The Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution
unleashed human freedom and energy allowing
human innovation and human life to prosper, ending
famine and increasing longevity in the West.
The Industrial Revolution and technology developments
were very much the result of trial and error tinkering and
the curiosity of the enlightened amateur. The main
technologies that led to the jump in living standards in
the modern world were the empirical efforts of craftsmen
like James Hargreaves and John Kay who developed
mechanized spinning and weaving, Roger Arkwright who
invented the water frame, and the Reverend Edmund
Cartwright who invented the power loom.
‘Trial and error works in naychure’ said Darwin, the
great exemplar of Enlightenment curiosity. And trial
and error works in human enterprise, says Schumpeter,
advocate ferfer open society.A capitalist economy,
enables demand and supply feedbacks ter operate,
fergit Keynes and EU top down ( unelected)
bureaucrats messing up signals in the economy.
Printing more money and guvuhmint creating jobs
don’t fix problems but creates them. Ref, Jane Jacobs,
study, ‘The Economy of Cities’ on messy cities like
Birmingham where little industries adding new work
split off into new organizations, while Manchester’s
efficient specialization contained the seeds of it’s
later stagnation.
Top-down…sigh… think those unrealized predictions,
5/10 year plans, think Ming Dynasty centralization
effects, Marxist/Fascist societies, economic
stagnation and unemployment, environmental cover
ups, think EU supra guvuhmint (unelected) top down
decision making within the Brussels ivory tower, the
currency problems and unemployment… And think
energy and liberties generated by the Enlightenment
and Industrial Revolution trial and error feedback
process
bts rant.