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A Farewell to Alms, through p.272
Clark reconceptualizes what the Industrial Revolution was all about. It wasn't a huge spurt of technology, circa 1780-1830, but rather there was a prior period of slow and gradual improvement in living standards. That contribution completely revises the "rise of the West debate." While Clark is not the first "gradualist" on this topic, he makes the best and most conceptual case for throwing out previous understandings of the Industrial Revolution.
That point alone makes this one of the most important books of recent times. My main difference with Clark, in these sections...
...comes again on the question of science. He points out correctly that most of the major technological innovators did not get much for their efforts. Clark therefore does not see the late 18th century or early 19th century as giving special incentives for science. I agree as far as he goes, but I view the incentives for science more broadly.
Core Europe, starting in late medieval times, developed a new and still poorly understood organizational technology. This was, very roughly, the ability to work in groups, cumulate technologies and advances, and learn from each other in competitive environments. Most notably, this new technology led the Florentine and Venetian Renaissances, especially in the visual arts. But there was more. The rise of printing. The rise of classical music, starting in 1685 or whenever. The rise of early modern philosophy. Europe goes crazy with inventiveness, albeit in splats and bursts. (Clark's own chapter 12 gives good evidence for this tendency, though it will play a less central role in his version of the story.)
It is also the case that most of these bursts of inventiveness didn't do much for the average standard of living. Yes mastering oil paint technique made Florence richer but not so much.
It just so happened that one of these bursts came in science, technology, and engineering. And it came in England, mostly for reasons of "national character." It just so happened that the English burst did more for the standard of living, for reasons of external benefits. But having had such a burst was not unique to England. England was just one spoke on a more broadly turning wheel, and a European distribution of bursts was well in place prior to most of the special conditions we might find in England.
England, by the way, also had the literary revolution of the 18th century, and England plus Scotland drove the rise of modern economics. There is no Chinese Adam Smith and that is because that Europe was pulling decisively ahead in ideas production. I consider this a fact of great importance whereas for Clark it is a sideshow to some other story.
Most generally, I see the historical problem of growth through the lens of culture -- in the sense of the history of the arts, music, and letters -- more than through the economic history literature. I am very taken by Max Weber's writing on Western music and also his conception of the broader style of Western rationality. And I see the rise of these organizational improvements as a central -- the central? -- story of early modern Europe and the move to prosperity. It simply took a long time to apply these organizational movements to science, and to turn that science into concrete technical advances.
None of this need contradict Clark and indeed you will find parts of this narrative in his book. But unlike Clark I would not superimpose this on a broader Malthusian story or an emphasis on the long run. Nor am I putting much stock in genetic evolution. So these organizational/technological improvements, in my view, move closer to the center of the story of European progress.
Unlike Clark, I think incentives to create matter greatly, but not through patents or other direct pecuniary rate of return effects. The great creators have a burning desire to create, provided they have the opportunity to do so. This new European technology of organization (whatever it should be called), combined with growing wealth for the upper classes, meant that such creative opportunities were far more available than ever before. And powerful intellects grabbed them, for reasons of psychic incentives. So incentives are paramount to the European story, while Clark remains correct in criticizing the standard account of how those incentives might have mattered.
I also see England has having innovated with the quality of its state in particular its fiscal grounding. I wish this played a larger role in Clark's account although of course I understand why it does not. Institutions are not allowed to become a competing force on center stage. The economic returns from colonies might be given more play as well.
Overall I am willing to accept many of Clark's arguments, but I always go back to wanting to superimpose a broader institutional story on his microfoundations.
He resists that move, and that is the major place where I part company with him. I think he is too intent on pushing institutional and ideological factors off the stage; I am happy to allow Clark's factors on the stage -- most of all gradual growth downward mobility and quality of labor -- but I want a very busy and cluttered stage.
I believe, by the way, that if Clark's vision were correct, Australia and New Zealand would be stronger economic powerhouses than has turned out to be the case.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on September 4, 2007 at 06:49 AM in Books | Permalink
Comments
Tyler: I agree that internal motivations, status, opportunity, etc are far more important drivers for high quality innovation and creation than monetary incentives are, and that the monetary incentives rarely ever go to the great innovators anyway. This and history tend fairly strongly to make me think that patents and copyright don't increase, and possibly greatly decrease society's level of creativity and innovation, while an unconditional basic income would drive an unprecedented hyper-renaissance. Do you agree with these economic predictions?
Posted by: michael vassar at Sep 4, 2007 8:15:04 AM
Isn't the main thing that the "ideas production" produced was a relatively libertarian spirit and understanding in Britain?
Isn't what the "technology" and "organization" of idea production achieved was an persuasive explanation that our ingrained, ever-present moral responsibility to others is unsullied when we let our acquisitive penchants and creative passions go, within the grammar of commutative justice?
