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Noah Smith 🐇
@Noahpinion
, 3 tweets, 2 min read Read on Twitter
It appears that the invention of the steam engine - and other Industrial Revolution inventions - had much more to do with science than I had realized;
rootsofprogress.org/relationship-o…
I had a debate with @winkinj about this earlier this year, but it looks like there were lots of historical details I was unaware of. He was right, and I was wrong! Science was important for the Industrial Revolution.

rootsofprogress.org/science-and-st…
However, it is generally true that in the 1700s, European inventions depended much more on tinkering, and then started depending steadily more and more on science in the 1800s and 1900s.

rootsofprogress.org/science-and-th…
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Noah Smith 🐇
@Noahpinion
1/Lots of people are getting interested in industrial policy. That's a good thing.

Here is a reading list of good books about industrial policy.
2/The best book to start with is "Concrete Economics". It's not about HOW to do industrial policy. It's about WHY to do it.

amazon.com/Concrete-Econo…
3/For the history of industrial policy, the best book to start with is "How Asia Works".

It's about how Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China got rich (while Malaysia, Philippines, and Thailand have lagged somewhat).

amazon.com/How-Asia-Works…
Read 14 tweets
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Noah Smith 🐇
@Noahpinion
1/Today's @bopinion post is about the looming recession...if there is, in fact, a looming recession.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
2/The yield curve has inverted. That is a harbinger of recession. But it probably does not *cause* recessions, any more than a crowing rooster causes the sun to rise.
3/What's more, an inverted yield curve typically comes a year or so *before* a recession, so for right now we're OK. And U.S. economic data are still holding up fine.

For now.

blogs.uoregon.edu/timduyfedwatch…
Read 19 tweets
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Noah Smith 🐇
@Noahpinion
Some people think that blocking trolls prevents them from being exposed to alternative views.

But this is backwards. Getting trolled by people with alternative views makes you more likely to discount those views, since you associate them with a troll.

BLOCK EARLY, BLOCK OFTEN.
To say a little more about this...back in 2011-2013, there seemed to be a lot of optimism that Twitter, by enabling fluid, instant, open conversation among a maximally large set of people, would increase the cross-fertilization of viewpoints and ideas...
Although some of that did happen, I would say that largely this hope was dashed. Twitter famously became, in the words of a friend in the tech industry, "open combat". It is now famous for tribalism, bitterness, and endless flame wars.

Why did this happen? Well...
Read 11 tweets

Related threads

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Janamejayan
@Janamejayan
1. I know I started tweeting Indian History from 1700 AD to 1858. This stream will be continued in a couple of hours. In the meantime I felt it important to tweet the European History which the European ignorantly know as their 'World History'.
2. The european divided History into two (a) the chronology of events that were recorded, and (b) the History of 'mankind' that has no record of events and therefore imagined. In reality European know of history only from the Biblical times which is 1445 BC or about 3600 yrs ago
3. Our PuraNas are all written at some time until such time they were orally transmitted. Most Puranas, Ithihasas, Vedas do not very much contradict the history. But the Europeans were not even aware of our existence let alone know our history.
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Timothy B. Lee
@binarybits
It's interesting to imagine a world where humanity never invented the transistor and therefore never had a digital revolution. In that world, the obvious interpretation of economic history would be that the discovery of fossil fuels gave humanity a one-time growth spurt.
It would be clear that the invention of the steam engine in the 1770s triggered a 200-year, S-shaped growth spurt. From the perspective of 2019, people would view the moon landing 50 years earlier as marking the point where the S curve leveled off.
It's not that there would have been no progress post-1969. The developed world would have made incremental gains on the great inventions of the early 20th Century, and the developing world would have catch-up growth.
Read 13 tweets
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WonderWoman🦋
@SecretDurga2
Let us see what #Hinduism n #Hindus gave to the world.

A #Thread about #Hindus contribution to form this world better.

Hindu's contribution in any subject is more than any other religion in this world.

SHARE AND BE PROUD.
1)Let's talk about #Mathematics 1st
i)"0" :- one of the most important inventions of all time. Aryabhata invited the "0" 1st.The concept of zero and its integration into the place-value system also enabled one to write numbers, no matter how large, by using only ten symbols.
2)ii) Decimal System:- Hindus gave Decimal system. This system made the uses of arithmetic in practical inventions much faster and easier.

iii)Numerical Notation:-
As early as 500 BCE, had devised a system of different symbols for every number from one to nine.
Read 29 tweets
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Emily Lakdawalla
@elakdawalla
MU69 appears as a bi-lobed baby comet in latest New Horizons images! What's a contact binary and how do they form? I gotchu: planetary.org/blogs/emily-la…
Just added this really nice illustration to the article on how contact binaries form -- nice work by @jtuttlekeane showing the value of art and science together. #STEAM
Two nearly perfect little spheres, gently squished together.
Read 5 tweets
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Pseudoerasmus
@pseudoerasmus
Amazing someone can think technology did not matter to the Industrial Rev since it's the proximate cause! (btw neither article nor book says this but it does question the 'good' institutions narrative). You can acknowledge the role of slavery/violence w/o uttering patent nonsense
Regardless of whether cotton and/or coal was crucial to Britain being the first site of the industrial revolution (both are disputed by economic historians), it is difficult to imagine any kind of transformation we would recognise as an industrial revolution, without steam power
Peer Vries, a global historian who agrees with Beckert et al. on the crucial role of imperialism & massive state power, still says of steam, "The effect
of just this one technological innovation dwarfed the growth effects of all forms of coercion"; his rough quantification:
Read 38 tweets
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Lara Durgavich
@tinkeringprim8
And now I present: a thread based on my love of #science, #scicomm, and #animals, and the fact that I'm a huge #nerd:
1/?
The other day at the library, I got this book by Ann Tompert for my 2yo (2/?): amazon.com/Just-Little-Bi…
The premise: an elephant and a mouse want to ride a see-saw. #Physics has other ideas, so some other animals come to help. (3/?)
Read 46 tweets

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