Nick Szabo  🔑

But given China's market disintegration & lack of knowledge accumulation, why does the ecological argument even matter? You need a modern textile industry to exploit Amer. ghost acres. Maybe 90 extra sugar kcal/day for China wd have led to labour intensification in rice productio

So in my opinion, Pomeranz has really boxed himself in. He needs to explain Chinese technological stagnation, but rejects the low-wage hypothesis; so his only recourse is to make an ecological argument which is very insufficient to explain the origins of the industrial revolution

Pomeranz mentions this machine & sort of assumes if such a thing existed once, even if it had not been used in 500 years, the technological gap w Europe could not have been wide in 1750-1800. It's implicitly assuming away centuries of learning by doing....https://twitter.com/pseudoerasmus/status/549843816124256256 …

None of this is to endorse a "culture of science" argument. IMO when it comes to China, Elvin-Allen is probably right low wages impeded the long-run development AND conservation of knowledge re labour-saving technology. But why the long-run low wage equilibrium in the 1st place?

IMO the best theory for China's low wage equilibrium is geographical & argued in this paper: rice agriculture had an intrinsically high labour intensity => lower food prices => higher fertility => higher population density at a lower standard of livinghttps://twitter.com/pseudoerasmus/status/1027869091535745024 …

The above, & the fact that the 19th century coincides with the down phase of China's dynastic cycles, explains China's great divergence. Quite apart from any European incursion, the 19th century was catastrophically turbulent for China filled with civil wars & famines & breakdown