners in England, and for nearly a century the Arkwrights lived at Sutton Scarsdale without making any major alterations to the house. Then in 1918 William Arkwright, whose interests lay more with the breeding of pointers than architecture and elegant living, tried to let the house, having first astutely allowed the historian Margaret Jourdain to describe its beauties to possible buyers in a feature for Country Life.

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All by Adrian Hon

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 4chan, Adam Curtis, Adrian Hon, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Astronomia nova, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, bread and circuses, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Sedaris, deep learning, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Galaxy Zoo, game design, gamification, George Floyd, gig economy, GitHub removed activity streaks, Google Glasses, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobs below the API, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, meme stock, meta-analysis, Minecraft, moral panic, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, Ocado, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Parler "social media", passive income, payment for order flow, prisoner's dilemma, QAnon, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, r/findbostonbombers, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, spinning jenny, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, workplace surveillance

In 2012, Amazon spent $775 million to buy Kiva Systems, an advanced warehouse robotics company, in an effort to reduce its reliance on human workers.18 Collectively, companies are spending billions of dollars a year to research and deploy robots as hotel butlers, fast-food cooks, delivery workers, and of course, taxi drivers.19 Those with a positive outlook on life will view robots as merely another step in a centuries-long process of automation that started with the spinning jenny; in this line of thinking, any workers who are replaced by robots can instantly and painlessly retrain for new jobs, and if they don’t, they’re regrettable casualties in a war that ultimately raises the sum total of human happiness, whose end will see the annihilation of human drudgery. While that future may come to pass, it won’t be for decades.

Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn From Their Mistakes--But Some Do by Matthew Syed

Abraham Wald, Airbus A320, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, Atul Gawande, Black Swan, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, crew resource management, deliberate practice, double helix, epigenetics, fail fast, fear of failure, flying shuttle, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Dyson, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, luminiferous ether, mandatory minimum, meta-analysis, minimum viable product, publication bias, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, Silicon Valley, six sigma, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, US Airways Flight 1549, Wall-E, Yom Kippur War

But there is a problem with the linear model: in most areas of human development, it severely underestimates the role of bottom-up testing and learning of the kind adopted by the Unilever biologists. In his book The Economic Laws of Scientific Research, Terence Kealey, a practicing scientist, debunks the conventional narrative surrounding the Industrial Revolution: In 1733, John Kay invented the flying shuttle, which mechanized weaving, and in 1770 James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, which as its name implies, mechanized spinning. These major developments in textile technology, as well as those of Wyatt and Paul (spinning frame, 1758), Arkwright (water frame, 1769), presaged the Industrial Revolution, yet they owed nothing to science; they were empirical developments based on the trial, error and experimentation of skilled craftsmen who were trying to improve the productivity, and so the profits, of their factories.5 Note the final sentence: these world-changing machines were developed, like Unilever’s nozzle, through trial and error.

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect by David Goodhart

active measures, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, computer age, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, deskilling, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shock, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postindustrial economy, precariat, reshoring, Richard Florida, robotic process automation, scientific management, Scientific racism, Skype, social distancing, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thorstein Veblen, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, young professional

In most countries touched by industrial takeoff, the universities initially had little to do with the training of the new scientific and technical class, and this was especially true of England, where Oxford (established in 1096) and Cambridge (established 1209) remained the only universities for more than six hundred years, well into the nineteenth century. Most of the innovations associated with the first industrial revolution in Britain—from the formation of the Royal Society in 1660 to key inventions such as James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny (1764) and James Watt’s steam engine (1775)—had nothing to do with England’s fossilized “Oxbridge duopoly.” Learned societies like the Lunar Society of Birmingham were far more intellectually significant. And although the philosopher John Locke graduated from Oxford in the mid-seventeenth century after having studied medicine, natural philosophy, and philosophy, the Enlightenment, too, had only a limited impact on the two institutions, which remained dominated by the Anglican church and the teaching of theology and the classics (with some mathematics and natural sciences) until the latter part of the nineteenth century.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

Robert Koch created bacterial cultures after accidentally leaving a potato out to go mouldy, while a few years later Alexander Fleming stumbled on penicillin by accidentally leaving such a culture in his laboratory sink during a spell of freak weather.30 Radiation and X-rays were both uncovered during the search for other things. Columbus found the ‘New World’ by mistake. The pacemaker was meant to record the human heartbeat, not control it. Happy accidents are behind inventions from Newcomen's steam engine to the spinning jenny to vulcanised rubber. Just as every idea is formed of other ideas, so it also involves an element of chance – a random meeting of minds, a lucky experiment, a date missed, an accidental find, a serendipitous connection.31 Misreadings, faulty copies and fluky mistakes are legion, as powerful, if not more so, than directed efforts or ‘heroic genius’.32 At the same time ideas repeatedly exhibit multiple discovery, wherein many researchers stumble on the same breakthrough at once.33 Examples include calculus, oxygen, logarithms, evolutionary theory, photography, the conservation of energy, the telephone and the polio vaccine.