Isn't it the case that there were a few thousand people in Britain who thought that way, and wrote and adjudicated and ruled that way (relative to other places), and consequently led the culture to be more libertarian than other countries?
Isn't it the case that we should be talking about culture?
Posted by: Daniel Klein at Sep 4, 2007 9:02:56 AM
The deeper I get into ‘A Farewell to Arms’ the outline of Gregory Clark’s main thesis begins to take shape. I cannot anticipate its full form, but I am getting restless with it already. I find the book enjoyable to read, and exasperating in parts at the same time. His main but flawed criticism of Adam Smith, apart from lumping him carelessly with neoclassical economics, jars when he quotes in place of the so-called ‘industrial revolution’ a phrase that could have come direct from both Wealth Of Nations (1776) and Lectures On Jurisprudence (1762-3), namely ‘slowly and gradually’, and while claiming this as a correction to the wilder ideas of 19th century and 20th century economic historians, he also uses it to take a side swipe at Smith, as if he wrote something different.
Smith historical analysis would sit easy with Clark’s ‘brief economic history of the world’. Smith sourced the habits of commercial society right back in the hunter-gatherer ‘rude’ societies, the ‘very slow and gradual consequence’ of ‘the propensity to truck, barter, and trade’. His assessment of each ‘age’ that followed – shepherding and agriculture – was that they increased the productive powers of labour.
Hence, the history of the last ten millennia is not the fact that subsistence levels of consumption did not change (which Smith agreed was the case to the 18th century), but that total output of the ‘necessaries, conveniences, and amusements of life’ did change constantly. To focus on per capital averages and not on gross annual outputs is misleading.
Technology did change and improve constantly, though not year-by-year. Clark is in a hurry – ‘why did it take so long?’, etc. I find asking why Babylon didn’t go on to a massive rise in per capita income a most strange idea. How many ‘hanging gardens’ could they produce and who would invest their non-extistent capital in them elsewhere? Labour is not enough for speeding through to the commercial age.
The pace began to ‘quicken’ (relatively speaking; more like separate strands were converging slowly: think of Smith’s account of the common labourer’s jacket) in the 16th – 18th century. Everything else was dragged along not just by knowledge, but by its dissemination (printing, art, culture, languages, and inter-actions on a scale in Europe). The image that Clark gives by way of criticising standard ‘explanations’ of applying neoclassical rational thinking to all (something Smith could never be accused of) and to history is perfectly justified, though his examples sometimes are quite, er, ‘silly’, for example in respect of the alleged economics of slaves doing a deal with their masters. Isolated examples are not data. Nor does it help, in my view, that Solow’s neoclassical growth theory, with its equilibrium explanations and assumptions, etc., is used to explain history. Growth is a process of disequilibria.
History, since ‘rude’ society is the history of the ruling orders, who built the artefacts of civilisation out of the surplus extracted from the subsistence labour of the majority. This raised poor bright people as well as it gave roles for disinherited rich sons. That innovators did not gain the prizes they are supposed to have lusted after is not germane. They didn’t know they were going to be cheated out of their ‘letters patent’. Think of Harrison’s chronometer and his non-‘prize’ denied to him by rivals for many years, which changed shipping by enabling longitude to be measured on great circles, anywhere on earth, thus raising productivity. Joan Thirsk has written about the Elizabethan attempts to kick start economic development and get the poor to work, and how its many gains were sullied by the attendant corruption that set in. (Economic Policy and Projects: the development of consumer society in Early Modern England, OUP,1978).
It is not the certainty of prizes, or rewards, that drove them – that prizes didn’t come after the fact cannot be said to have influenced their work beforehand. If James Watt had not been refused the right to work as an instrument maker in Glasgow by the local Guild, and the Senate at Glasgow University, a member of which was Adam Smith, had not appointed him to the University in 1763, which was outside the Guild’s legal rights to prohibition, he would not have been given the University’s model Newcomen steam engine to repair, which he did and then went on the improve it. Such are the tenuous events that led to Britain’s lead in power-driven machinery in the 19th century.
I look forward to the next chapters.
Posted by: Gavin Kennedy at Sep 4, 2007 9:23:47 AM
Since virtually all of the innovators were men, maybe something changed in the way of sexual incentives. Maybe a cultural change took place which allowed innovators more fame (if not fortune), which in turn led to other innovators joining the fray. Clark's thesis is that the population was getting smarter over time, so the change in question could have been just a generally greater appreciation of intelligence in others, i.e. women came to appreciate male intelligence more.
