Simon_Jester wrote:Iron Bridge wrote:The same thing that causes countries today to have "industrial revolutions": development of free market institutions.
Russia became vastly more industrialized under the communists than it had ever been under the capitalists. China likewise. How does that impact your argument?
Russia never had free market institutions.
Was Marxian Communism an improvement on Tsarism?
Let's refer again to the Maddison data.
In 1913, Former USSR (no data for 1917, or I would use that) had a GDP per capita of $1,488 (FY1990), while USA had a GDP per capita of $5,301, so F USSR had a GDP per captia 28% that of the USA. In 1984, the last year before Perestroika, the USSR had a GDP per captia of $6,709, while USA had a GDP per capita of $20,123. So the USSR ended with a GDP per capita 33% than of the USA. This is a slight win for Marxism over Tsarism, while still far inferior to the performance of market capitalism.
Perhaps you will say this is unfair because the USA started off much more developed too. So let us compare this progress to a country that started off at a comparably low level of development and fully adopted free market institutions in this time period. In 1913, Japan had a GDP per capita of $1,387 (26% USA). In 1984, it had a GDP per capita of $14,773 (73.5% USA).
The fact is the USSR ended up, relative to the technology of the time, about as poor as Tsarist Russia. Japan, South Korea, HK, Singapore, etc. by comparison closed the gap with the West.
Perhaps China fared better? In 1949, the year of PRC victory in the civil war, Chinese GDP per capita was $488 (5.4% of US). In 1978, the year economic policy switched to "Socialism with Chinese characteristics" (more accurately, Socialism with Anglo-American Characteristics), Chinese GDP per capita was $978 (5.3% of US). 30 years of Chinese socialism marginally increased the gap with the capitalist West.
Looking at presence of coal is missing the point. First because a lot of the early developments in living conditions did not involve what is today regarded as industry - improved agricultural tools for instance - and that second as an input commodity coal would simply be imported from where it could be found. The British Isles did not grow cotton, but they still had the world's largest textiles industry.
Coal is consumed in much bulkier quantities- it can't be
moved efficiently without industrial machinery; good luck moving thousands of tons of coal around without railroads and industrial shipbuilding. For that matter, the methods of coal mining didn't even exist in recognizable form until the British developed them around the late 1700s and early 1800s...
In the early 1800s, Britain was importing 10,000s of tons of cotton. This is more than enough weight of coal to merely build more transport infrastructure, and pre-dated both construction of railways and iron-hulled ships.
I agree that probably even a lifetime spent working in the field of history would not lead one to any firm answer to this question. But a few terms spent studying economics would give an accurate first approximation.
I question this. Why would economists automatically understand this better than historians? It's very much a historical question, because nothing like the
first emergences of industrialization in Europe has happened in at least a hundred years.
Two reasons. First, historians do not learn economic theory, only qualitative descriptions of events. It is like asking why might an engineer understand more than a historian about how coal mining developed. Second, history as a discipline still perceives events through the prism of some psuedoscience theories, such as Marxism, which are actually long disproven and abandoned economic theories.
While I've been heavily criticised for it here, my economic analysis of development is the mainstream view among economists.