Well, that's not fair! I want to live now because I'm unlikely to die in childbirth, my kids are all likely to survive, I can vote, own property, control my own movements, have human rights, be free of lice & parasites, be atheist, have antibiotics, dentistry, survive plaguehttps://twitter.com/derryborndo/status/961043032505307136 …
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Of course. Ferguson ascribes progress to many having smallish shareholdings. My point is that the ownership has conglomerated into bigger holdings in fewer hands. So you have to ascribe progress since, say, the late C19th, to other variables - e.g. culture of science & tech.
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Which is a product of modernity. I don't know where you're going here. Do you think you are better off now than you would have been in the medieval period or not?
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Of course I do. I am positing that the Lockean idea of petty bourgeois property rights as a take-off to economic growth worked: N America, in contrast to S America and its latifundia, was built on small estates. But they are no longer the dominant form of land ownership.
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This doesn't appear to have any relation to anything I'm saying. America happened in the modern period.
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OK, I happen to think that you have to go back to proto- and Enlightenment ideas to get a hang on the rise of the U.S. but that requires essays (& possibly a lifetime of study) from both of us. I think we should leave it there & thx for the convo. Sláinte.
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Not to mention Rome! But I still don't get how this relates to my claim that things are better now than in the medieval period.
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Yes, all is better now than the Medieval. & the BBC4 tendency of historians to be its apologists, rather than its explainers, irks, or, as Mrs. Bennet would say, vexes me. 1 does need to understand WW Rostow's "take-off to economic growth" to get the conditions for the modern.
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Hang on, that last sentence is pompous piffle. I mean, we need a certain amount of economic growth to get the conditions for the modern.
End of conversation
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