Posted by: Dennis Mangan at Sep 4, 2007 10:07:00 AM
That's one of the (many) reasons I read this blog every day - Gavin Kennedy that's probably the best blog post I've ever read. I'm waiting to read the book as I'm currently away from my amazon delivery address, but I can't wait now...
Viva la (Marginal) Revolution!
Posted by: nick at Sep 4, 2007 10:46:07 AM
It is of course worth noting that an explosion in innovation had happened before but not an explosion of scientific/technological innovation. The explanation for that might be as simple though as saying that the previous explosion never expanded beyond the Greek population, which was very small compared to the population of Western Europe in 1400 or so.
Of course, no-one has answered the question of what these institutions were that Greece had but Persia and Rome lacked or that England had and China lacked. Given the first example, they don't seem to be due to evolutionary change. Printing has often been seen as a very big deal, but not big enough to spread European institutions to China.
Posted by: michael vassar at Sep 4, 2007 10:50:02 AM
Clark’s most important piece of evidence, at least relative to my priors, is the table on p. 235 in which he shows that many of the inventors of important technologies did not have their intellectual property rights protected. This will be grist for the mill (pun intended) of Julio Cole, Jeff Hummel, and others who think that the importance of intellectual property rights has been way overstated. Clark also points out (p. 236) that of the 379 people who died in Britain in the 1860s leaving estates of more than half a million pounds, only 17 were in textiles. I find this second piece of evidence interesting but only somewhat persuasive. Half a million pounds back then translates into somewhere between $10 million and $20 million today. So could there have been many textile people dying in the 1860s who left estates of a quarter of a million pounds? The equivalent of $5 million would have been a strong incentive to innovate, especially given the high marginal utility of money then compared to now—remember his own Malthusian trap that Clark has leaned on throughout the book.
I also think Clark too quickly dismisses Kremer’s population argument (p. 228). He states, “Under Kremer’s argument, the growth rate of ideas would be at best just proportionate to population size.” I think this is false. My own hunch is that it would be proportionate to the square of population density: with more people around there is more interaction and linearity doesn’t apply. And since, for a given land area, population density is proportional to population, then the growth rate of ideas would be proportional to the square of population. If I’m right then the solid line graph on p. 227 does fit Kremer’s story.
Two great sections of writing and thinking to highlight before I get to some smaller criticisms:
First one, p. 211:
Yet this approach exerts its powerful hold over the economics profession in part because of the limited historical knowledge of most economists. The caricature many modern economists have of the world before the Industrial Revolution is a mixture of all the bad movies ever made about early societies. Vikings pour out of long ships to loot and pillage defenseless peasants and burn the libraries of monasteries. Etc.
Second one, p. 230. (Adam Smith couldn’t have said it better):
As the [French] revolutionaries fed on each other, revolutionary equality soon yielded to a vainglorious military dictatorship that led hundreds of thousands to their starving, frozen end on the Russian steppes. Meanwhile a “nation of shopkeepers,” incapable it seemed of vision beyond their next beef pudding, was transforming the possibilities for all humanity. And in the process, as we shall see, they ushered in more egalitarian societies than had been witnessed for thousands of years.
Finally, three critical comments:
1. On p. 205, Clark makes an amazing statement about causality. He states, “When two variables are so closely correlated one must cause the other.” His only hedge is a footnote that states, “Or there could be a single independent cause for both.” This is absolutely false. What happened to what we point out in introductory econometrics classes: correlation does not necessarily imply causation.
2. Clark misuses the term “beg the question.” (p. 259). What he means is “raise the question.”
3. I must agree with Gavin Kennedy that reading this book is frustrating. Clark sprinkles astounding bits of information that make me glad I read the book while at the same time not steering a clear path. Or, more correctly, maybe he’s steering a clear path but he seems to get sidetracked.
Posted by: David R. Henderson at Sep 4, 2007 11:19:01 AM
I’m not sure I see the relationship between the developments in high culture Tyler and Dan Klein point to as decisive, and the cultural evolution toward middle class habits that resulted from downward mobility of the economically successful – the primary cultural development for Clark.
Are these two aspects of the same thing? They certainly don’t sound very similar. What do they have in common, except the spread of literacy and numeracy?
Did the flowering of high culture cause the other? This doesn’t seem plausible. The burst of high culture in the Hellenic world didn’t do much for work habits or economic growth, as Tyler points out. Or was the short-run effect of high culture primarily on the institutions, as Tyler and Klein both suggest? That just takes us back to Clark’s skepticism about the importance of those institutions. Could those changes in high culture brought about the IR, even if they affected institutions, without the other kind of cultural evolution emphasized by Clark?
