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108 sats \ 2 replies \ @denlillaapan 3 Oct \ parent \ on: Lodging for Wayfaring Men Book Club #1: Farber's First Essay the_stacker_muse BooksAndArticles

There are a couple of handful candidate answers, yes, but this is the one I find most persuasive:

the implication here is that a move towards freedom predates and potentially is responsible for the burst of creativity that leads to such improvements.

An important piece of the puzzle is that we've had rises and falls in economic well-being (think: sustained growth in per-capita GDP) in enough different times and geographies that most other explanations fall away: what was different about England in the 1600-1700s?

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107 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby OP 3 Oct

I might argue that it was the unparalleled access to natural resources: the european colonial empires are rising and have access to whole continents-worth of resources and the ability to move the resources around.

Or do you suggest that it was common law? Blackstone publishes his big ol' compendium of common law in the middle of the 1700s.

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210 sats \ 0 replies \ @denlillaapan 3 Oct

the nat resources -- the most persuasive of which in the IR is coal -- is definitely a regularly invoked candidate... but it's not from the empires (it's home-grown), and many other civilizations (e.g., Yangtzee delta in China) had remarkably refined energy processes for coal. Still, no dice.

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