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims

air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, book scanning, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, company town, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, Dava Sobel, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital twin, Donald Trump, easy for humans, difficult for computers, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, intermodal, inventory management, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kiva Systems, level 1 cache, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, machine readable, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, Nomadland, Ocado, operation paperclip, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, polynesian navigation, post-Panamax, random stow, ride hailing / ride sharing, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, rubber-tired gantry crane, scientific management, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, spinning jenny, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, workplace surveillance

De-skilling is what makes it possible for Amazon to continue to function despite relatively high rates of turnover. It’s also what makes it possible for the company to hire hundreds of thousands of seasonal employees every year and, whatever their background, turn them into productive associates within a day or two. The spinning jenny, Jacquard loom, and numerical machine tool, all milestones in the industrialization of manufacturing, took knowledge that used to be in the heads of skilled craftspeople and embodied it in a machine that made them redundant. Today, automation does this and more: it makes possible things that no human could accomplish without it.

The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution by Charles R. Morris

air freight, American ideology, British Empire, business process, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, clean water, colonial exploitation, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, en.wikipedia.org, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, if you build it, they will come, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, lone genius, manufacturing employment, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, refrigerator car, Robert Gordon, scientific management, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, undersea cable

Farm life could also be isolating, and the girls seem to have taken great delight in meeting and living with so many girls of their own age. It’s no surprise that most of them seem to have remembered the mills with fondness. The first Waltham mill started operations in February 1815 with twenty-three yarn-making machines—carders, rovers, and spinning jennies of various kinds—and twenty-one looms, seven wide and fourteen narrow ones. The initial machinery was rapidly added to, replaced, and rebuilt, as operations expanded and Moody piled on his process improvements. One of Nathan Appleton’s firms, a wholesale distributorship, took care of the marketing at a modest 1 percent of sales.

The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts by Richard Susskind, Daniel Susskind

23andMe, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, Atul Gawande, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Bill Joy: nanobots, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clapham omnibus, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, death of newspapers, disintermediation, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lump of labour, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Metcalfe’s law, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, Skype, social web, speech recognition, spinning jenny, strong AI, supply-chain management, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telepresence, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, Two Sigma, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, world market for maybe five computers, Yochai Benkler, young professional

David Card and Orley Ashenfelter (2011), 1043–171. 28 The spirit of their anxieties is shared with the original nineteenth-century ‘Luddities’ (whose name derives from their declared support for Ned Ludd, an East Midlands weaver who smashed a set of framing machines in anger and in fear in the early tremors of the Industrial Revolution). The Luddites viewed James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny in the nineteenth century with the same anxious suspicion that today’s pessimists view Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web in the twenty-first century. See Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé, Captain Swing (2001). 29 David Autor, ‘Polanyi’s Paradox and the Shape of Employment Growth’, NBER Working Paper 20485, National Bureau of Economic Research (2014). 30 Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (2014).

Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire by Danny Dorling, Sally Tomlinson

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, colonial rule, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Etonian, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, gentrification, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, University of East Anglia, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, wealth creators

Instead, the Daily Mail referred to judges it does not agree with as ‘Enemies of the people’.40 If you doubt our words over the intolerance of the British, try wearing a white poppy on Remembrance Day – the poppy worn to remember all the casualties of all wars and to show a commitment to peace.41 Intolerance of the British towards those they suspect of being unpatriotic currently runs at very high levels, further stoked up by Brexit. The British tend to be proud of their industrial revolution, though are usually taught to be this way in school, rather than coming to this conclusion themselves. Spinning jennies, steam pumps and steam engines were not just invented by a Lancastrian (Hargreaves) and two men from Devon (Savery and Newcomen): they were part of a revolution that swept across Europe, with a huge number of similar inventions occurring at much the same time. However, it was the British who engaged in that revolution most voraciously.

Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate raider, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, disintermediation, diversification, do well by doing good, fiat currency, financial independence, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global supply chain, God and Mammon, happiness index / gross national happiness, hydraulic fracturing, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, land value tax, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, low interest rates, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, multilevel marketing, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Scramble for Africa, special drawing rights, spinning jenny, technoutopianism, the built environment, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons

Freed of that pressure, we will turn our gifts toward that which inspires us—for more and more of us, that is the healing of society and the planet from the ravages of Separation. (If you still think that freedom from survival pressure will lead to dissipation and indolence, please go back and reread “The Will to Work” in Chapter 14.) 6. ECONOMIC DEGROWTH Motivation: Over hundreds of years of inventing labor-saving devices, from the spinning jenny to the digital computer, we have at every turn chosen to consume more rather than to work less. This choice, driven by the money system, accompanied an accelerating drawdown of social and natural capital. Today, the option of accelerating consumption is no longer available to us. Absent the driving force of positive risk-free interest, economic growth will no longer be necessary to promote the flow of capital, and a degrowth economy will become feasible.

The Difference Engine by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling

card file, Charles Babbage, clockwatching, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, spinning jenny, the scientific method

From the days of her father's fame, from her girlhood, Sybil could remember Mick Radley's like. She knew the kind of boy that he had been. Ragged angry factory-boys, penny-a-score, who would crowd her father after his torchlight speeches, and do whatever he commanded. Rip up railroad tracks, kick the boiler-plugs out of spinning jennies, lay policemen's helmets by his feet. She and her father had fled from town to town, often by night, living in cellars, attics, anonymous rooms-to-let, hiding from the Rad police and the daggers of other conspirators. And sometimes, when his own wild speeches had filled him with a burning elation, her father would embrace her and soberly promise her the world.

Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time by James Suzman

agricultural Revolution, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, basic income, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, clean water, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, cyber-physical system, David Graeber, death from overwork, deepfake, do-ocracy, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, fake news, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kibera, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lateral thinking, market bubble, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, Parkinson's law, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-work, public intellectual, Rubik’s Cube, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, sharing economy, social intelligence, spinning jenny, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban planning, work culture , zoonotic diseases

If anything, the early years of the Industrial Revolution were marked by the mass culling of a whole range of well-established and sometimes even ancient professions, from weavers to farriers, while creating a handful of opportunities for a new class of workers comprised of aspirant engineers, scientists, designers, inventors, architects and entrepreneurs, almost all of whom came from the private school- and Oxbridge-educated urban classes. For those destined to work on the factory floors, actual skills were not on the list of qualities that their employers wanted. What they required were bodies that could be trained to operate their spinning jennys, water frames and power looms. Life was hard even for those working for the most enlightened employers – by the grim standards of the time – like Richard Arkwright. The inventor of the spinning frame – a machine for binding thread – he established a series of mills across the north of England between 1771 and 1792, was one of the principal targets of the Luddite Rebellion, and is now often thought of as ‘the inventor of the factory system’.

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914 by Richard J. Evans

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, clean water, company town, Corn Laws, demographic transition, Edward Jenner, Ernest Rutherford, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, Ford Model T, full employment, gentleman farmer, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial cluster, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pneumatic tube, profit motive, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, safety bicycle, Scaled Composites, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, source of truth, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, trade route, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration

The most important centre of the new textile production in Europe was in northern France and southern Belgium, where the industrial mills exemplified the new world of work and discipline that was now being established. Here the flat land and sluggishly flowing rivers meant that steam power was used from the outset, since watermills were impractical. In the early industrial town and port of Ghent there were already 250,000 spinning jennies by 1815. The largest mill in the town, owned by the Voortman family, signed a contract in 1821 with two English businessmen to import and set up 100 power looms, ten dressing machines, a steam engine and a washing machine, at a total cost of £5,000. This was an enormous sum in the currency of the day, funded by the profits the firm had made during the Napoleonic Wars.

…

British governments tried to prevent the export of technical know-how by passing laws forbidding the export of machinery and the emigration of artisans in the 1780s. But these regulations were completely unenforceable. Already in 1798 the Belgian (at the time, French) engineer Liévin Bauwens (1769–1822) had smuggled a disassembled spinning jenny packed into sugar crates out of Manchester to Ghent via Hamburg, despite the fact that the export of machinery was punishable by death. Count István Széchenyi (1791–1860), a Hungarian aristocrat who visited England in 1815, succeeded in obtaining: a model of the gas-driven engine, which cost me a deal in both money and effort and was obtained only by dint of sheer will-power and persistence … Several acquaintances mocked me for my preoccupation with machines, especially the light-generating one to which I devoted so much time while in England.

Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World by Joshua B. Freeman

anti-communist, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate raider, cotton gin, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, joint-stock company, knowledge worker, mass immigration, means of production, mittelstand, Naomi Klein, new economy, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

From the late eighteenth century on, factories, factory villages, and manufacturing cities drew tourists, journalists, and philanthropists from continental Europe and North America as well as Great Britain itself.47 Part of the attraction was their novelty. W. Cooke Taylor, the son of an Irish manufacturer who toured the industrial districts of Lancaster in the early 1840s, wrote that “The steam-engine had no precedent, the spinning-jenny is without ancestry, the mule and the power-loom entered on no prepared heritage: they sprung into sudden existence like Minerva from the brain of Jupiter.”48 The scale and setting of mill buildings, whether in rural river valleys or crowded industrial cities, startled visitors. British poet laureate Robert Southey wrote that the approach to the New Lanark mills reminded him “of the descent upon the baths of Monchique,” built by the Romans in southern Portugal.

Sugar: A Bittersweet History by Elizabeth Abbott

addicted to oil, agricultural Revolution, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, company town, cotton gin, death from overwork, flex fuel, Ford Model T, land tenure, liberation theology, Mason jar, Ralph Waldo Emerson, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce, working poor

HIGH TEA AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION The second half of the eighteenth century spawned two fundamental social and economic transformations: the Industrial Revolution and the Sugared Tea Revolution that sloshed into being within it. Led by England, the Industrial Revolution recast primarily agricultural Europe into ever-urbanizing industrial societies fueled by capitalism, overseas trade, growing consumption and changing mores. Technological innovations, most notably the cotton gin, the spinning jenny and the steam engine, transformed how English cotton was produced. Historian David Landes provides this eloquent summary: “The abundance and variety of these innovations almost defy compilation, but they may be subsumed under three principles: the substitution of machines—rapid, regular, precise, tireless—for human skill and effort; the substitution of inanimate for animate sources of power, in particular, the introduction of engines for converting heat into work, thereby opening to man a new and almost unlimited supply of energy; the use of new and far more abundant raw materials, in particular, the substitution of mineral for vegetable or animal substances.

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, food miles, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Medieval Warm Period, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, packet switching, patent troll, Pax Mongolica, Peter Thiel, phenotype, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, working poor, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

As the twentieth-century economist Colin Clark put it, ‘Leisure has a real value even to very poor people.’ So, stuck between booming demand and stalling supply, the putters-out and their suppliers were ripe customers for any kind of productivity-enhancing invention, and with such an incentive, the inventors soon obliged. John Kay’s flying shuttle, James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny, Richard Arkwright’s water frame, Samuel Crompton’s mule – these were all just milestones on a continuous road of incrementally improving productivity. The jenny worked up to twenty times as fast as a spinning wheel and produced a more consistent yarn, but it was still operated entirely by human muscle power.

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

3D printing, accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, company town, congestion pricing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, fear of failure, financial innovation, flying shuttle, gentrification, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, high net worth, immigration reform, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, loss aversion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, middle-income trap, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, Paul Samuelson, place-making, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart meter, social graph, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, universal basic income, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

Futurologists talk about a “singularity,” a dramatic acceleration of the rate of productivity growth fueled by infinitely intelligent machines, although most economists are quite skeptical that we are anywhere close to seeing something like that. But it could well be that if Gordon plays spot the robot in a few years, he will have a more exciting time. On the other hand, while this particular wave of automation is just starting, there have been others in the past. Like AI today, the spinning jenny, the steam engine, electricity, computer chips, and computer-assisted-learning machinery all automatized and relieved the need for humans in the past.12 What happened then is very much what one might have expected: by replacing workers with machines on some tasks, automation has a powerful displacement effect.

How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It by Arthur Herman

British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, creative destruction, do-ocracy, Edward Jenner, financial independence, gentleman farmer, global village, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Joan Didion, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, oil shale / tar sands, Republic of Letters, Robert Mercer, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, tontine, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, working poor

It came in two forms. David Dale was a self-taught industrial entrepreneur who rose from weaver’s apprentice to branch manager of the Royal Bank of Glasgow and founding member of Glasgow’s Chamber of Commerce. In 1786 he set up a cotton mill at New Lanark, in partnership with the English inventor of the spinning jenny, Richard Arkwright. Deeply religious and personally scrupulous, Dale wanted the factory to be a model of its kind. His employees put in an “easy” schedule of only eleven hours a day, with a two-hour break for dinner, and had free housing. By 1800, New Lanark employed more hands than any factory in the world, two-thirds of whom were women and children recruited from local orphanages.

