Ricardo wrote:
>
I have come to the conclusion that China's hydraulic lock-in and
long term patter of development cannot be fully grasped without a
clear appreciation of the ecological dynamic of the Yellow River.
I'm finding these posts intensely interesting but what's frustrating is that
I still haven't got a handle on the notion of lock-in and the more I ponder
it the less I see it; but I'm simply learning from you and hesitate to
speculate about what makes me uneasy in the absnece of much more data. I
guess my problem comes down to not quite believing that you've etsbalished
more than a kind of mentality, a mass or more properly, an elite psychology
which consitututed lock-in: the elites were trapped not so much by scarcity
of capital which could be diverted from hydraulic maintenance as by a moral
investment in the past and by a political need to stabilise society in the
conservative ways characteristic especially of the Ming. Because in fact
there was plenty of surplus available to redirect into take-off; if you
compare with the English Industrial Revo you see there that the high-growth
manufacturing industries were sectorally insignificant at the start and the
amounts of capital which take-off required were relatively quite small
(relative to what was avaialble, or to elite luxury consumption). So you end
up wondering about the wider context of Chinese and Japanese failure to
capitalise on early technological advances, and even the tendency to lose
them and to regress.
In short, there are some links missing here, somewhere.
Mark Jones