[Updated from earlier post on earlier freedom vs. equity value debate topic to economic stability vs. economic growth topic]
People in the south of England in the 1800s benefited from economic stability. Stability but less prosperity than those workers and factory owners with fast-expanding textile enterprise in Manchester and other industrializing cities in the north of England.
The fast industrializing cities paid workers much higher wages, and owners higher profits, but the fast growing textile industry was highly competitive with jobs and profits far less secure. Factories depended on cotton imported from Egypt and the United States. U.S. cotton was less expensive but less secure and when the Civil War started supplies were cut off, throwing tens of thousands out of work.
Fast-growing enterprises tend to be more risky and less stable. Jobs in older companies are lost from disruptive new technologies that increase productivity by automating tasks like weaving.
For students researching and debating the economic stability vs. economic growth topic, plus for other debaters with immigration and military commitments policy topics, Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel, North and South (free online) offers food for thought. The novel contrasts the traditions and values of the “old order” in the aristocratic south of England with the “new order” in the rapidly industrializing north. In the south people know their place and society is stable. But in the manufacturing towns in the north, textile mills are transforming society, offering higher wages and disrupting traditions and social stations. The fast expanding textile industry bring risks too, with busts following booms.
Across the developing world, industry along with international trade and investment are transforming traditions in long-impoverished societies. North and South looks at the conflicts and challenges as northern England industrialized in the mid-1800s. After long delay, that industrialization, now part of globalization as Hernando de Soto argues in the beginning of Globalization at the Crossroads, is spreading prosperity (and conflict) across Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
In addition to the novel, the North and South BBC miniseries is available on DVD and streams on various platforms (like Britbox).
Wikipedia says of North and South:
The serial is based on the 1855 Victorian novel North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell and takes place in the years surrounding the Great Exhibition of 1851. It was adapted for television by Sandy Welch and directed by Brian Percival.
Gaskell (1810-1865) examined social issues and some of her novels were critical of industrialization. North and South, originally serialized by Charles Dickens, compared the rural and aristocratic south of England with the rapidly industrializing north.
North and South offers an alternative view to the anti-capitalism in Dickens’ novels. Gaskell portrays both labor and business sympathetically. Innovative textile machinery raised productivity and though factory owners conspired to slow wage increases, they also competed against each other for labor, offering higher wages and better working conditions.
Workers became less deferential to aristocrats as their increased incomes allowed them more food, larger living spaces, better clothing, more children, and more choices for employment. But in the 1850s, wages and housing were far less than even a few decades later, which in turn were far less than wages and living standards later.
[Angus] Deaton, an economist at Princeton University who studied poverty in India and South Africa and spent decades working at the World Bank, won [the Nobel] prize for studying how the poor decide to save or spend money. But his ideas about foreign aid are particularly provocative. Deaton argues that, by trying to help poor people in developing countries, the rich world may actually be corrupting those nations’ governments and slowing their growth. According to Deaton, and the economists who agree with him, much of the $135 billion that the world’s most developed countries spent on official aid in 2014 may not have ended up helping the poor.
Critics of capitalism are, no surprise, also critics of international capitalism (globalization). Consider this
American Foreign Relations take on the globalization and WTO riots in Seattle in 1999:
The 1999 World Trade Organization summit in Seattle, Washington, vividly revealed the wide opposition to globalization, drawing a huge force of protesters from both poor countries and wealthy ones. Many of the protesters would agree with the arguments of Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello, who have asserted that the WTO “work[s] hand-in-hand with the IMF and the World Bank to impose the Corporate Agenda on developing countries.” This corporate agenda, they write, seeks “to reduce all barriers to downward leveling of environmental, labor, and social costs.” The American Friends Service Committee went so far as to claim that globalization “has undermined basic rights, cultural and community integrity, the environment, and equity … [and] caused economic insecurity.” Critics point out that it has also lessened the importance of nations that once could use their resources or strategic locations as bargaining chips for aid, and has helped to create global disasters like the banking crisis in Asia in 1997–1998.
So, is industrialization and globalization allowing billions around the world to earn higher incomes, or is capitalism and global trade somehow grinding the world’s poor deeper into poverty (while hurting middle income workers in developed countries)? These are questions worth researching as students debate foreign aid, legal immigration, and international terrorism, as well as students debating economic stability and growth.
Debates today over globalization and international trade reflect political and economic debates that have erupted over the last 150 years. Many, many books try to analyze living conditions of working families through the Industrial Revolution. Here is part of an
entry in the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics:At one time, behind the debate was an ideological argument between the critics 
(especially Marxists) and the defenders of free markets. The critics, or pessimists, saw nineteenth-century England as Charles Dickens’s Coketown or poet William Blake’s “dark, satanic mills,” with capitalists squeezing more surplus value out of the working class with each passing year. The defenders, or optimists, saw nineteenth-century England as the birthplace of a consumer revolution that made more and more consumer goods available to ordinary people with each passing year. The ideological underpinnings of the debate eventually faded, probably because, as T. S. Ashton pointed out in 1948, the industrial revolution meant the difference between the grinding poverty that had characterized most of human history and the affluence of the modern industrialized nations. No economist today seriously disputes the fact that the industrial revolution began the transformation that has led to extraordinarily high (compared with the rest of human history) living standards for ordinary people throughout the market industrial economies. [Source]
North and South gives us a glimpse of this vast spirit of enterprise as cities like Manchester were industrializing. New factories generated choking pollution, but pollution decreased as newer and more efficient machinery was developed and deployed (pollution was wasted energy! unburnt hydrocarbons!). Stunning gains in productivity led to a rapid fall in the price of cloth and clothing, as new automated looms could make in hours what handlooms took days or weeks to produce. Factory owners faced a challenging environment with lower margins and higher labor costs. Automation benefited everyday people now able to afford newer and better clothing. Some elites were upset that everyday people could afford cotton clothing that looked more and more like the linens only the wealthy with servants could afford.
The workers were earning more, but also having larger families. Just wages? Or were wages being held down by factory owners capturing labor’s “surplus value”? Could forming unions and threatening strikes push wages higher, or would unions and strikes disrupt industrial operations, wages, and productivity gains? That’s a question for today in the U.S. and around the world, just as it was in England in the 1850s.
Riots and terrorism around the world today are in some ways similar to the industrial violence of the 19th Century. People were poor and blamed their poverty on the ruling elites. New technologies threw thousands out of traditional low-productivity jobs as they created newer higher-productivity jobs, usually with higher pay. New economic opportunities allowed wives and daughters to earn their own incomes, reducing the control of fathers and brothers in traditional societies.
After building his successful enterprise, the business hero of North and South decides to get the education he couldn’t afford and didn’t have time for as a young man. He hires a retired minister from the south of England to tutor him. As he learns through evening discussions with his tutor, he also discusses social issues and social justice with the minister’s daughter. She is unhappy to have had to move from her quiet rural life in the south to the rude, free-wheeling, chaotic busy world of the industrializing north.
They discuss freedom, justice, and the plight of the poor. They fight and disagree about ideas and the world around them. And maybe they will fall in love.