A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World by William J. Bernstein

Admiral Zheng, asset allocation, bank run, Benoit Mandelbrot, British Empire, call centre, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Corn Laws, cotton gin, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, domestication of the camel, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Eratosthenes, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, high-speed rail, ice-free Arctic, imperial preference, income inequality, intermodal, James Hargreaves, John Harrison: Longitude, Khyber Pass, low skilled workers, non-tariff barriers, Paul Samuelson, placebo effect, Port of Oakland, refrigerator car, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, upwardly mobile, working poor, zero-sum game

This served to increase the demand for thread, whose spinning was more difficult to mechanize. In 1738, Lewis Paul and John Wyatt patented the first mechanical spinning machine, but no commercially feasible device became available until the mid-1760s, when such machines were invented by James Hargreaves, Richard Arkwright, and Samuel Crompton. (These were, respectively, the spinning jenny, the water frame, and the mule, the latter so-called because it was a hybrid of the first two.)55 As the economic historian Eric Hobsbawm famously said, "Whoever says Industrial Revolution says cotton." The new machines that were the heart of the great transformation made redundant untold thousands of spinners and weavers, who engaged in spasms of "machine breaking" in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before finally disappearing into the new mills.56 (The term "Luddite" derives from the probably fictional leader of the machine-breaking riots in the 1810s, Ned Ludd.)

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business intelligence, central bank independence, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of gunpowder, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-oil, pre–internet, public intellectual, publish or perish, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sexual politics, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce

John Metcalf – Blind Jack of Knaresborough – was the son of poor parents who lost his sight from smallpox at the age of six and made his living for years as a wrestler. He was one of the great road-builders of his time. James Brindley was the son of a Midland yeoman farmer who was barely able to read or write. He built many of the canals which allowed Manchester and Liverpool to flourish. Richard Arkwright was the son of a tailor. He built the spinning jenny, which helped to power the cotton industry.3 These new men thought as radically as they lived. They believed that people derived their worth from what they wrought rather than from what they inherited. And they were instinctively hard on the world: hard on themselves because they needed to wrestle success from the gutter; hard on the aristocracy because they didn’t deserve what they had; and hard on their employees because they had risen from poverty themselves.

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The urban fabric of modern Hong Kong was knit following the end of China’s civil war in 1949, which sent two million refugees streaming across its border with little more than the shirts on their backs— appropriate, considering Shanghai’s fleeing capitalists underwrote its first textile factories. Textiles are the bottom rung of industrial economies. Britain’s woolen mills were the first to be mechanized in the eighteenth century by the flying shuttle and spinning jenny, and the first to be copied on cut-rate American looms. Hong Kong followed in their foot-steps until Deng’s Reform and Opening in 1978, when its reservoir of cheap labor was undercut by the bottomless one pooling in Shenzhen. The Delta was built with Hong Kong’s jobs and Hong Kong’s dollars.

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership by Andro Linklater

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, business cycle, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, electricity market, facts on the ground, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, light touch regulation, market clearing, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, Northern Rock, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, ultimatum game, wage slave, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor

The law’s only role was to adjudicate between rival assertions of ownership. This interpretation made it as imperative for an eighteenth-century inventor to register his claim to possession as it was for a sixteenth-century encloser. No one with a significant idea, such as James Hargreaves with his bank of mechanically operated spinning-wheels, his “spinning jenny,” could afford not to seek a patent. However fragile its protection, it provided legal evidence of a natural right to what both Boulton and Watt routinely called “our property.” Without a patent, that natural right might pass to anyone who claimed it. With it, the property might become more profitable than land, and allow its owner, as Watt would show, to extend its brief life much longer than fourteen years.

Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Air France Flight 447, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-fragile, banking crisis, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, business cycle, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discrete time, double entry bookkeeping, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, fail fast, financial engineering, financial independence, Flash crash, flying shuttle, Gary Taubes, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, Helicobacter pylori, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, high net worth, hygiene hypothesis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, meta-analysis, microbiome, money market fund, moral hazard, mouse model, Myron Scholes, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, selection bias, Silicon Valley, six sigma, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, Yogi Berra, Zipf's Law

Kealey presents a convincing—very convincing—argument that the steam engine emerged from preexisting technology and was created by uneducated, often isolated men who applied practical common sense and intuition to address the mechanical problems that beset them, and whose solutions would yield obvious economic reward. Now, second, consider textile technologies. Again, the main technologies that led to the jump into the modern world owe, according to Kealey, nothing to science. “In 1733,” he writes, “John Kay invented the flying shuttle, which mechanized weaving, and in 1770 James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, which as its name implies, mechanized spinning. These major developments in textile technology, as well as those of Wyatt and Paul (spinning frame, 1758), Arkwright (water frame, 1769), presaged the Industrial Revolution, yet they owed nothing to science; they were empirical developments based on the trial, error, and experimentation of skilled craftsmen who were trying to improve the productivity, and so the profits, of their factories.”

