I recently read a paper, "The Cultural Origins of the Demographic Transition in France", that provided some interesting insight. While the paper was about cultural origins and used an interesting method to explore them, I was more fascinated to learn about the demographic transition, probably decades behind continental historians. The demographic transition in France was the dramatic drop in fertility in the 18th century. It dramatically raised the French GDP per capita to a level above England's until the mid-19th century when the Industrial Revolution let England catch up. France remained surprisingly non-urban and agricultural - something I knew from the films of Pagnol - well until the middle of the 20th century.
Nowadays, we think of rising living standards driven by the fruits of the Industrial Revolution as leading to lower fertility, but the order was reversed in France. Is this something useful for thinking about development and development strategies. Suppose England too had its demographic transition in the 18th century. Would this have suppressed or expedited industrialization? I still can't completely wrap my head around this. Do any economists have a take on this alternative history?
My way of dealing with this is simply "France is anomalous as far as the demographic transition is concerned". And I am not convinced we know why it came so early there...
A&M comes starting in the 1870s—but in the U.S. and Germany only. Herbert Hoover wants to turn the Department of Commerce into an engineering-centered McKinsey for American industry in the 1920s. But the main part of the research-university push really comes during and after World War II...
" rather, I am talking to a sub-Turing instantiation of your mind that I have spun up from marks on a screen and am running on a separate partition in my wetware, and you are talking to a sub-Turing instantiation of my mind that you have spun up from marks on a screen and are running on a separate partition in your wetware. We can more-or-less stay in sync as long as handshaking is frequent and message length is short. But if not, not"
I think the need to wall one's self off from people is perfectly understandable; what I don't understand is the weird anger about it. Lots of people complaining about parasocial relationships are themselves in parasocial relationships with dead people who wrote books or what have you; would those dead guys be complaining?
Separately, twitter has clearly conditioned a lot of people into incredible impatience by clogging their buffers up, so the acceptable message length is dropping pretty close to zero, which means that people are effectively not communicating anything at all, but only apparently communicating. (Which would explain the loneliness epidemic.)
Yes: by using our attention to distract us from our intentions, Twitter should die in a fire, and be replaced with something else. Also Amazon and Google, which have transformed themselves from information-aggregators to attention grifters...
I recently read a paper, "The Cultural Origins of the Demographic Transition in France", that provided some interesting insight. While the paper was about cultural origins and used an interesting method to explore them, I was more fascinated to learn about the demographic transition, probably decades behind continental historians. The demographic transition in France was the dramatic drop in fertility in the 18th century. It dramatically raised the French GDP per capita to a level above England's until the mid-19th century when the Industrial Revolution let England catch up. France remained surprisingly non-urban and agricultural - something I knew from the films of Pagnol - well until the middle of the 20th century.
Nowadays, we think of rising living standards driven by the fruits of the Industrial Revolution as leading to lower fertility, but the order was reversed in France. Is this something useful for thinking about development and development strategies. Suppose England too had its demographic transition in the 18th century. Would this have suppressed or expedited industrialization? I still can't completely wrap my head around this. Do any economists have a take on this alternative history?
My way of dealing with this is simply "France is anomalous as far as the demographic transition is concerned". And I am not convinced we know why it came so early there...
<i>the industrial research lab, modern corporation, full-globalization triple. </i>
What of the modern research university? Or do I have my timing wrong?
A&M comes starting in the 1870s—but in the U.S. and Germany only. Herbert Hoover wants to turn the Department of Commerce into an engineering-centered McKinsey for American industry in the 1920s. But the main part of the research-university push really comes during and after World War II...
" rather, I am talking to a sub-Turing instantiation of your mind that I have spun up from marks on a screen and am running on a separate partition in my wetware, and you are talking to a sub-Turing instantiation of my mind that you have spun up from marks on a screen and are running on a separate partition in your wetware. We can more-or-less stay in sync as long as handshaking is frequent and message length is short. But if not, not"
I think the need to wall one's self off from people is perfectly understandable; what I don't understand is the weird anger about it. Lots of people complaining about parasocial relationships are themselves in parasocial relationships with dead people who wrote books or what have you; would those dead guys be complaining?
Separately, twitter has clearly conditioned a lot of people into incredible impatience by clogging their buffers up, so the acceptable message length is dropping pretty close to zero, which means that people are effectively not communicating anything at all, but only apparently communicating. (Which would explain the loneliness epidemic.)
elm
this is a very stupid outcome
Yes: by using our attention to distract us from our intentions, Twitter should die in a fire, and be replaced with something else. Also Amazon and Google, which have transformed themselves from information-aggregators to attention grifters...
So how long did Grandpa live?
Wow...