Between 1760 and 1860, technological progress, education, and an increasing capital stock transformed England into the workshop of the world. The industrial revolution, as the transformation came to be known, caused a sustained rise in real income per person in England and, as its effects spread, in the rest of the Western world. Historians agree that the industrial revolution was one of the most important events in history, marking the rapid transition to the modern age, but they disagree vehemently about many aspects of the event. Of all the disagreements, the oldest one is over how the industrial revolution affected ordinary people, often called the working classes. One group, the pessimists, argues that the living standards of ordinary people fell, while another group, the optimists, believes that living standards rose.
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.
Answer:
The 13.5 million immigrants increased the cultural diversity and provided employers with a wider range of diversity of employees, so they were able to hire more specialized individuals for a lesser cost. The "melting pot" is essentially what is a mix of many different cultures into a culture conglomerate. Think of a stew, you throw in the potatoes, the carrots, the broth, and whatever else. While each element of the stew remains distinct in of itself, its still part of the larger element, the stew, and as such has become affected by it and is no longer the exact same as before you put the ingredients into the stew. The positives of these elements are that the US has a greater economic force due to the diversity of ideas creating new products and the availability of workers, but such a wide range of opinions of differing cultures may cause conflicts and polarization.
The creation of new knowledge systems, social hierarchies, and networks of thinkers