When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Rise of the Middle Kingdom by Martin Jacques

Admiral Zheng, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, classic study, credit crunch, Dava Sobel, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income per capita, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, lateral thinking, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Meghnad Desai, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, one-China policy, open economy, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price stability, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

Even in technology, there appears to have been little to choose between Europe and China, and in some fields, like irrigation, textile weaving and dyeing, medicine and porcelain manufacture, the Europeans were behind. China had long used textile machines that differed in only one key detail from the spinning jenny and the flying shuttle which were to power Britain’s textile-led Industrial Revolution. China had long been familiar with the steam engine and had developed various versions of it; compared with James Watt’s subsequent invention, the piston needed to turn the wheel rather than the other way round.6 What is certainly true, however, is that once Britain embarked on its Industrial Revolution, investment in capital- and energy-intensive processes rapidly raised productivity levels and created a virtuous circle of technology, innovation and growth that was able to draw on an ever-growing body of science in which Britain enjoyed a significant lead over China.7 For China, in contrast, its ‘industrious revolution’ did not prove the prelude to an industrial revolution.

Ellul, Jacques-The Technological Society-Vintage Books (1964) by Unknown

Bretton Woods, conceptual framework, do-ocracy, double entry bookkeeping, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mars Society, means of production, Norbert Wiener, price mechanism, profit motive, rising living standards, road to serfdom, spinning jenny, technological determinism, Thorstein Veblen, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto

We already know how this necessity arose ( it is emphasized in all textbooks). The flying shuttle of 1733 made a greater pro- 111) THE CHARACTEROLOCY OF TECHNIQUE duction of yarn necessary. But production was impossible without a suitable machine. The response to this dilemma was the invention of the spinning jenny by James Hargreaves. But then yarn was product*! in much greater quantities than could possibly be used by the weavers. To solve this new problem, Cartwright manu­ factured his celebrated loom. In this series of events we see in its simplest form the interaction that accelerates the development of machines.

Empire of Guns by Priya Satia

banking crisis, British Empire, business intelligence, Corn Laws, cotton gin, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, hiring and firing, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Khyber Pass, Lewis Mumford, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent-seeking, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, technological determinism, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, zero-sum game

The American war paid “rich dividends” to textile manufacturers in Yorkshire, Lancashire, and the West Country. War eased transformation in the cotton industry, too, quite apart from the Wyatt and Paul spinning machine. High employment rates during the Seven Years’ War dampened resentment of the introduction of the flying shuttle, which transformed weaving. The spinning jenny followed as output increased during the war. Farming benefited, too. The Navy Victualling Office was one of the nation’s largest purchasers of agricultural produce, structuring and integrating markets significantly with its bulk-goods transport system. Treasury Board contractors were involved in this work.

The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, borderless world, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computerized trading, content marketing, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, edge city, experimental subject, export processing zone, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, future of work, gentrification, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, intermodal, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kanban, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Leonard Kleinrock, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, packet switching, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, popular capitalism, popular electronics, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social software, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the medium is the message, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

Since our experience of the new is shaped by our recent past, I think the answers to these basic questions could be helped by a brief reminder of the historical record of the industrial revolution, still present in our institutions, and therefore in our mind-set. Lessons from the Industrial Revolution Historians have shown that there were at least two industrial revolutions: the first started in the last third of the eighteenth century, characterized by new technologies such as the steam engine, the spinning jenny, the Cort’s process in metallurgy, and, more broadly, by the replacement of hand-tools by machines; the second one, about 100 years later, featured the development of electricity, the internal combustion engine, science-based chemicals, efficient steel casting, and the beginning of communication technologies, with the diffusion of the telegraph and the invention of the telephone.

