If the relevant factor is dear labor and cheap materials, then it should be surprising (on Allen’s model) that there was innovation in post America across a wide variety of domains? This was the height of unionized labor and also of American access to cheap commodities (but not finished products, so being able to solve the expensive part happening here still matters), which should affect a pretty wide set of domains.
In terms of thinking of the vibes—whether we end up as compatibilists or hard determinists—I think it’s worth distinguishing between “we can locate culture somewhere on this causal graph” and “culture is not on this causal graph.”
In order to say “you don’t have to posit a uniquely British culture of innovation to explain the industrial revolution” I don’t think it’s necessary to say “culture never matters.” Instead you can have a mix of “culture is affected by (e.g.) economic forces” and “culture, at least around basic vibes like optimism, risk tolerance, and individualism, doesn’t independently vary all that radically.” A plausible model to me might posit a lot of individual variation in vibes-propensity that exists in any human society, economic factors that make any given set of vibes relatively successful at the margin or not, and then emulation of successful strategies. So optimism matters, and if aliens hit early modern England with a clinical depression ray that would have real effects; it’s just that you can find natural optimists and natural pessimists in most situations, and people who are neither will see through a mix of emulation and trial and error how much optimism is justified. This fits with the pretty clear cultural differences we see between foraging, farming, and industrial societies (although admittedly the case is strongest in the case of agricultural civilization—foragers are pretty diverse we don’t have multiple independently developed industrial civilizations!)
Two thoughts.
If the relevant factor is dear labor and cheap materials, then it should be surprising (on Allen’s model) that there was innovation in post America across a wide variety of domains? This was the height of unionized labor and also of American access to cheap commodities (but not finished products, so being able to solve the expensive part happening here still matters), which should affect a pretty wide set of domains.
In terms of thinking of the vibes—whether we end up as compatibilists or hard determinists—I think it’s worth distinguishing between “we can locate culture somewhere on this causal graph” and “culture is not on this causal graph.”
In order to say “you don’t have to posit a uniquely British culture of innovation to explain the industrial revolution” I don’t think it’s necessary to say “culture never matters.” Instead you can have a mix of “culture is affected by (e.g.) economic forces” and “culture, at least around basic vibes like optimism, risk tolerance, and individualism, doesn’t independently vary all that radically.” A plausible model to me might posit a lot of individual variation in vibes-propensity that exists in any human society, economic factors that make any given set of vibes relatively successful at the margin or not, and then emulation of successful strategies. So optimism matters, and if aliens hit early modern England with a clinical depression ray that would have real effects; it’s just that you can find natural optimists and natural pessimists in most situations, and people who are neither will see through a mix of emulation and trial and error how much optimism is justified. This fits with the pretty clear cultural differences we see between foraging, farming, and industrial societies (although admittedly the case is strongest in the case of agricultural civilization—foragers are pretty diverse we don’t have multiple independently developed industrial civilizations!)