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How has industrialisation changed our lives?

By Rod Matthews

Confirmation bias is a well documented tendency for people to look for, interpret and re-

present information in a way that best suits their current belief. As a result it would be easy to

provide a highly skewed answer to the question ‘how has industrialisation changed human

lives and destinies?’

The most honest answer would be that industrialisation has been a double edged sword. To

examine this in more detail we can start by listing some of the major areas of humans’ lives

that could be said to have been effected by the industrial revolution.

Energy Production:

Prior to the industrial revolution the major source of energy was firewood. The industrial

revolution includes the comercialisation of coal and then oil into primary energy sources.*

Benefits:

The benefits of moving from wood to coal and to oil include:

Reduced deforestation

Increase in energy output

It is unlikely that we would have discovered electricity by using wood

Drawbacks:

The drawbacks of using coal and oil include:

Higher concentration of carbon and other harmful polutants

Scarring of the landscape with mining

Commerce, Finance and Trade:

In ‘The Ascent of Money – A Financial History of the World’ by Niall Ferguson1 it is argued

that the end of fuedalism in Britain, the funding of war through bonds and bullion, and the

growth in the liquidity of capital were major contributors to the beginings of the industrial

revolution.

Benefits:

Increased equity of access to capital - democratised money

Led to the rise of the middle class and the entrepreneurial

Sped up the process of specialisation and innovation

Improved the standard of living for many millions

1 Ferguson, Niall, 2008, The Ascent of Money – A Financial History of the World, The

Penguin Press, United States.

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Drawbacks:

It merely transferred power from one elite to another (from the class elite to the

financial elite)

Led to boom and bust cycles that create misery for the non-financial elite

Led to the creation of complex financial instruments that are no better than ponzi

schemes

The Rise of Science:

The European Renaisance of the 14th

to 17th

centuries combined with the explosion of

mechanical inventions led to the rise of the respectability of science.

Benefits:

Increased critical thinking and reduction in ignorance

Increased technology, invention and discovery

Increased quality of life on a daily basis

Drawbacks:

Transferrence of power from one elite to another (from the religious to the

scientific elite)

Increased reductionism and not encouraging creativity

Unintended consequences (e.g. the transport revolution has reduced our fitness)

Chemistry and Biology:

The rise of scientific thinking has been highly pronounced in the areas of chemistry and

biology.

Benefits:

Increases in survival and longevity

Reduction of disease and discomfort

Increase in quality of life

Reduction of ignorance and increased education

Increase in the quantity and quality of food

Increase in the productivity of agriculture

Drawbacks:

Chemical polution

Inhumane testing procedures

It has produced a cycle of creating and dealing with unintended consequences

Population:

Underpinning all of this is the increase in population that started in the 1700’s and 1800’s and

exploded in the 1950’s.

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Benefits:

We are saving more lives – It is pretty hard to argue against the protection of our

own species – Why is that???

More people means more ideas, more specialisation and more of one type of

resource – the human resource

Pushes us to learn to live with a broader range of people and reduces racism in the

longer term

Drawbacks:

It is hard to see how we are going to solve the issue of space for everyone and

everything to live

The negative behaviours that increase as people are asked to learn to live in

smaller areas

Environmental degradation

Exploitation of all resources – energy, time, money and people

Robert K. Merton coined the phrase ‘unintended consequences’ to describe unanticipated or

unforseen outcomes of a purposeful action.2 He notes that there are potentially three

unintended consiquences to any action:

1. A positive outcome

2. A negative outcome

3. The opposite to what was intended

The Industrial Revolution is certainly an excellent case study in the unintended consequences

of purposeful actions. The industrial revolution provided us with the energy, commerce,

science and technology that has changed human lives and destinies for the better and for the

worse. It has also amplified the speed with which we are creating and dealing with problems

for the human race and the planet.

Notes:

* As an interesting side note, coal had been used as a fuel by the Greeks and perhaps even

earlier.3

Perhaps we are currently using the energy of the future and we are missing the

technology, investment or market forces to make it into the coal of the future.

2 Merton, Robert K., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences This page was

last modified on 30 August 2012 at 21:38.

3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal#Early_uses_as_fuel This page was last modified on 8

September 2012 at 14:55.