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196 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2011
Western technology in the 21st century uses vast amounts of capital per worker. It only pays to substitute that much capital for labour when wages are high relative to capital costs.
Growth was also promoted by Parliament’s power to take people’s property against their wishes. This was not possible in France. Indeed, one could argue that France suffered because property was too secure: profitable irrigation projects were not undertaken in Provence because France had no counterpart to the private acts of the British Parliament that overrode property owners opposed to the enclosure of their land or the construction of canals or turnpikes across it. What the Glorious Revolution meant in practice was that the ‘despotic power’ of the state that ‘was only available intermittently before 1688 … was always available thereafter’.