Clark doesn’t say much about just what this bourgeois ethos was in concrete terms, but if it had a lot to do with willingness to work long and hard at boring and repetitive tasks, it’s hard to relate that to a Mozart or David Hume. More often than not people contrast the bourgeois ethos with the drive to create. If you are saying they are essentially the same thing, as a good Randroid would, then I don’t see it as a critique of Clark.
Dan Klein suggests we should be talking about culture – but isn’t that what Clark is talking about? The cultural evolution toward the bourgeois way of life? Maybe we should be talking more about the details of that change.
Posted by: Kent Guida at Sep 4, 2007 11:31:57 AM
I am enjoying these comments - even the more critical ones. I do want to respond, but will be out of action for the next 3 hours with some daily life business.
Posted by: Gregory Clark at Sep 4, 2007 11:32:47 AM
Read a biography of Mr. Tesla. There was an interesting story on incentives.
I imagine the late 19th century the way I do the late 20th century. You had a lot of people who had a lot of venture capital to invest in "science," In the 1990s it was the "internet" and "ebuisness." Development will go in the direction of what venture capitalists think will be next big thing.
Posted by: Jacob at Sep 4, 2007 1:26:14 PM
All right, I should not be commenting here as I have not read the book, but I see
no contradiction between established stories about the Industrial Revolution in Britain
from many sources and the claim of a gradual rise in living standards there between 1780
and 1830. This strikes me as simply being a matter of a simple mathematical confusion,
that between a discontinuity in a level and a discontinuity in a rate of change.
So, people like Alexander Gerschenkron and Simon Kuznets, who set out to document when
the Industrial Revolution started in various countries, observed its takeoff (to use
Rostowian langugage) as coinciding with a discontinuity in the rate of growth, usually
from near zero in per capita terms to something noticeably positive, with Gerschenkron's
famous law of relative backwardness arguing that the later a country takes off, the more
rapidly it grows (or can grow), at least at first after the takeoff due to being able to leapfrog
over greater degrees of technological differentiation and productivity as compared to the
leading edge of the world economy. Given Britain's role as the starting country, its takeoff
was the least dramatic and the slowest as there was no such possibility of any accelerated
leapfrogging, although still a discontinuity in the rate of growth supposedly occurred around 1780.
So, a discontinuity in the rate of growth that moves it from near zero to about 1-1 1/2% results
in a gradual rise in living standards over the next 50 years. But what triggered that discontinuity?
Does Clark deny that there was a major wave of technological innovations in the period around
1780 in Britain, with the justly famous Watt steam engine of 1776 being a crucially important one
and with a bunch of others clustered in a short period of time in what most historians have long
identified as the technologically leading sector, the textile industry?
I apologize for commenting on this without having read the book, but I would be curious to read
how the book refutes this rather standard story that I have just laid out above. What has been
presented so far both by Tyler and the discussants does not even begin to do so, and the claim
that the story of a gradual increase in living standards in Britain between 1780 and 1830 is
somehow enormously important strikes me as enormously exaggerated. It is simply the logical and
obvious outcome of the standard story of a technologically induced upward ratcheting of the
long rate of economic growth in Britain, if not as sharp a one as would happen in other countries
later that went through the same "Revolution," as explained by Gerschenkron (1962).
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Sep 4, 2007 1:37:26 PM
Kent Guida comments about what I wrote, and prompts me to say more.
What I think must be a crucial part of the story of the institutions and widespread belief systems that emerged is the (relatively) libertarian character achieved by what I would call the (relatively) enlightened thinking among an influential minority of the population. That body of enlightened thinking came to be called "liberalism".
Certain ideas are both important and rather true, and they have a force by virtue of the combination of those two characteristic. That force should be part of the historical narrative. The name we give to that force is "enlightenment." Talking about that force, substantively, however, requires that one take a stand about what is both important and true--something that ninnies and nincompoops shrink from doing. Also, scholars and others will often get the substance of enlightenment wrong, which doesn't do much to advance the inclusion of enlightenment as a historical force.
Ludwig von Mises was a crank, but nonetheless I think there is something to the following paragraph:
"The most amazing thing concerning the unprecedented change in earthly conditions brought about by capitalism is the fact that it was accomplished by a small number of authors and a hardly greater number of statesmen who had assimilated their teachings. Not only the sluggish masses but also most of the businessmen who, by their trading, made the laissez-faire principles effective failed to comprehend the essential features of their operation. Even in the heyday of liberalism only a few people had a full grasp of the functioning of the market economy. Western civilization adopted capitalism upon recommendation on the part of a small élite."
(from Mises, The Anti-Capitalist Mentality, p. 21 of new edition, and online).
Schumpeter, in his own nincompoopish way, says something highly congruent on pp. 136-37 of Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.
Like Kent Guida, I would have a hard time seeing how Mozart helped to advance liberalism. But, I have an easy time seeing what David Hume, Adam Smith, et al had to do with it. They enlightened people.
