<story><title>What if they gave an Industrial Revolution and nobody came? (2023)</title><url>https://rootsofprogress.org/robert-allen-british-industrial-revolution</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>throwup238</author><text>I think there’s one flaw in the overall theory presented in the article: it was demand for coal for heating independent of the industrial revolution that really kickstarted things and the labor exploited for coal mining was the lowest of the socioeconomic classes. Before the industrial revolution England was already mining around five times more coal than the rest of the world &lt;i&gt;combined&lt;/i&gt; just to survive winters. Once they exhausted the easy surface deposits they had to go deeper and deeper which required mechanized power to work against the water seeping in. The first engines were invented not when labor became too expensive but when it was impossible to do with human labor at all.&lt;p&gt;After reading &lt;i&gt;Coal - A Human History&lt;/i&gt; I’m of the opinion that the industrial revolution was a complete accident of circumstance on a tiny island that didn’t have enough trees to support its population’s energy needs and a surface supply of coal just big enough to get the industry started but not enough to supply the growing population without digging deeper.</text></comment>
<story><title>What if they gave an Industrial Revolution and nobody came? (2023)</title><url>https://rootsofprogress.org/robert-allen-british-industrial-revolution</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>throwaway22032</author><text>It strikes me that if you have different classes of people working on a problem then it doesn&amp;#x27;t necessarily matter what&amp;#x27;s more efficient on a per-person basis initially because some people will not be doing the work anyway.&lt;p&gt;For example, buying a power sander for 10 hours labour cost when you could just have sanded the table down in less than 10 hours manually.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not like there were infinite quantities of slaves or lower class workers, at some point someone is going to explore the idea of automation purely out of interest.&lt;p&gt;For what it&amp;#x27;s worth this is why I believe that inequality and some level of wealth at the top is useful and necessary. You want a class of people who can just sort of mess about as they see fit. Otherwise everyone is just scrambling to meet basic needs.</text></comment>