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich

agricultural Revolution, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, British Empire, charter city, cognitive dissonance, Columbian Exchange, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, delayed gratification, discovery of the americas, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, epigenetics, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial innovation, Flynn Effect, fundamental attribution error, glass ceiling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, land reform, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, New Urbanism, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, profit maximization, randomized controlled trial, Republic of Letters, rolodex, social contagion, social web, sparse data, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, wikimedia commons, working-age population, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

While Newcomen’s engine opened a new era, both Denis Papin and the British military engineer Thomas Savery had come up with steam power at about the same time.13 Spinning mule (1779): Samuel Crompton’s invention is called a “mule” because it so obviously combines Richard Arkwright’s water frame (1769) with James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny (1764). Hargreaves got the idea for his jenny when he saw a single-thread wheel loom accidentally flip over onto the floor. Both the wheel and the spindle continued to rotate, but the spindle was upright, which suggested the possibility of using multiple spindles in an upright position. Despite not having a patent, Hargreaves went public with his invention, which opened the door to Crompton’s recombination.

The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty by Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kula ring, labor-force participation, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, openstreetmap, out of africa, PageRank, pattern recognition, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Skype, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, the market place, transcontinental railway, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks

The Industrial Revolution, which got under way in the middle of the eighteenth century in Britain, was its economic offshoot because, just as in the Italian communes we saw in the previous chapter, it was produced by the liberty, opportunities, and incentives that the Shackled Leviathan made possible. In the course of a few decades, technology and the organization of production were transformed in a number of key industries. Leading the way were textiles, where a series of innovative breakthroughs in spinning, such as the water frame, the spinning jenny, and the mule revolutionized productivity. Similar innovations occurred in weaving, with the introduction of the flying shuttle and various types of power looms. Equally transformative were the novel forms of inanimate power starting with Thomas Newcomen’s atmospheric engine and then James Watt’s steam engine.

Escape From Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity by Walter Scheidel

agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, conceptual framework, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, disruptive innovation, Easter island, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flying shuttle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, means of production, Multics, Network effects, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, secular stagnation, South China Sea, spinning jenny, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, vertical integration, zero-sum game

This prompted a search among domestic manufacturers for ways of producing more and cheaper cotton cloth that was suitable for printing. In response, a series of innovations greatly increased productivity in spinning and weaving, first by raising output per worker and then, crucially, by introducing water-powered machinery. Between the 1730s and the 1770s, the flying shuttle and the spinning jenny were followed by the water frame and the spinning mule, which was perfected into a fully automated device in the 1820s. But it was earlier with Samuel Crompton’s invention of the mule that the Lancashire muslin industry took off from the 1780s onward.115 Interstate competition and interventionism also affected the British coal industry.

The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber, David Wengrow

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, degrowth, European colonialism, founder crops, Gini coefficient, global village, Hernando de Soto, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, labour mobility, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, means of production, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, public intellectual, Scientific racism, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl

It allowed them to claim that their own societies were self-evidently superior, a claim that – at the time – would have been much harder to defend had they used any criterion other than productive labour.16 Turgot and Smith began writing this way in the 1750s. They referred to the apex of development as ‘commercial society’, in which a complex division of labour demanded the sacrifice of primitive liberties but guaranteed dazzling increases in overall wealth and prosperity. Over the next several decades, the invention of the spinning jenny, Arkwright loom and, eventually, steam and coal power – and finally the emergence of a permanent (and increasingly self-conscious) industrial working class – completely shifted the terms of debate. Suddenly, there existed forces of production previously undreamed of. But there was also a staggering increase in the number of hours that people were expected to work.

The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution by David Wootton

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, book value, British Empire, classic study, clockwork universe, Commentariolus, commoditize, conceptual framework, Dava Sobel, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, fudge factor, germ theory of disease, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, interchangeable parts, invention of gunpowder, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lateral thinking, lone genius, Mercator projection, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, QWERTY keyboard, Republic of Letters, social intelligence, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

Friedrich von Knauss (1724–89) invented a mechanical hand that wrote on a piece of paper just like a living hand; he also constructed the first typewriter.38 The Industrial Revolution would depend on the skills of such men, skills that would have been familiar to the craftsmen who built the first Strasbourg Cathedral clock. The Scientific Revolution started as a revolution of the mathematicians; it would eventually turn into a revolution of the mechanics. There is a direct line of descent from the Strasbourg clock to the spinning jenny. This brings us back to the problem with which we began. The Strasbourg clock was built in the middle of the fourteenth century – but the mechanical philosophy was invented three centuries later. Machines did not change much in the meantime, but philosophers did. Once Lucretius was available (he was rediscovered in 1417), his concept of the machina mundi could be turned into a quite new idea, the idea of a clockwork universe.

