All Posts Tagged With: "Industrial Revolution"

Talk About a Revolution

What caused the Industrial Revolution? Few questions in economic history are discussed and debated as much as this one. Even if you happen to be among the small number of people who regret what historian (and Freeman columnist) Steve Davies calls “the wealth explosion” of the past couple of centuries, you must nevertheless find this [...]

24Aug2011 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 5 comments | Continued

The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Making of the Modern World, 1776–1914

For anyone interested in technology, the Industrial Revolution, or technical progress more broadly, this is a wonderful book. When I compare how people lived, say, in 1809 to how we live today, I am continually stunned by all that has happened. From horse-drawn carriages to iPhones in two centuries. It is hard to be an [...]

22Oct2010 | David K. Levine | 0 comments | Continued

Child Labor and the British Industrial Revolution

Profound economic changes took place in Great Britain in the century after 1750. This was the age of the Industrial Revolution, complete with a cascade of technical innovations, a vast increase in production, a renaissance of world trade, and rapid growth of urban populations. Where historians and other observers clash is in the interpretation of [...]

23Oct2009 | Lawrence W. Reed | 7 comments | Continued

The Subsidy of History

A considerable number of libertarian commentators have remarked on the sheer scale of subsidies and protections to big business, on their structural importance to the existing form of corporate capitalism, and on the close intermeshing of corporate and state interests in the present state capitalist economy. We pay less attention, however, to the role of [...]

1Jun2008 | Kevin A. Carson | 16 comments | Continued

Free Men for Better Job Performance ~ Part I

American industry and its managements have been the world’s leaders in management techniques and in productive efficiency. However, there are signs that this leadership may be slipping. Most companies are experiencing Parkinsonism in a mild if not severe form. Decentralization and other techniques have neglected the consideration of individual employees and their ownership and control of the faculties for which they were employed.

1Jun2007 | C.L. Dickinson | 1 comment | Continued

The History of “Underdevelopment”

Perhaps the most important feature of the modern world is its sustained, intensive economic growth. This produces most of the other distinctive features of modernity. Although there were earlier episodes of such economic efflorescence (to use Jack Goldstones term), it was only with the industrial revolution of late eighteenth-century Britain that it became a permanent and prominent feature of the world economy. Following the advent of this transformative process, questions soon arose elsewhere. The first was that of how to achieve the same kind of growth and dynamism. Soon this led to further questions: why other parts of the world did not show these qualities and why their attempts to do so ended in failure.

1Jun2006 | Stephen Davies | 0 comments | Continued

China’s Forgotten Industrial Revolution

We live in a world that has been shaped by a process that began some 250 years ago in northwestern Europe. We often call it the Industrial Revolution because one of its most dramatic features was the appearance of industrial manufacture with the rise of the factory system. However, this was only one element and [...]

1Jun2003 | Stephen Davies | 0 comments | Continued

Why Wages Used to Be So Low

Thomas Woods holds a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and is assistant professor of history at Suffolk Community College, a unit of the State University of New York. A widespread misconception about the market economy is that it was responsible for low wage rates from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution through the early [...]

1Jun2003 | Thomas E. Woods Jr. | 0 comments | Continued

A Myth Shattered: Mises, Hayek, and the Industrial Revolution

Thomas Woods Jr. holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and is a professor of history at Suffolk Community College in Brentwood, New York. The standard view of the Industrial Revolution among the general public is that it led to the widespread impoverishment of people who had hitherto been enjoying lives of joy and abundance. For [...]

1Nov2001 | Thomas E. Woods Jr. | 1 comment | Continued

On Reading History

Economics is the discipline that I loved first and that I continue to love above all. The economic way of thinking—as the late Paul Heyne called it—is a potent solvent for cutting through the nonsense and irrelevancies that typically loom large in policy discussions. No one lacking a solid grasp of economic principles can understand [...]

1Aug2001 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 0 comments | Continued

Reflections on Self-Responsibility and Libertarianism

Nathaniel Branden is the author of 20 books, including The Art of Living Consciously, Taking Responsibility, and most recently, My Years with Ayn Rand. His Web site is www.nathanielbranden.net. The traditional American values of individualism, self-reliance, self-discipline, and hard work had their roots, in part, in the fact that this country began as a frontier [...]

1Apr2001 | Nathaniel Branden | 3 comments | Continued

Across the Sea of Commerce

Anthony Young is a freelance writer based in Miami. The Industrial Revolution, which brought about the age of steam, transformed ocean travel and shipping in the nineteenth century. It resulted in a paradigm shift in the size of ships and the speed with which they could cross the oceans. With this shift from sail to [...]

1Jan2000 | Anthony Young | 0 comments | Continued

A Life of One’s Own: Individual Rights and the Welfare State

Ellen Frankel Paul is professor of political science and philosophy and deputy director of the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at Bowling Green State University. David Kelley, erstwhile professor of philosophy, social commentator, and executive director of the Institute for Objectivist Studies, has written a marvelous yet slim volume exposing virtually everything that is wrong [...]

1Jun1999 | Ellen Frankel Paul | 1 comment | Continued

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor by David S. Landes

W.W. Norton & Company • 1998 • 650 pages • $30.00 Randall Holcombe is DeVoe Moore Professor of Economics at Florida State University. Economic historian David Landes explains in this book why some nations are rich and some poor by appealing to the historical record. The history is fascinating, and Landes does a good job [...]

1Apr1999 | Randall G. Holcombe | 3 comments | Continued

Flunking Economics

Why should we care about economic literacy? Are we troubled by illiteracy in physics? Or metaphysics? Should we worry that most of us can’t remember much of the periodic chart of the elements? Why should we worry more about economics? Because economic illiteracy is dangerous. I can ride on a roller coaster without understanding centrifugal [...]

1Apr1999 | Lawrence W. Reed | 2 comments | Continued

Book Review: The Industrial Revolution and Free Trade, edited by Burton W. Folsom, Jr.

By the mid-1800s, socialists had initiated an attempt to show that the industrial revolution and concomitant rise of free trade had worsened the lives of British workers. Great Britain’s adoption of free trade internationally with the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 only made detractors more determined to show that a society built on [...]

1Apr1997 | Gene Smiley | 0 comments | Continued

Thomas Babington Macaulay: Extraordinary Eloquence for Liberty

Thomas Babington Macaulay ranks among the most eloquent of all authors on liberty. In terms of the sheer quantity and range of eloquence, perhaps only Thomas Jefferson soared to such breathtaking heights.

1Oct1996 | Jim Powell | 2 comments | Continued
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