Quote from: TPTB_need_war on September 20, 2015, 01:27:19 PM

Actually that primarily derives from some blog posts by Nick Szabo (who invented bitgold before bitcoin) which I had read years before Armstrong echo'ed any similar theme.

And my knowledge about the impact of rice vs. wheat on unemployment was also an independent research discovery of mine.

It's not because in order to produce a given calorie output per person the East needed more labor than Europe that there was a higher unemployment in Europe.

I don't say that to be unpleasant, please interpret the following with the more neutral tone possible but: to think that a higher labor intensive output entails less need to industrialize shows a serious flaw in understanding how economics work (and I have read some Szabo's article on economics that shows that his understanding of some areas of economics is far from perfect. For instance I remember one of his article where he explains that the efficiency created by Internet are not captured by the GDP and he retweeted an article saying that the efficiencies created by Uber will actually lower the GDP, which is plain wrong and consist of mistakes caused by the same blindspot in his economics skills).

I haven't done any research regarding the comparative rate of unemployment between Europe and the East but it's irrelevant to this matter because: when you need more labor to produce a given result, it's actually very bad. The incentives to improve were on Asia's side, but they didn't.

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It is precisely for the reasons I said. Before the Black Death, labor was too abundant, thus wages were too low, thus Europeans lived in squalor. After the Black Death, industrialization first of agriculture (e.g. breeding of stronger horses) was induced by needing to lower labor costs. Economics drives everything in nature, because economics is just another thermodynamic phenomenon in the abstract.

When you produce something efficiently that means that there is labor available to produce something else in the economy (a nascent new market) and that the output is cheaper so their is savings available to buy the products of the nascent new market. It's not bad, it's good.

Chineses and Europeans both lived in squalor because they where, as the whole wold, under a Malthusian economic reality (GDP per capita stagnant despite growth in GDP), until Europe starts to escape the Malthusian trap because of its creativity.

Also Armstrong's chart that you have posted is misleading because it makes a comparison based on the GDP and not the GDP per capita. Under the Sung dynasty (from 950 to 1250) GDP per capita was higher in China than in Europe, but after China GDP per capital stop improving and soon Europe took the lead on that metric (the only relevant one).

The question is why Europe was continuously on a upward trend since 1 000 AD onwards whereas China stopped right at the beginning of its ascent?

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Again you have shown how deeply European you are. Caucasians think man can control nature and that life is a line that is always improving. Asians think nature is in control and life is like a circle where you come back to where you started from (in some altered state of course because a thermodynamic system is irreversible thus not precisely repeatable in the microstates).

Yes Westerners think man can control nature because of Christianity.

Those kind of thought influences creativity. Belief systems are self-fulfilling prophecy.

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Europe's population is much higher now than it was then before the Black Death, so there wasn't any Malthusian check.

Europe's population right after the Black Death was much lower than before, so there was a Malthusian check.

The comparison of Europe's population now is irrelevant to this point.

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Rather the economic thermodynamics were stuck in a Coasian barrier. It required the Black Death to dislodge the barrier so that the innate capability of humans to compete could be unlocked.

It's an affirmation that seems highly arbitrary. I can say whatever happens at the beginning of the last millennium unlocked that Coasian barrier (assuming there was one to begin with).

The point of the rise of the West is that it is made of several highly revolutionary events, periods or paradigms shift (I listed some of them, not all, in my previous post). It is doubtful that plague was more important in the process of industrialization than the mechanical clock, the printing press, Colombus and Magellan, double entry bookkeeping, the cartography, Bacon, the Renaissance, Newton, Galileo, the representative states and the list goes on...

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Europeans are not any more creative and innovate than Asians innately. For example, China invented gun powder.

Yeah they have invented printing and the water clock also (under the Sung dynasty).

But these technology doesn't produce paradigm shift like they did in Europe. Why? The answer lies in the culture.

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Rather it is that Asia had always been in the past less incentivized to invent certain things.

We agree on that point.

We disagree on the following point: you think the economic incentives to innovate were on Europe's side and not on Asia's side whereas I think both have the same economic incentives (because economic laws are universal).

What made the West done what that East haven't done (including the colonization of the World) was a value system that foster the individualism. The cultural incentives of Western people have allowed them to follow their economic incentives, whereas East's cultural incentives made them overlook their economic incentives.

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If you think Asians are innately inferior engineers and innovators to Europeans, then you are lacking knowledge in this area (don't feel bad, I lacked knowledge in many areas such as food which nearly destroyed my life). Let me give another example.

It's possible that the East is in the process of evolving culturally and shifting their value system in favor of one more creativity-friendly under the pressure of globalization, but I am doubtful of that.

China technological advancement have consisted mainly of upgrading preexisting technology or refining dominant paradigm because of their conformist value system (in other words, there are good at refining preexisting paradigms but have rarely demonstrate an ability to shift paradigm). The same thing goes with art, their best artists didn't invent new styles but only refined the style of their tradition. Their best literate minds didn't produce ground breaking books but only commentated the books of their tradition. They improve cars, they don't invent a new way of transportation.

The East for now is catching up economically, the hard part for them will come when they need to take the lead on innovations.