The Rational Optimist (49 page)

p. 219 ‘Here are three anecdotes’. The first case comes from an unpublished history of the village of Stannington written by my grandmother and others in the 1950s. The other two cases are cited in Rivoli, P. 2005.
The Travels of a T-shirt in the Global Economy
. John Wiley.

p. 221 A famous print entitled ‘The Distinguished Men of Science of Great Britain Living in the Year 1807-8’. The print was published alongside a book edited and published by William Walker,
Memoirs of the Distinguished Men of Science of Great Britain Living in the Year 1807–08
.

pp. 221–2 ‘like Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin, Stanley Boyer and Leroy Hood’. Moore founded Intel, Noyce the microchip, Jobs Apple, Brin Google, Boyer Genentech, Hood Applied Biosystems.

p. 222 ‘explained one Hungarian liberal’. Gergely Berzeviczy, quoted in Blanning, T. 2007.
The Pursuit of Glory
. Penguin.

p. 222 ‘France, three times as populous as England, was “cut up by internal customs barriers into three major trade areas”’. Landes, D.S. 2003.
The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present
. 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press.

p. 222 ‘Spain was “an archipelago, islands of local production and consumption, isolated from each other by centuries of internal tariffs”.’ John Lynch, quoted in Blanning, T. 2007.
The Pursuit of Glory
. Penguin.

p. 223 ‘a “glorious revolution” against James II’s arbitrary government’. Jardine, L. 2008.
Going Dutch
. Harper.

p. 223 ‘this was not a bad place to start or expand a business in say 1700’. Baumol, W. 2002.
The Free-market Innovation Machine
. Princeton University Press.

p. 223 ‘says David Landes’. Landes, D.S. 2003.
The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present
. 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press.

p. 224 ‘says Robert Friedel’. Friedel, R. 2007.
A Culture of Improvement
. MIT Press.

p. 224 ‘writes Neil McKendrick’. Quoted in Blanning, T. 2007.
The Pursuit of Glory
. Penguin.

p. 224 ‘Daniel Defoe, writing in 1728’. Quoted in Mokyr, J. 1990.
Lever of Riches
. Oxford University Press; Friedel, R. 2007.
A Culture of Improvement
. MIT Press.

p. 225 ‘it was by copying these Oriental imports that the industrialists got started’. Mokyr, J. 1990.
Lever of Riches
. Oxford University Press; Friedel, R. 2007.
A Culture of Improvement
. MIT Press.

p. 226 ‘the Calico Act’. Friedel, R. 2007.
A Culture of Improvement
. MIT Press; Rivoli, P. 2005.
The Travels of a T-shirt in the Global Economy
. John Wiley.

p. 226 ‘enclosure actually increased paid employment for farm labourers’. Here is how Landes puts it: ‘For a long time, the most accepted view has been that propounded by Marx and repeated and embellished by generations of socialist and even non-socialist historians. This position explains the accomplishment of so enormous a social change – the creation of an industrial proletariat in the face of tenacious resistance – by postulating an act of forcible expropriation: the enclosures uprooted the cottager and small peasant and drove them into the mills. Recent empirical research has invalidated this hypothesis; the data indicate that the agricultural revolution associated with the enclosures increased the demand for farm labour, and that indeed those rural areas that saw the most enclosure saw the largest increase in resident population. From 1750 to 1830 Britain’s agricultural counties doubled their inhabitants. Whether objective evidence of this kind will suffice, however, to do away with what has become an article of faith is doubtful.’ Landes, D.S. 2003.
The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present
. 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press, pp. 114–15.

p. 227 ‘The historian Edward Baines noted in 1835’. Baines, E. 1835.
History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain
. Quoted in Rivoli, P. 2005.
The Travels of a T-shirt in the Global Economy
. John Wiley.

p. 227 ‘reflected Joseph Schumpeter’. Schumpeter, J.A. 1943.
Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy
. Allen & Unwin.

