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High Energy is Harming the UK Economy
The United Kingdom, which started the Industrial Revolution in 1769, is highly dependent.
Like all other modern industrialised and post-industrial economies, productivity heavily relies on energy consumption, which is a force multiplier of consumption.
For the first 50 years after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, around 1760, labour productivity grew at an average annual rate of around 0.5 per cent. Still, it accelerated to more than 1 percent in the 19th century.
Before the advent of modern machinery and other technologies such as the computer, people’s productivity depended on the agricultural economy.
Machines enabled European nations to be more productive, have a surplus of resources, and have a workforce and a population that is not dependent on what can be grown in the fields.
Great Britain in the 19th century was producing enough surplus goods even though places like China had more agricultural production and pig iron to make steel for the British, the world’s first industrialised nation, which had a surplus.
How economies worked before industrialisation: they were heavily dependent on the agricultural economy, and even though they could produce massive quantities of raw material, especially in continental-sized nations such…
