Capitalism liberated women from the toil and spinning that Jesus talked about

 

Jesus warned his followers not to be consumed with daily cares in Matt 6:28-29, “And why are you anxious concerning raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these."

Lilies don’t spin, but women did. Spinning yarn consumed the lives of most women in Jesus’ day. From pre-history until the invention of the spinning wheel, girls were taught from the age of 6 to spin thread using a spindle, usually a wooden dowel jammed into a hole in a clay or rock disc called a whorl. Spindles resembled a crude top. The short end of the dowl sticking out of the whorl had a hook for grabbing and spinning the fibers while the thread was wound on the longer part. 

Until they died or were too old, girls and women spun yarn from the time they got out of bed until they went to bed. They spun while cooking and taking care of children. They spun thread while washing clothes and dishes and talking to friends. Jewish women probably didn’t spin on the Sabbath. Demand for cloth was great and spinning the yarn was the main bottle neck. Navies required large amounts of cloth for sails, according to Virginia Postrel in The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World:

“Viking Age sail 100 meters square took 154 kilometers (60 miles) of yarn. Working eight hours a day with a heavy spindle whorl to produce relatively coarse yarn, a spinner would toil 385 days to make enough for the sail. Plucking the sheep and preparing the wool for spinning required another 600 days. From start to finish, Viking sails took longer to make than the ships they powered.” 

Virginia Postrel, The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World

Girls produced the coarse yarn needed for sails and the clothing of the poor. After years of practice, women could spin very fine threads used for the soft clothing of wealthy politicians and earned more for it. 

“Contrary to the impression left by toga party costumes, the toga was closer to the size of a bedroom than a bedsheet, about 20 square meters (24 square yards). Assuming 20 threads to the centimeter (about 130 to the inch), historian Mary Harlow calculates that a toga required about 40 kilometers (25 miles) of wool yarn—enough to reach from Central Park to Greenwich, Connecticut. Spinning that much yarn would take some nine hundred hours, or more than four months of labor, working eight hours a day, six days a week. Ignoring textiles, Harlow cautions, blinds classical scholars to some of the most important economic, political, and organizational challenges that ancient societies faced."

Virginia Postrel, The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World

Thank God for the Industrial Revolution

Tesla vehicles are being assembled by robots at Tesla Motors' factory in Fremont, California, July 25, 2016. | REUTERS/Joseph White

Are you looking for something beyond Mom, apple pie and football to be thankful for this holiday? Let’s thank God for the Industrial Revolution. 

Sure, it’s one of the most maligned periods in human history. Socialists claim it trapped workers in wage slavery. Marx asserted it alienated laborers from the product of their labor, to which he attributes all the evils of mankind from flat tires to broken bed springs, and business owners stole the wealth that workers created by keeping the profits. 

Others portrayed pre-Industrial Revolution Europe as idyllic with plump farmers happily raising families in the clean air of the countryside. The Industrial Revolution destroyed that paradise. Today, environmentalists complain that industrialization is destroying the climate, depleting resources and killing off animal species. That’s all fake history. 

The truth is that before the Revolution, Europe was as poor as Haiti is today and people lived no better than the average person 10,000 years earlier. Life was short and brutal. Most children died before reaching adulthood. According to Nobel Prize winner Robert Fogel in his classic book The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100: Europe, the continent grew enough food to provide calories for only 80% of workers. The other 20% consumed only enough calories to walk a short distance where they could beg for more. 

Check out the hockey stick graphs of per capita GDP (a measure of living standards) available on the internet. Here is one. Most graphs begin in the year 1000 AD, but the best economic historians, such as Angus Maddison, demonstrate that little improvement in living standards took place between prehistory and the Industrial Revolution. 

It doesn’t take a great deal of thought to understand why living standards didn’t improve. Farming determines how many people live in cities because city dwellers can eat only the surplus that farming families grow and don’t eat. Cutting edge farming technology in early human history was a team of oxen. In 1800, it was still a team of oxen, although horsepower was being introduced. Did you play the video game The Oregon Trail? What dragged the covered wagons over the plains? Oxen!