p. 227 ‘As the twentieth-century economist Colin Clark put it’. Clark, C. 1970.
Starvation or Plenty?
Secker and Warburg.

p. 228 ‘by 1800 the jenny was already obsolete’. Landes, D.S. 2003.
The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present
. 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press.

p. 228 ‘price of a pound of fine-spun cotton yarn fell’. Friedel, R. 2007.
A Culture of Improvement.
MIT Press.

p. 228 ‘Cotton accounted for half of all American exports by value between 1815 and 1860.’ Slavery delivered cheapness through increasing quantity of output, not by undercutting prices. Indian production did not decline in the nineteenth century: it expanded, but not as fast as American. Fogel, R.W. and Engerman, S.L. 1995.
Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery
. Reissue edition. W.W. Norton and Company.

p. 228 ‘As the economist Pietra Rivoli puts it’. Rivoli, P. 2005.
The Travels of a T-shirt in the Global Economy
. John Wiley.

p. 229 ‘There was never going to be enough wind, water or wood in England to power the factories, let alone in the right place.’ Rolt, L.T.C. 1965.
Tools for the Job
. Batsford Press. Incidentally, coked coal was used to make iron (by Abraham Darby at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire) as early as 1709, but only inferior cast iron.

p. 230 ‘the country’s demographic and economic centre of gravity shifted south to the Yangtze valley’. Pomeranz, K. 2000.
The Great Divergence
. Princeton University Press.

p. 230 ‘Coal’s cost per tonne at the pithead in Newcastle rose slightly between the 1740s and 1860s’. Clark, G. and Jacks, D. 2006.
Coal and the Industrial Revolution, 1700–1869
. Working Paper #06-15, Department of Economics, University of California, Davis.

p. 231 ‘The wages of a coal hewer in the North-east of England were twice as high, and rising twice as fast, as those of a farm worker in the nineteenth century.’ Clark, G. and Jacks, D. 2006.
Coal and the Industrial Revolution, 1700–1869
. Working Paper #06-15, Department of Economics, University of California, Davis. As one young English woman (my ancestor), the daughter of a judge, wrote to her mother after moving north from Bedfordshire to Northumberland in 1841: ‘The more I see of the poor people about here the more I feel puzzled as to the possibility of doing them any good ... They all have immense wages and plenty of coal and are quite rich in comparison with our Millbrook people.’ From Ridley, U. 1958/1990.
The Life and Letters of Cecilia Ridley 1819–1845
. Spredden Press.

p. 231 ‘As the historian Tony Wrigley has put it’. Wrigley, E.A. 1988.
Continuity, Chance and Change: the Character of the Industrial Revolution in England
. Cambridge University Press.

p. 232 ‘an Indian weaver could not compete with the operator of a steam-driven Manchester mule’. Clark, G. 2007.
A Farewell to Alms
. Princeton University Press.

p. 233 ‘Today most coal is used for generating electricity.’ Fouquet, R. and Pearson, P.J.G. 1998. A thousand years of energy use in the United Kingdom.
Energy Journal
19:1–41.

p. 234 ‘pulling ploughs by cable through a field at the Menier estate near Paris’. Rolt, L.T.C. 1967.
The Mechanicals
. Heinemann.

p. 234 ‘like the computer it took decades to show up in the productivity statistics’. David, P.A. 1990. The dynamo and the computer: an historical perspective on the modern productivity paradox.
American Economic Review
80:355–61.

p. 234 ‘One recent study in the Philippines’. Barnes, D.F. (ed.). 2007.
The Challenge of Rural Electrification
. Resources for the Future Press.

p. 235 ‘Joule for joule, wood is less convenient than coal, which is less convenient than natural gas, which is less convenient than electricity, which is less convenient than the electricity currently trickling through my mobile telephone.’ Huber, P.W. and Mills, M.P. 2005.
The Bottomless Well: the Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy
. Basic Books.

