The wheels of change: Human capital, millwrights, and industrialization in 18th-century England
- The consensus among economic historians has been that Britain’s leadership during the Industrial Revolution owed little to the school system.
- This shows how millwrights – highly skilled carpenters who specialised in constructing and repairing watermills – had a persistent effect on the mechanisation of textile- and iron-making and on the economic expansion that was taking place on the eve of the Industrial Revolution.
Why so many of the world’s oldest companies are in Japan
-
The country has 33,000 businesses at least a century old. How have so many survived – and what does it mean for Japan’s future?
Walkable places are growing in value almost everywhere
- Over the past decade, across the nation, the most walkable homes have appreciated the most.
- In two-thirds of large metro areas, walkable neighborhoods have higher home values than car-dependent ones.
- Walkable neighborhoods appreciated faster than car-dependent ones in 44 of 51 large metro areas in the past seven years.
Draining the swamp
- How sanitation conquered disease long before vaccines or antibiotics.
- The bottom line is that sanitation—pest control, water filtration and chlorination, safe sewage disposal, milk pasteurization and other food safety, and public education about general hygiene—probably did more than anything else to reduce mortality rates, if only because these techniques were available decades, and in some cases centuries, before anything else.
Visualizing the 700-Year Fall of Interest Rates
- Today’s graphic from Paul Schmelzing, visiting scholar at the Bank of England (BOE), shows how global real interest rates have experienced an average annual decline of -0.0196% (-1.96 basis points) throughout the past eight centuries.
- Collecting data from across 78% of total advanced economy GDP over the time frame, Schmelzing shows that real rates* have witnessed a negative historical slope spanning back to the 1300s.
- In fact, the historical record would imply that we will see ever new record lows in real rates in future business cycles in the 2020s/30s
Here is the original: Eight centuries of global real interest rates, R-G, and the ‘suprasecular’ decline, 1311–2018