We should talk about enlightenment as an historical force--unfortunately, not a supreme one.
What explains modern prosperity? To some extent it is that the powers that be sufficiently figured out, smiled on, or acquiesced to the necessary moral, ethical, political, and legal reforms, and that was partly because they absorbed the ideas, directly or indirectly, represented by the great liberal writers.
(BTW, I confess to not having opened Clark's book.)
Posted by: Daniel Klein at Sep 4, 2007 1:45:26 PM
Much of the recent commentary focuses on the relation between what Tyler calls Clark's "microfoundations" (the material/demographic trends of the Malthusian regime) and the specific cultural or institutional changes traditionally used to explain the location and timing of the breakout from the Trap. This is -- as I pointed out in an earlier post -- analogous to the "infrastructure/superstructure" debate among Marxist historians of the rise of capitalism.
Part of the problem is caused by the very different time frames inherent in the two levels of analysis. Clark's mechanisms can explain why all settled agricultural regimes subject to the Malthusian pressures would eventually create human beings capable of making the breakthrough to modern economic growth, thereby explaining its global spread -- regardless of whether the selection processes involved were cultural, genetic or, most likely, both (what recent theory calls "co-evolution). But with these processes working over long periods and relatively slowly (the unit time of transmission being a generation), it's hard to explain with Clark's framework alone the "precociousness" of England. Why was the supply of innovators so large in 18th century England? Why did the latest theoretical and experimental science get readily incorporated into the work of these innovators (as shown by Margaret Jacob and Joel Mokyr). Why England before the rest of Europe and Europe before China and India?
To answer these questions, what we need to "superimpose" (as Tyler puts it) on top of Clark's framework is not so much institutions of governance or property, but the kind of developments outlined in Weber's Sociology of Religion and Merton's Sociology of Science, which can explain why English society could generate -- and incorporate -- the innovators and why China, India and the Islamic world had no equivalents of Bacon, Newton, Smith, and Malthus himself.
Posted by: David H. Levey at Sep 4, 2007 2:13:01 PM
Dan,
I think one of the key points of Clark's book is that many of the "necessary moral, ethical, political, and legal reforms" that we often think of as being necessary for laissez-faire had already existed for hundreds of years in England without spurring an Industrial Revolution. Property rights and limited government had been around a while, with the miracles of increasing prosperity nowhere in sight.
So perhaps those laissez-faire reforms were necessary but not sufficient--and if so, then what else was needed on top of laissez-faire to create the IR? I think this is where Tyler's point about the culture of creativity comes in--something that is often considered quite separate from laissez-faire. Mokyr's book Gifts of Athena makes a good case for a new cultural shift that was prima facie unrelated to property rights and personal freedom: It was a spirit of inquiry.
I think Clark's discussion of the hundreds of years between laissez-faire (at least as conventionally understood) and the IR is a fascinating, well-made point.
Our new GMU colleague Gary Richardson argues in ongoing research that there's a good reason why it took hundreds of years: It took Parliament that long to tinker with property rights in a Coasian fashion to get the kinds of property rights that actually created value. That seems well worth considering....
Your first post on cultural change got me thinking about Robert Lucas's "A Million Mutinies" essay. Lucas argues that economic change, like cultural change, requires a willingness to abandon hidebound tradition. He talks about Naipaul's novel A House for Mr. Biswas as an illustration. It's quite a nice piece:
http://www.minneapolisfed.org/pubs/region/01-12/lucas.cfm
Posted by: Garett Jones at Sep 4, 2007 6:02:37 PM
So, fine, I agree that "culture of creativity" is probably necessary, especially for an initial
industrial revolution, with a bunch of institutional and other stuff lying behind it. But is not
the standard story still true at the immediate point, that an outburst of linked technological
innovations in the late 1700s in Britain triggered a discontinuous increase in the long run growth
rate that then led to a gradual increase in living standards? Does Clark's book deny this, and if
so on what grounds?
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Sep 4, 2007 6:08:51 PM
Let me comment a little on how I arrived at the story of the Industrial Revolution given in the book - and through that perhaps generate some understanding about why what is proposed in the book seems the only possible story.
Despite the fact that the IR in England in 1800 is THE great event of economic history, and perhaps of human history, there are surprisingly few people who directly study it any longer (Joel Mokyr, and also to some degree Joachim Voth and Anthony Wrigley). The topic has been largely abandoned in economic history (as opposed to theory where it is alive, but they tend not to explain any actually observed Industrial Revolution).
Deirdre McCloskey, for example, wrote a wonderful essay on the Industrial Revolution in the Cambridge Economic History of Britain circa 1983. But when that work was revised in the 1990s in the revised essay she essentially throws up her hands and says in effect "This stuff is just inexplicable."
