A friendly review of & but with this unfortunate line: “China is essentially going through a hugely accelerated version of the industrial revolution & the Gilded Age rolled into one.” #ModernizationTheoryNeverDies newyorker.com/magazine/2019/
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Not sure I understand what's unfortunate about it?
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Remember how Gilded Age America was run by a ruthlessly authoritarian one party state that had all the tycoons under its thumb, controlled internal movement of its people, and for decades enforced an anti-natalist policy that produced the mother of all demographic dividends?
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Man you historians never let one slip past you huh
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otoh... corrupt city machines did kinda run a ransomware level control on tycoons, and slavery was a similar kind of demographic dividend... I think the rhyme holds in the bass notes if you squint a bit at the lyrics
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“Stylized facts” vs, uh, real facts — this is one of the main contributions historians make: calling bullshit on facile Whig historiography.
I’ve been beating this particular drum for 15 years, though by now am grimly resigned that I will die before modernization theory does.
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Maybe we can just fork it off as a different discipline we call Mannerist History, a sort of literary genre more than a kind of history :D
I find I learn as much from such "stylized facts" narrativization. Just different things.
In fact, mannerist history is, in large part, my main schtick. I'm increasingly doing that very deliberately, introducing outright fictional elements and notional made-up data (like via liberally careless use of the 80-20 principle for instance)
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Interestingly, I'm currently finishing up Terry Pratchett's Hogfather, where the premise is that the Auditors of Reality (the main antagonists of Death) issue a hit contract on the Hogfather (= Santa Claus) precisely for the sin of personifying "wishful facts" against "reality"
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