p. 236 ‘in Adam Smith’s words’.
The Wealth of Nations
.

p. 236 ‘the average person on the planet consumes power at the rate of about 2,500 watts’. A watt is a joule per second. A calorie is 4.184 joules. The figures of energy consumption in watts per capita come from the International Energy Agency. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image: Energy_consumption_versus_GDP.png.

p. 236 ‘it would take 150 slaves’. By the way, twice as much energy is wasted turning grain into bicycle-cargo motion as is wasted turning oil into truck-cargo motion: or sixteen times as much if the grain goes into the cyclist via a chicken. Huber, P.W. and Mills, M.P. 2005.
The Bottomless Well: the Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy
. Basic Books.

p. 237 ‘an anxiety as old as fossil fuels themselves’. Jevons, W.S. 1865.
The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of our Coal-mines
. Macmillan.

p. 238 ‘If America were to grow all its own transport fuel as biofuel it would need 30 per cent more farmland’. Dennis Avery, cited in Bryce, R. 2008.
Gusher of Lies
. Perseus Books.

p. 239 ‘or hydroelectric dams with catchments one-third larger than all the continents put together’. The assumptions behind these calculations are optimistic, rather than conservative: that solar power can generate about 6 watts per square metre; wind about 1.2, hay-fed horses 0.8 (one horse needs 8 hectares of hay and pulls 700 watts, or one horse power); firewood 0.12; and hydro 0.012. America consumes 3,120 gigawatts. Spain covers 504,000 sq km; Kazakhstan 2.7m sq km; India and Pakistan 4m sq km; Russia and Canada 27m sq km; all the continents 148m sq km. All power density figures except horses are from Ausubel, J. 2007. Renewable and nuclear heresies.
International Journal of Nuclear Governance, Economy and Ecology
1:229–43.

p. 239 ‘Just one wind farm at Altamont in California kills twenty-four golden eagles every year’. Bird risk behaviors and fatalities at the Altamont Pass wind resource area, by C.G. Thelander, K.S. Smallwood and L. Rugge of BioResource Consultants in Ojai, California, NREL/SR-500-33829, December 2003. To those who say far more birds are killed flying into windows – yes, but not golden eagles, which are both peculiarly rare and peculiarly vulnerable to wind turbines. When did a golden eagle last crash into your conservatory? As for the charge that an oil company would be prosecuted for causing such bird deaths, see Bryce, R. 2009. Windmills are killing our birds: one standard for oil companies, another for green energy sources.
Wall Street Journal
, 7 September 2009. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203706604574376543308399048.html?mod=googlenews_wsj.

p. 239 ‘Hundreds of orang-utans are killed a year because they get in the way of oil-palm biofuel plantations’. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?

p. 239 ‘says the energy expert Jesse Ausubel’. Ausubel, J. 2007. Renewable and nuclear heresies.
International Journal of Nuclear Governance, Economy and Ecology
1:229–43.

p. 241 ‘Between 2004 and 2007 the world maize harvest increased by fiftyone million tonnes’. Avery, D.T. 2008.
The Massive Food and Land Costs of US Corn Ethanol: an Update
. Competitive Enterprise Institute no. 144, 29 October 2008.

p. 241 ‘American car drivers were taking carbohydrates out of the mouths of the poor to fill their tanks’. Mitchell, D.A. 2008.
Note on Rising Food Prices
. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper no. 4682. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1233058.

p. 241 ‘So the question is: how much fuel does it take to grow fuel? Answer: about the same amount.’ Bryce, R. 2008.
Gusher of Lies
. Perseus Books.

p. 242 ‘says Joseph Fargione of the Nature Conservancy’. Fargione, J. et al. 2008. Land clearing the biofuel carbon debt.
Science
319:1235–8.

p. 242 ‘the biofuel industry is not just bad for the economy. It is bad for the planet, too.’ Bryce, R. 2008.
Gusher of Lies
. Perseus Books.