The reason it is largely abandoned is that the IR is a huge, glaring challenge that mocks the pretensions of modern economics to understand economic growth.
One of the reasons this book took so long to finish was that I could not see for the longest time any way forward on the IR.
As I thought about it I came to the conclusion that, given how little was happening in England institutionally in the run up to the IR, and how little incentives changed in the IR, the process would only become explicable if
(1) The Industrial Revolution was really much more gradual than the conventional history assumes. Accidents, demography, etc all conspired to make 1800 seem like a much more sudden break than it was.
(2) Britain was less unique in this period than conventional histories assume. The IR was geographically also much more diffuse.
One of the big empirical contributions of the book is to try to make that case.
That made it possible that some kind of evolutionary development of the economy could explain the IR.
Posted by: Gregory Clark at Sep 4, 2007 8:17:31 PM
I agree with Tyler Cowen and David H. Levey. I am not a monist and don't suppose that there is a single answer. But I think the most important thing by far was that the Renaissance was capped in England by Francis Bacon. It is remarkable how many people in our time have forgotten what a huge turnabout in cultural outlook was programmed by that man, nearly in a moment. He was cited continuously for 200 years.
Bacon wrote down the rule that instrumental rationality was applicable across the board -- across the entire range of human endeavors. Splitting, weighing, rejoining materials was a general strategy that could be pursued everywhere; material improvements could be sought everywhere; life might be improved everywhere. It wasn't merely "science" as now defined -- occultism and magic were also instrumental pursuits. And Bacon and his followers singled-out the artisans and manufacture, as ripe for scrutiny and improvement.
Bacon described and called for an "institutional" change in the broadest sense of a mental redirection. He called it the "instauration." Given the enormous mental inertia that was still to be overcome, perhaps we ought be surprised that the Industrial Revolution followed in only 150 years.
There had been NO statement of this program before this time, anywhere. The religious teaching was that the world had fallen from a perfect state into degeneration.
Of course there was medieval preparation for the instauration: in thinking with objects, strength of materials, and diagrammatic and mathematical invention such as the "latitude of forms." Much of this, such as some of Leonardo and Galileo, had come out of practical orientation. And the Renaissance was already noted for, among other things, a huge acceleration in the number of Aristotelian commentaries: 6653 commentaries were written between 1500 and 1650 A.D. (That was an elevenfold increase from the prior century.)
Although he was the closest precursor to Bacon in generality of program, of course Aristotle did not call for the general rule of experimental improvements in the mechanical arts, so far as we know. Although, from around 150-100 B.C. (150 years after Aristotle,) we have THIS show-stopping little number!:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
Posted by: Lee A. Arnold at Sep 4, 2007 8:45:46 PM
Gavin Kennedy seems to think that the view of the pre-industrial world in the book is not that much different from Adam Smith's.
I disagree.
Smith is all about Smithian Growth in the millenia leading to 1776 - the expansion of the economy by reducing the impediments to trade, and thus extending the division of labor. This growth thus has at its base institutional improvements. Some modern economists, such as Avner Greif, give great weight to an extension of this vision whereby the key to growth is the devising of institutions which allow trade.
AFTA argues these processes, at least in the years 1200-1800 in England, were inconsequential. Trade possibilities were probably as good in 1300 as in 1800. The economy had improved somewhat, but technological advance dominated throughout.
AFTA thus argues for many purposes, Smith was a minor figure. The great intellectual figure of the era was Malthus, whose thinking was much more attuned to the realities of the pre-industrial world.
Posted by: Gregory Clark at Sep 4, 2007 9:02:05 PM
As a physicist with little former knowledge of economics, perhaps I can contribute an outsider's perspective on the book thus far.
1. Before the IR, humankind was in a quasi-static ecological equilibrium. The rate at which efficiency grew was slow with respect to the time scale of population growth. Easy enough.
2. What was the IR? The best answer I can glean is found in Figure 12.8, which shows a population growth which did not push down income per person. It held steady for a while, than actually started to increase. Seems to me this would be driven by an increased rate of efficiency growth (to offset and eventually overcome the decreasing marginal output per worker). Once the threshold is crossed the geometric nature of population growth takes over.
3. Even before getting to the presentation of Pomerantz's theory on pg 260, I asked myself the question: what allows our immensely greater efficiency then pre-IR society? I answered: fossil fuels. What would happen to efficiency or income per person if we ran out of oil tomorrow?
4. Can we really say we have escaped the "Malthusian Trap?" After all, death rates must eventually equal or surpass birth rates. We have been in a far-from-equilibrium condition for 200 years, a blip in geological time. This cannot last forever. In order to maintain a high income per person, we need to continue to have external sources of energy and limit fertility. Is it even possible to equilibrate at close to the present value of income per person, or will this era combust as quickly as its energy source?