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000 by Paul Kennedy

agricultural Revolution, airline deregulation, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, imperial preference, industrial robot, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, long peace, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, night-watchman state, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, oil shock, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, zero-sum game

She was economically different from the others, but that was only because she was so far ahead of them.32 Given these auspicious circumstances, fears of strategical weakness appeared groundless; and most mid-Victorians preferred, like Kingsley as he cried tears of pride during the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in 1851, to believe that a cosmic destiny was at work: The spinning jenny and the railroad, Cunard’s liners and the electric telegraph, are to me … signs that we are, on some points at least, in harmony with the universe; that there is a mighty spirit working among us … the Ordering and Creating God.33 Like all other civilizations at the top of the wheel of fortune, therefore, the British could believe that their position was both “natural” and destined to continue.

The scramble for Africa, 1876-1912 by Thomas Pakenham

active measures, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, Etonian, European colonialism, God and Mammon, imperial preference, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, out of africa, Scramble for Africa, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

What could the white men do to him? How could they come into his country unless they flew in the air? When the storm had blown itself out, Mackay and Ashe returned to their daily tasks of translating the Gospel of St Matthew into Luganda, printing copies on their press, making a loom and a kind of spinning jenny, and baptizing their lads in secret. Such was the fear of persecution that none of the Baganda dared come to the chapel except at midnight. But the missionaries tried to act as though things were normal. One day Ashe went up to the palace and had an interview with Pokino, the senior minister and formerly a diligent ‘reader’ at the mission.

Frommer's England 2011: With Wales by Darwin Porter, Danforth Prince

airport security, Ascot racecourse, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Babbage, Columbine, congestion charging, country house hotel, double helix, Edmond Halley, gentrification, George Santayana, haute couture, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Murano, Venice glass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Sloane Ranger, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, sustainable-tourism, the market place, tontine, University of East Anglia, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

In a later reincarnation, the fort saw supporters of Prince John surrender to Richard the Lion-Hearted in 1194. Many other exploits occurred here—notably Edward III’s capture of Roger Mortimer and Queen Isabella, the assassins of Edward II. From Nottingham, Richard III marched out with his men to face defeat and his own death at Bosworth Field in 1485. With the arrival of the spinning jenny in 1768, Nottingham was launched into the forefront of the Industrial Revolution. It’s still a center of industry and home base to many well-known British firms, turning out such products as John Player cigarettes, Boots pharmaceuticals, and Raleigh cycles. Nottingham doesn’t have many attractions, but it’s a young and vital city, and is very student-oriented thanks to its two large universities.

Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David S. Landes

Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bartolomé de las Casas, book value, British Empire, business cycle, Cape to Cairo, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, computer age, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, Francisco Pizarro, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, new economy, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, out of africa, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Robert Solow, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

N o t easily, because of the decades of experiment that precede a given innovation and the long run of im­ provement that follows. Where is beginning and where end? The core of the larger process—mechanization of industry and the adoption of the factory—lies, however, in the story of the textile manufacture.* Rapid change there began with the spinning jenny of James Harg­ reaves (c. 1 7 6 6 ) , followed by Thomas Arkwright's water frame (1769) and Samuel Crompton's mule ( 1 7 7 9 ) , so called because it was a cross between the jenny and the water frame. With the mule, one could spin fine counts as well as coarse, better and cheaper than any hand spinner

Europe: A History by Norman Davies

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, centre right, charter city, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of DNA, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equal pay for equal work, Eratosthenes, Etonian, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial independence, finite state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, gentleman farmer, global village, Gregor Mendel, Honoré de Balzac, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, liberation theology, long peace, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, popular capitalism, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Transnistria, urban planning, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois

But the prospect of a power source far more forceful than hand, water, or spring inspired a rash of inventions, all initially in the realm of textiles. Three Lancashire men, James Hargreaves (1720–78) of Blackburn, Richard Arkwright (1732–92) of Preston, and Samuel Crompton (1753–1827) of Hall’ith’ Wood, Bolton, built respectively the spinning jenny (1767), the spinning frame (1768), and the spinning mule (1779). The jenny was suitable only for hand use in cottages; the frame and mule proved suitable for steam traction in factories. A new level of sophistication was reached in France with the silk loom (1804) of [JACQUARD]. Steam-power and machines, however, could not be put into widespread use unless coal—the most efficient fuel for raising steam—could be mined on a much expanded scale.