Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made
1776 patent had expired did it become possible to develop new high-pressure designs suitable for mobile applications
Vaclav Smil • Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made
The demographic dividend is inherently time limited but its positive consequences can endure well beyond its end. As the large cohorts of working-age population age and retire, the dividend first recedes and then it disappears, but it can have a longer-term economic effect if the temporary gains were invested in infrastructures, education, health,
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In the common (albeit misleading) terminology, no industrial revolution could have taken place without the preceding agricultural revolution. This labor push factor was potentiated by the effect of the already noted Engel’s law: reduced share of spending on food can be used to buy more manufactured products. Second, new opportunities in industrial
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a genetically programmed maximum but because of a combination of natural constraints ranging from chronic diseases to the biomechanical limits of proteins (including the ubiquitous elastin) that form internal organs, bones, and muscles (Robert
Vaclav Smil • Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made
Longevity is an outcome of complex interactions that include economic, nutritional, and health care variables,
Vaclav Smil • Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made
consequences of the shift from subsistence to adequacy and then to ostentatious waste of resources.
Vaclav Smil • Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made
Higher yields reduced land needed per unit of output and allowed reforestation of previously farmed land, a trend particularly notable in parts of Europe and in Eastern North America
Vaclav Smil • Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made
Moving from a traditional village to a modern megacity is commonly associated with the doubling or tripling of per capita claims on the biosphere’s resources.
Vaclav Smil • Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made
Only after Watt’s