The Great Fact and the Good Life

2019 ◽  
pp. 37-48
Author(s):  
Arthur M. Diamond
Keyword(s):  
Economic History ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Abraham Maslow ◽  
The West ◽  
Hunter Gatherers ◽  
Life Plan ◽  
Sea Squirt ◽  
Primary Goods ◽  
New Goods

Deirdre McCloskey’s Great Fact of economic history is the enrichment in the West that started during the Industrial Revolution, following millennia of life being, as Hobbes says, “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Hunter-gatherers lived violent, uncertain, often repetitive lives, far from the Golden Age that some imagine. Goods can be good if they provide John Rawls’s primary goods that are needed for achieving almost any life plan. They can be even better if they help us to achieve the higher goods related to the creativity, challenge, and fulfillment that Abraham Maslow discussed in his hierarchy of needs. Many who seem to oppose new goods are accidental Luddites, only opposing the particular new goods that they fear will harm them. After digesting its brain and backbone, a sea squirt spends the rest of its life vegetating. A human retains her brain and backbone, and so must act to thrive.

The Benefits: New Goods

2019 ◽  
pp. 49-62
Author(s):  
Arthur M. Diamond
Keyword(s):  
Scarlet Fever ◽  
Character Recognition ◽  
Optical Character Recognition ◽  
Air Conditioning ◽  
Life Plan ◽  
Life Plans ◽  
Washing Machines ◽  
Primary Goods ◽  
New Goods ◽  
And Control

The value of innovative new goods is hard to measure, but can be seen in how people vote with their feet to live where there are innovative new goods. Among the most important new goods are cures for diseases, electric light, cars, washing machines, air conditioning, television, and computers. Cures for disease are especially important because they are primary goods that are needed for pursuing almost any life plan. The grandson of John D. Rockefeller, the richest person ever to live, died of scarlet fever because medical invention and entrepreneurship had not yet created Prontosil. Washing machines reduce time spent in routine drudgery. Air conditioning aids health, and allows the mental sharpness needed for pursuing creative and challenging life plans. Cars increase safety and control of travel times and companions. Some goods, such as Ray Kurzweil’s optical character recognition (OCR) machine, enables the blind to read regular books.

Beautiful Beach Bodies and Muscle Heads

2020 ◽  
Vol 97 (2) ◽  
pp. 112-123
Author(s):  
John D. Fair
Keyword(s):  
Juvenile Delinquency ◽  
Southern California ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Physical Culture ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
The West ◽  
Guise Of The Good ◽  
Beach Boys ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Age Of Aquarius

Uneasily situated between counterculture images projected by James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and the dawning of the “Age of Aquarius” a decade later, there emerged a motion picture interlude of innocence on the beaches of Southern California. It was fostered by Gidget (1959) and then thirty “surf and sex” movies that focused on young, attractive bodies and beach escapades rather than serious social causes.The films, argues Kirse May, “created an ideal teenage existence, marked by consumption, leisure, and little else.” Stephen Tropiano explains how their popularity helped shape “the archetypal image of the American teenager” and, reinforced by the surfin' sounds of Jan and Dean, the Beach Boys, and other recording groups, “turned America's attention to the Southern California coastline,” where “those who never set foot on its sandy shores were led to believe that life on the West Coast was a twenty-four-hour beach party.” This study examines a notable film of this genre to determine how musclemen were exploited to exhibit this playful spirit and how their negative reception reinforced an existing disregard toward physical culture. Muscle Beach Party illustrates how physical culture served other agendas, namely the need to address American fears of juvenile delinquency and to revive sagging box-office receipts within the guise of the “good life” of California.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gianfranco Pacchioni
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Full Time ◽  
Human Race ◽  
Hunter Gatherers ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Radical Transformation

