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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34971 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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I’ll be thinking about this one for a while. Especially every time a top-level gets made about Jewish representation.

How much of culture do you think is constrained by relative tech level? If modern venture capitalists were given unfettered access to 18th-century English cottage-industry peasants, I suspect they’d see a similar response. Maybe the previous years of an English state were enough to condition efficient workers...but my guess would be not.

For obvious reasons, I can’t remember seeing any scholarship on the topic.

I don't know if "constrained" is the right word.

I think some cultures are inherently better at adapting to new technology. Others are almost incapable of it, with a bell curve inbetween.

Think Japan versus India versus Australian aborigines.

I guess I’m trying to disentangle culture (meaning interpersonal relations, obligations, division of labor) from culture (meaning societal organization).

I have a suspicion that the average English peasant had similar interpersonal relationships as the average Congolese. English adaptation to tech would then be driven more by a culture that let it cajole them into useful labor anyway. That probably means state capacity, but also norms about rent extraction and the available alternatives to industrial work.

Dump a Chinese railroad company into pastoral 1790 England, and I’d expect them to come up with all the same criticisms from the documentary—unless they took on more statelike powers.

It’s a nice story, partly because it avoids the standard /pol/ conclusion exhibited on that KnowYourMeme page. But I don’t really know much about how England supplied labor in early industrialization. I’ll do a bit more research and probably make a top-level later.

What was the reaction to 18th century English poor going to the mills?

I don’t think it was...great.

Obviously it worked out for England, as the state parlayed that technological advantage into a ludicrous economic one. Did the peasants get “pulled” into vast economic opportunity, or “pushed” out of a non competitive textile market? Whig history prefers the latter explanation. It’s really not my area of expertise.

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