WHAT CAUSED THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION?

WHAT CAUSED THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION? Kids, a graph in a review article in the New York Review of Books by Nobel Prize winner Robert Solow is very important to me. The review is of A FAREWELL TO ALMS: A Brief Economic History of the World by Gregory Clark. (I posted here on an earlier review of Clark’s book.) The graph shows real income per capita in England from 1200 to 2000. The line on the graph basically stays level until it begins to curve upwards in the late 1700’s (the “Industrial Revolution”) and finally becomes almost a straight vertical line in the last part of the twentieth century. What caused the Industrial Revolution to take place at that time in England? After so many years of study of economic development, the evidence is not conclusive. Solow discusses how hard it is to explain a “truly unique event”, and he poses the “null hypothesis” which the competing explanations have to beat: that an industrial revolution was a random event. “It was bound to happen somewhere in some century; heads just happened to come up for the first time in England in 1800 after 180 (eighteen centuries times ten places) consecutive appearances of tails.”