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This post seems to be riddled with inaccuracies and misleading statements. I’ll just name a few here, since documenting all of them would take more time than I’m willing to spare.
For most of history, China was the center of civilization. It had the biggest cities, the most complex government, the highest quality manufacturing, the most industrial capacity, the most advanced technology, the best historical records and the largest armies. It dominated East Asia at the center of an elaborate tribute system for a thousand years.
This is simply false. China sometimes had the biggest cities and sometimes did not. In the early Roman imperial period, for example, the biggest cities in the world were Rome, Alexandria, Seleucia and Luoyang. Only one of those cities was in China. The same pattern holds later in history also; for example, at the height of the Abbasid Caliphate Baghdad was the biggest city in the world, at the height of the Ottoman Empire Constantinople was the biggest city in the world and so on.
It’s also a big stretch to say that China “dominated East Asia” for a thousand years. Sometimes China was dominant, sometimes it was not.
Western Europe was a backwater’s backwater. It had few cities. Most people lived on the countryside. Technology regressed after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
There’s no evidence for the claim that technology regressed after the fall of Western Rome. There were not as many big cities in Europe as there were in the time of Western Rome, but where do you get the impression that technology went backwards in this period?
The technical reason Britain won was the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution started in Britain. Guns and ships require lots of iron. The Industrial Revolution gave Britain the best guns and the best ships.
This is misleading at best. In most cases the reason European armies were able to defeat local armies was not that the locals lacked the equipment the Europeans had; indeed they could buy that equipment from Europeans on the open market! Both sides in the Taiping rebellion were armed with modern equipment for the time, for example. Especially when it came to land battles, the reason European armies were superior was for organizational reasons. They were better led, individual soldiers were better trained and more capable, soldiers were better able to coordinate their actions with each other, et cetera.
This is still true, by the way: the United States and Saudi Arabia often use the very same equipment for their military since the Saudis buy the equipment from the US, but if the US army actually had to fight the Saudi army the Saudis would lose without even putting up much of a fight. That’s what happened when the UK went to war with China in 1839.
Britain started the Opium Wars right after the China had just finished fighting both sides of multiple civil wars including the Taiping Rebellion and the Dungan Revolt.
This is incorrect. The Taiping Rebellion began in the early 1850s, while the First Opium War (as you cite in your post) began in 1839 and ended in 1842. Ditto for the Dungan Revolt, it occured well after the end of the First Opium War.
European hegemony was caused by the Industrial Revolution was caused by high labor value relative to material costs was caused by discontiguous empires was caused by long-range trade.
This explanation clearly would have been extremely unpersuasive ex ante, so there’s no reason for us to take it seriously ex post unless we somehow got a lot of detailed evidence about all the causal links mentioned in this speculation. We didn’t get any such evidence, so this explanation should just be dismissed unless someone can give a stronger argument for it.
What I don’t like about this post is that everything in it is stated as fact, while at best it consists of implausible speculation (at worst of outright falsehoods).
+1.
Someone may have made this point somewhere else already, but there’s really no mystery in Americans getting fatter if we condition on the trajectory of mean calorie intake. Mean calorie intake has gone up by about 20% from 1970 to 2010 in the US, and mean body weight apparently went up by around 15% in the same period.
If we make a simplification and assume that you expend energy at a rate proportional to your body mass (reasonable because work has units of ), we would roughly expect that increasing your calorie intake by 20% permanently would mean you either have to dissipate this energy in the form of excess sweating etc. or you have to store it somehow. If we make a further simplification and assume you don’t compensate for your excess calorie intake by excess heat dissipation (which seems roughly correct empirically), we end up with your body mass having to eventually go up by 20% so that your new energy expenditure matches your higher calorie intake.
In other words, a naive picture of the energy balance of the human body suggests we should expect long-term calorie intake and long-term body mass to be roughly proportional to each other. This is close to what we find empirically: 20% increase in mean calorie intake together with a 15% increase in mean body mass from 1970 to 2010. Any difference here can be explained away by short-run convergence dynamics, which tend to be much more complicated than the long-run energy balance relations.
Here’s a passage from Slime Mold Time Mold that supports this:
Partly this is because once you gain weight, you burn more calories (because it takes more energy to move and maintain physiological function) and you need to eat more calories to maintain your weight. Studies show that people with obesity eat and expend more calories than lean people. From this study, for example, consider this sentence: “TDEE was 2404±95 kcal per day in lean and 3244±48 kcal per day in Class III obese individuals.” From this perspective, the average daily consumption per Pew being 2,481 calories per day doesn’t seem like much — that’s about what lean people expend daily. Obese individuals generally burn 3000+ kcal/day, and while not every modern person is obese, it does make the increase from 2,025 calories per day in 1970 to about 2,481 calories per day in 2010 look relatively small.
Global warming is a good analogy here. In the long run we know e.g. the greenhouse effect should lead to a higher global mean temperature because of the energy balance of the Earth’s climate system. However, in the short run there are many places that can soak up energy: deep ocean dynamics, for instance, cause convergence to climatic equilibrium to take time on the order of hundreds or thousands of years. The human body is similar.
