Apparently, factory-like methods that greatly increase farming productivity have long been feasible. (First known factory: Venice Arsenal, 1104.) Yet it took slaves to actually implemented such methods in farming. Even after ten thousand years of Malthusian competition, a farming method that could support a much larger population per land area did not displace other methods.
The introduction of farming was associated with important new elements, like religion, that encouraged more “self-control,” i.e. sensitivity to social norms. However, those additions were not sufficient to achieve factory-like farming — most humans had too little self-control to make themselves behave that way, and too strong an anti-dominance norm to let rulers enforce such behavior.
This dramatically illustrates the huge self-control innovations that came with industry. School, propaganda, mass media, and who knows what else have greatly changed human nature, enabling a system of industrial submission and control that proud farmers and foragers simply would not tolerate – they would (and did) starve first. In contrast, industry workers had enough self/culture-control to act as only slaves would before – working long hours in harsh alien environments, and showing up on time and doing what they were told.
Wow, that's pretty messed up. For 10,000 years people had too much self respect to work as hard as slaves voluntarily. They would rather starve than work that hard. But then in the industrial revolution, every day workers started submitting to this type of treatment.
Hanson asks - and answers - the obvious question at this point:
So what made industry workers so much more willing to increase their self-control, relative to farmers? One guess: the productivity gains from worker self-control were far larger in industry than in farming. Instead of a 50% gain, it might have been a factor of two or more. Self-controlled workers and societies gained a big enough productivity advantage to compensate for lost pride.
I'm willing to buy that. I read once a historian claim that the most important invention of the 18th century was gin, because it allowed people struggling with the industrial revolution to drink enough to manage the emotional pain. I guess this is what he was talking about.
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