5. The idea that evolved cultural traits are required to establish a modern economy seems like a no-brainier. A portion of this is probably biological, but I expect cultural is more important (given how the variations between individuals swamps variations between populations). Precisely what these traits are (and how heritable they are) is an important question and should be explored directly, rather than indirectly inferred and theorized about.
Posted by: Eric Preston at Sep 4, 2007 9:34:39 PM
Gregory Clark,
So, I have not read your book, but I have read several accounts of your supposed Malthusian mechanism.
I am not going to dispute that there may have been some change in either culture or genetics or both
that fed into the propensity for supportive institutions for both technological change and capital
investment and entrepreneurship (although a lot of the latter at the time of the IR was concentrated
among religious minorities in Britain). However, when I read that you are arguing for these demographic
factors to simply predominate over everything else, I find this unconvincing, although perhaps I would
feel differently if I read your book.
First of all, regarding some crucial institutional frameworks, they predated the period of which I gather you
write. I am thinking of such things as the Magna Carta dating from the 1200s. Granted, it in itself was not
clearly or directly tied to economic factors or behavior, but many would say that the parliamentary system
put in place during the Glorius Revolution was, a view supported by both Joel Mokyr and John Nye. And a lot
of historians see the Glorious Revolution as the lineal descendant of the Magna Carta. So, it would seem that
at least some of the favorable cultural/genetic trends were already going on or in place prior to the period
you focus on, if that is what lies behind such favorable developments.
Now, I see you stating above that technological change is the key to what was going on. So, presumably all these
favorable demographic changes were supposed to feed into some tendency to carry out technological changes. Now, I
can think of some other factors that favored England with respect to the specific tech changes that were involved
in the IR. In particular, I am thinking about the presence of lots of coal in England and how that may have given
England an edge in the development of the crucial steam engine. What is involved is both that coal is what feeds steam
engines and gives them the sufficient power to drive more substantial machinery and industrial processes, as well as
the fact that the early steam engines were developed and used in the very process of mining coal. I am thinking of
the Newcomen steam engine dating to around 1700, which was first used to pump water out of coal mines, with the coal
conveniently right there to be used to help in its own mining. Following path dependence kinds of arguments, it
could be argued that the later emergence of the Watt engine at the crucial point in time of the discontinuity in the
growth rate, was fundamentally derived from this rather fortuitous earlier historical accident, which was partly based
on a convenient geographical fact, the large amount of coal and its usage in Britain.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Sep 4, 2007 11:12:23 PM
Garett,
Thank you for the focus on why the IR didn't come earlier.
You suggest that Britain in, say, 1400, had property rights and limited government. I don't know, let's say they did.
But did they have moral authorization to go out and get rich? Did they have moral authority to abandon hidebound traditions?
My historical knowledge is meager, but my impression is that they had no such moral authorization.
As I understand it, they weren't enlightened in that way. That only came later, notably by virtue of individuals who made a profound and elegant case for the moral warrant to go out and get rich, within the grammar of commutative justice.
/Dan
Posted by: Daniel Klein at Sep 5, 2007 1:15:09 AM
Gregory Clark neatly summarises his impression of the differences between our approaches. Let me be clear: I have no axe to grind for forcing Adam Smith as a ‘major’, nor resisting an assessment that he was a ‘minor’, figure. It seems to me as a reader of Greg’s book (rigorously following Tyler’s ‘rules’ to read and debate in restricted order to page 272), that much of what Gregory asserts as ‘new’, ‘last 70 years research’, about the period to 1800 (itself an arbitrary watershed) was discussed in detail by Adam Smith (WON, and LOJ), and indeed formed much of his distinct contribution, and was in place before 1763. That is all I have been saying in this debate. Greg rejects these statements, but so far in AFTA (what a brilliant contraction!) I read nothing to contradict the view that Greg has a view of Adam Smith heavily influenced by The Neoclassical Distortion. It would be better if he demonstrated he had read WON and LOJ.
That ‘Trade possibilities were probably as good in 1300 as in 1800’, I find breathtaking. I have noted his references and will read these on my return to Edinburgh from France in October. But I find it weird (‘exasperating’ even) that Greg make these sorts of grand statements. Exactly what were people in 1300 going to trade (and with who?) in 1300 comparable to what many more of them they could trade in 1800 among themselves and with Europe and north America (Europe couldn’t even sail to America until the end of the 15th century).