Life changed abruptly in the 17th century Dutch Republic. Dutch Protestants implemented the economic principles that Catholic scholars from the University of Salamanca, Spain, had distilled from the Bible. They did so because they had recently won independence from Spain after an 80-year war and saw their nation as the new Israel. So they wanted to establish a government based on Biblical principles. They sought to keep the seventh commandment, “Thou shalt not steal,” by limiting government power and establishing free markets. 

The Dutch didn’t anticipate that the change would make them richer. No one at that time thought it was possible to improve living standards. After all, they hadn’t changed in over 5,000 years. But they did. The Dutch launched the Industrial Revolution. For the first time in human history, standards of living began to grow rapidly as the graphs show, first in the Dutch Republic, then England, the US and Western Europe. 

The West left behind millennia of cycles of famine and mass starvation that the rest of the world continued to suffer from for centuries longer. Westerners today are 30 times wealthier than our ancestors in the 17th century. That’s close to a 3,000% increase. Greater wealth bought better health and longer lives. The planet could support more people, too. In 1900, the planet could feed a mere one billion people. Today, we feed almost eight billion so well that obesity is a problem.

Adam Smith praised the Dutch government in his classic The Wealth of Nations as having most fully implemented the system of natural liberty. That system became known as capitalism. Critics point out that capitalism hasn’t solved all problems in the world today. We still suffer from war, crime, violence, poverty, and racism. Wealth is not evenly distributed. 

But the Dutch never intended their system to solve all of humanity’s problems, nor did they think humans could. God could, but not humans. They had one object in mind, to establish a government on Biblical principles and so please God. 

Atheists fabricated the nonsense that the state can perfect human nature because people are born good and turn bad only because of oppression. Atheists set up the state as an idol in place of the Christian God and attributed to the state all of God’s power to recreate paradise on earth. History for the past 150 years has proven them wrong. 

So, if you enjoy central heat and air conditioning, the high-definition smart TV on which you will watch the University of Oklahoma football team play against Oklahoma State, or the Ford F-150 in your driveway, or any of the many material blessings of living in the richest nation on the planet and in the history of humanity, you must thank God for the Industrial Revolution.

The Reformation financed the Industrial Revolution

After millennia of stagnation, why did the European economy explode in the 17th century into what economic historians call the hockey stick of per capita GDP? We know that Christianity had finally made an impact on envy; Christian individualism had broken out; modern science, created by Christian theologians, began to contribute; the Salamancan scholars persuaded people to respect commerce and protect property. Those are all necessary ingredients. Still, where did business people get the money to invest?

Marx claimed that Europe stole it from the Americas when Spain began looting it colonies of gold and silver. But Spain never took part in the Industrial Revolution and declined in wealth and power throughout the 17th century.

Europe lacked the wealth needed to ignite the revolution for two reasons. One was the conspicuous consumption of the nobility. They held to an economic principle that their spending benefitted the poor, so they were required to spend as much as possible on moral/economic grounds. Also, their status in the community required them to spend lavishly on houses and throw parties with great banquets. Had investing in business interested the nobility, which it didn’t, they would have had no savings to invest.

The Great Stagnation Explained

A few economists are worried about the great stagnation, the apparent plateauing of wages and economic growth. Some attribute the malaise to rising inequality or technology having picked all of the low hanging fruit, or other causes. Any time someone identifies a problem every person with an ideology to promote offers their pet ideology as the cause or cure. Here is my take on it:

The industrial revolution caused per capita incomes in the West to rocket from $3/day in 1700 to as much as 130 times that amount today. A graph of incomes produces a “hockey stick” as this graph from the Atlantic that demonstrates:

Chicago economist Deirdre McCloskey’s explains in her book Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World that the innovation caused the rapid take off in incomes, but innovation requires that society value business and innovation and adopt “bourgeois values.” She devotes a large portion of the book to slaying zombie explanations for the rise in incomes, including thrift, capital accumulation, greed, the Protestant ethic, colonialism, education, transportation, geography, energy, trade, slavery, exploitation, commercialization, genetics, institutions, and science.

How is it possible for innovation to benefit all of society and not just the inventor? After all, successful inventors become very wealthy. The answer is that innovators capture merely 2% of the total benefit of their inventions according to Yale economist William D. Nordhaus in his paper “Schumpeterian Profits in the American Economy: Theory and Measurement.”