This might seem obvious to some people but Slime Mold Time Mold has said before that the increase from ~ 2000 kcal to ~ 2400 kcal in mean calorie intake is small. The exact quote from them is below:
It’s true that people eat more calories today than they did in the 1960s and 70s, but the difference is quite small. Sources have a surprisingly hard time agreeing on just how much more we eat than our grandparents did, but all of them agree that it’s not much. Pew says calorie intake in the US increased from 2,025 calories per day in 1970 to about 2,481 calories per day in 2010. The USDA Economic Research Service estimates that calorie intake in the US increased from 2,016 calories per day in 1970 to about 2,390 calories per day in 2014. Neither of these are jaw-dropping increases.
It’s indeed small compared to the overfeeding studies they consider (which can involve people going up to 10,000 kcal/day in calorie consumption) but those studies are short-term and as a consequence are mainly informative about convergence dynamics and not about equilibrium sensitivities.
They later tried to address this because people picked up on it and eventually said “well, even if the 20% increase explains the obesity epidemic, that still leaves the question of why people are eating more open”. I think this is bizarre: to me it’s quite obvious that in the long run more calorie intake has to lead to higher body mass, though not necessarily in a proportional way as I’ve idealized above. They should have been focusing on the causal channel going through calorie intake from the start. Instead, it seems like to them this was a secondary channel to fall back on.
Edit: I want to point out how disturbing it is that both the post itself and my comment have been receiving many downvotes from people who don’t think it’s worth their time to explain what they think is wrong with either of them. If you want to carry on doing that then more power to you, but it’s a mode of behavior that lowers my opinion of LW as a forum, especially when the agreement karma is available to express disagreement.
There is a standard reason why real GDP growth is defined the way it is: it works locally in time and that’s really the best you can ask for from this kind of measure. If you have an agent with utility function defined over goods with no explicit time dependence, you can express the derivative of utility with respect to time as
If you divide both sides by the marginal utility of some good taken as the numeraire, say the first one, then you get
where is the price of good in terms of good . The right hand side is essentially change in real GDP, while the left hand side measures the rate of change of utility over time in “marginal units of ”. If we knew that the marginal utility of the numeraire were somehow constant, then changes in real GDP would be exactly proportional to changes in utility, but in general we can’t know anything like this because from prices we can only really tell the utility function up to a monotonic transformation. This means real GDP is by construction unable to tell us the answer to a question like “how much has life improved since 1960″ without some further assumptions about , since the only information about preferences incorporated into it are prices, so by construction it is incapable of distinguishing utility functions in the same equivalence class under composition by a monotonic transformation.
However, real GDP does tell you the correct thing to look at locally in time: if the time interval is relatively short so that this first order approximation is valid and the marginal utility of the numeraire is roughly constant, it tells you that the changes over that time period have improved welfare as much as some extra amount of the numeraire good would have. If you want to recover global information from that, real GDP satisfies
so what you need for real GDP growth to be a good measure of welfare is for nominal GDP (GDP in units of the numeraire) times the marginal utility of the numeraire to only be a function of , which I think is equivalent to being Cobb-Douglas up to monotonic transformation. The special nature of Cobb-Douglas also came up in another comment, but this is how it comes up here.
I think the discussion in the post is somewhat misleading. There’s really no problem that real GDP ignores goods whose price has been cut by a factor of trillion; in the toy example I gave with Cobb-Douglas utility real GDP is actually a perfect measure of welfare no matter which goods have their prices cut by how much. The problem with real GDP is that it can only work as a measure on the margin because it only uses marginal information (prices), so it’s insensitive to overall transformations of the utility function which don’t affect anything marginal.
Curious to see what people have to say about this way of looking at the issue.
To support your point here, here is a list of some international wars since the end of WW2 in which a dictator invaded another country but they failed to get more out of the war than a stalemate:
The Korean War: North Korea invaded South Korea, but after interventions by both UN forces (led by the US) and China, the war got bogged down on a front line close to the original border between North and South Korea. There were no signs of instability in either of the two Korean governments, and no nuclear weapons were used despite the US being in unilateral possession of them at the time.
Soviet-Afghan War: The USSR invaded and set up a satellite state in Afghanistan. After a decade of fighting a protracted guerrilla war with insurgents backed by the US, the USSR withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, just before the collapse of the USSR. It has been suggested that the defeat in Afghanistan played a part in the dissolution of the USSR, but it seems like it was far from the decisive influence to me. We can count this as a partial success for Tegmark’s thesis at best.
The Iran-Iraq War: Saddam Hussein invaded Iran, but the war became a stalemate that lasted for eight years before status quo ante bellum was restored. There was no sign of instability in his rule that I’m aware of as a result of this debacle.
The Gulf War: Saddam Hussein invaded and took over Kuwait, but subsequently got kicked out of the country by coalition forces led by the US. The US also encouraged rebellions throughout Iraq against Saddam’s rule. These rebellions were crushed by Saddam’s government following peace with the US and its allies.
While the sample size is small, and my memory here may be biased, I think the outside view evidence certainly casts doubt on Tegmark’s thesis. Unless we have some very specific inside view reasons to believe Putin would be overthrown in the case of agreeing to something resembling status quo ante bellum, which I don’t see, Tegmark’s assessment of the odds of Putin being forced from power in such an eventuality seems overconfident.