Feudal agriculture was not a place that potential traders could wander off their Lord’s lands (with what?) and go to the mainly miserable collection of hovels, called ‘towns’, and take advantage of hardly existent trade potentials. This was not the American ‘west’. In find references to that period being ‘laissez-faire’ problematical (it wasn’t in France, the source of the laissez-faire phrase in 1690). Trade fairs expanded in location across Europe (Braudel, et al) and were controlled locally.
There were pedlars travelling long distances across Europe with what they could carry for petty trades a few centuries after 1300. This was part of the long and slow (and dangerous) process of the re-emergence of the age of commerce, and it had a long way to go before trade became significant. The Elizabethan government adopted a policy of encouraging domestic manufacture (early import substitution of ‘luxury’ goods and ‘secret’, i.e., ‘stolen’ technologies), to reward the people who established them (often, incidentally ‘merchant’ adventurers who were the younger sons of well-off local people!) and to set to work ‘indigent’ and unemployed familes, children included. Employment kept them alive and their children survived too. From the early 1600s to the mid-18th century, local dispersed commercial process continued in fits and starts, often suppressed by the town guilds, letters patent, and outright corruption, otherwise known as mercantile political economy, to establish the markets that Greg claims were always there since 1300.
So my ‘axe’ is not so much to heap praise on Adam Smith as to question Greg’s narrative supporting his impressive and interesting data. My only comment on Malthus, writing in the early 1800s, is that his major idea – the ‘Malthusian trap’ – appeared at the moment it was being thwarted.
As stated, I look forward to reading the next chapters. If I am wrong I shall be happy to concede to it. So far I think Greg has to have a ‘big finish’.
Posted by: Gavin Kennedy at Sep 5, 2007 2:39:44 AM
@michael vassar:
Why would an unconditional basic income spur a hyper-rennaissance? wouldn't it, with todays methods of "having fun"/distraction, actually do the opposite?
You take it for granted that more free time and less ordeal in general life would increase time spent on creative activities. However, regard people on unemployment pays and do you see them miraculously invent new principles/ideas or even works of art?
I think maybe one of the conditions that also brought up invention in Britain was the need to invent. Why are the Jewish people always been rich and inventive, because they always were a minority that had to suffer from the societies majorities and thus became inventive out of the need to survive.
So, I think a basic income as it is already implemented in Germany or France, actually decreases invention and creativity.
And I tend to agree, if I have to look at myself at the moment, rather writing an over-long comment instead of working properly...
Posted by: Max at Sep 5, 2007 5:32:05 AM
A large number of scholars including Greg Clark have in fact demonstrated that the industrial revolution was a much more gradual process than was previously thought. This was a live area of debtate 15 -20 years ago but was largely settled by the work of Nick Crafts and Knick Harley. See the debate in the Economic History Review, volumes 44 and 46, 1992 between Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson on the one hand and Crafts and Harley on the other for instance. As a result I find the claim that this is the book's biggest contribution slightly odd.
I am interested in the relationship between culture in England becoming `more middle class' and in the innovations of period 1770- 1830. Joel Moykr's proposed industrial enlightenment is one such `bridge'. The idea of self-interest being liberated in the eighteenth century when it was hidebound or constrained by social norms is another possible bridge - though it seems close to Weber's hypothesis about religion.
On the institutional differences between England in 1300 and 1800, personally I find the evidence presented by Greg in his book, fascinating and important but certainly not decisive. For example unlike land rights, property rights in capital or commerce were not well understood or recognised in the medieval period - look at Edward III interventions in the wool industry in the mid-14th century. In this sense I think the Smithian story described by Gavin Kennedy cannot simply be dismissed.
Posted by: Mark Koyama at Sep 5, 2007 5:53:40 AM
I do not want to debate Gavin Kennedy on intellectual history (that would be like me challenging Roger Federer to a tennis match).
But I do relish debate him and others on my court, which is economic history.
The widespread impression that between 1300 and 1800 England experienced significant institutional improvements is just wrong. There were changes, yes. But not improvements.
England in 1300 was a highly commercial society, with commodities like grain flowing freely across England, and between England and the rest of Europe. In 1300 in London you could rent storage in granaries for grain on a weekly basis. Court records reveal a web of debt stretching out from London into the Midlands between grain suppliers and London merchants (see the work of Bruce Campbell and his co-authors on the medieval London grain market).
The peasantry rather than being the subjects of abusive overlords, had instead largely expropriated from their supposed masters they land they cultivated, paying rents well below market values in most cases.
Guilds restricted trade and crafts in towns, but there was so much competition between different towns that these restrictions could have only modest effect.
Transport costs in 1300 were no greater than in 1750 (though these costs did fall in the late 18th c).
Taxes and trade restrictions, unlike in 1800, were minimal.
So why was medieval England largely stagnant technologically?
Posted by: Gregory Clark at Sep 5, 2007 9:30:45 AM
