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/
Conversation
Not sure I understand what's unfortunate about it?
1
2
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?
1
1
Man you historians never let one slip past you huh
2
2
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
1
2
“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.
1
2
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.
1
1
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)
1
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"
1
The Auditors are a sort of extreme caricature of "just the facts" stances where they are constantly waging war on the messy half-fictionalized ongoing self-narrativization tendencies of humanity :D
1
1
"I will die before modernization theory does" is more than a fatalistic resignation on your part. It's actually an interesting empirical observation about the human historical imagination. Cf: "The markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent"