About 10,000 years ago, at the beginning of the agriculturalrevolution, on the whole earth lived between 5 and 8 million hunter-gatherers, all belonging to the Homo sapiens species. Five thousand years later, freed from the primary needs for survival, some belonging to that species enjoyed the privilege of devoting themselves to philosophical speculation and the search for transcendental truths. It was only in the past two hundred years, however, with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, that reaping nature’s secrets and answering fundamental questions posed by the Universe have become for many full-time activities, on the way to becoming a real profession. Today the number of scientists across the globe has reached and exceeded 10 million, that is, more than the whole human race 10,000 years ago. If growth continues at the current rate, in 2050 we will have 35 million people committed full-time to scientific research. With what consequences, it remains to be understood. For almost forty years I myself have been concerned with science in a continuing, direct, and passionate way. Today I perceive, along with many colleagues, especially of my generation, that things are evolving and have changed deeply, in ways unimaginable until a few years ago and, in some respects, not without danger. What has happened in the world of science in recent decades is more than likely a mirror of a similar and equally radical transformation taking place in modern society, particularly with the advent ...

scholarly journals THE IDEA OF THE GOOD LIFE IN ARISTOTLE AND CONFUCIUS

2020 ◽  
pp. 61
Author(s):  
John Gabriel Mendie ◽  
Stephen Nwanaokuo Udofia
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
The West ◽  
Happy Life ◽  
Material Things

Man, by nature, desires to live a good and happy life. But often times, the enduring quest for the blissful and delightful, eludes man. This constant questing and concurrent yearning make man restless, until his hopes and aspirations of the good or happy life, are crowned with an éclat. But, can man ever attain or realize this feat in the society? Is the idea of the good life, a mirage, a myth or reality? Even more seriously, what does the good life really entail? Is it predicated on material things, that is, on the mundane? Or is the good life, a kind of utopia, an ideal that seeks to bring to the glare of publicity, the “oughts” of life as the case may be? Since the idea of the good life is something well-defined, does it also imply that there is such a thing as the bad life? If, such exist, what would it consist of? Armed with these cogitations, this paper, attempts an expository-comparative study of the good life, its constitutive elements and its attainability in the thoughts of two distinguished philosophers: Confucius (in the East) and Aristotle (in the West).

A Review Essay on The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700–1850 by Joel Mokyr

2012 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Clark
Keyword(s):  
Review Essay ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
World History ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Intellectual Movement

The British Industrial Revolution is the key break in world history. Yet the timing, location, and cause of this Revolution are unsolved puzzles. Joel Mokyr's book is one of a number of recent attempted solutions. He explains the Industrial Revolution through the arrival of a particular ideology in Britain, associated with the earlier European intellectual movement of the Enlightenment. This review considers how Mokyr's “idealist” approach fares as an account of the Industrial Revolution, compared to the spate of recent proposed “materialist” explanations. (JEL N13, N63)

The Motivation to Not Cooperate

2021 ◽  
pp. 69-72
Author(s):  
Samuel Cohn
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Substantial Improvement ◽  
Military Power ◽  
Level Playing Field ◽  
Playing Field ◽  
Standards Of Living ◽  
The World ◽  
European Standards

This chapter analyzes how Europe historically underdeveloped much of the world. Europe had been growing endogenously during the last few centuries of the Middle Ages. However, its big break came from the discovery of the Americas. Mexico and Peru had supplies of silver far in excess of anything available in Europe. The Spanish seizure of the Mayan and Aztec kingdoms provided Europe with a vast supply of silver currency that led to one of the greatest monetary expansions in economic history. This financed both a substantial improvement in European standards of living and a substantial increase in European military power. The chapter then looks at how the Europeans treated Java, the economic center of ancient Indonesia, as well as India. When the Industrial Revolution came, Britain developed factory textiles, which threatened to bankrupt the rest of the world's textile makers. Most of the world that was not colonized responded to the British threat by putting tariffs on English textiles. Soon all of those nations had their own textile factories and were able to compete in the world clothing market on a level playing field.

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