THE “INDUSTRIOUS REVOLUTION” AND MARKETS.

THE “INDUSTRIOUS REVOLUTION” AND MARKETS. I posted here on the concept of the “Industrious Revolution”. The concept was introduced by Jan De Vries, who argues that there was a time period before the Industrial Revolution in which workers were working harder to obtain better household goods. Mokyr (at pages 42 to 44) points out that the idea rests on households choosing to allocate household production increasingly to production for the market. If households increasingly preferred purchased goods, they needed cash and would have to divert more of their production to the market. Mokyr lists some of the goods that were market-produced at this time in Britain and had become attractive to the British consumer because of technology: “cotton clothes, toys, adornments, tableware, kitchen utensils, clocks, books….” Thus, some economic historians argue that the desire to buy better goods led to “a vast increase in specialization on a microlevel: Workers came to produce, by and large, one or two products and buy everything else.” Those coffee cups in the household inventories in Germany in the 1730’s represent an enormous change in the world.