An Article from Wall Street Journal on Joel Mokyr's A culture of Growth.
The Genesis of Prosperity
What brought about the Great Enrichment? And why did it start in England? It had a culture that embraced change and scientific inquiry.
Life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” Thomas Hobbes proclaimed in 1651, and it had been that way ever since humans had inhabited the Earth. At the time Hobbes wrote those words, life expectancy averaged about 30 years old in his native England and income per person typically was around $5 a day (in 2016 dollars). Thanks to the Industrial Revolution and the Great Enrichment that followed, the typical subject of Queen Elizabeth II lives to almost 80 and has an income of over $100 a day. Perhaps more impressively, most people in the world today face the prospect of living at least that well within a generation or two.
What brought about the Great Enrichment? And why did it all start in England? Joel Mokyr, in his fine book, attributes it to the unique and productive culture that evolved there. It was a culture that welcomed change and favored scientific inquiry that spurred radical technological improvements. To Mr. Mokyr, the forming of physical capital and the expansion of the division of labor through trade—sometimes called Smithian growth after Adam Smith—was not in itself adequate to get more than a modest increase in output. Critical were new ways of doing things, new products and new techniques.
A Culture of Growth
By Joel MokyrPrinceton, 403 pages, $35
According to Mr. Mokyr, three factors led to the ultimate triumph of the new modern search for scientific truth over the largely inaccurate “science” of the ancients. First, Europe’s fractured political environment was a blessing: Scientists who were banned or ostracized in one political jurisdiction fled to other locales more tolerant of their views. The controversial Franciscan monk, Bernardino Ochino (1487-1564), for example, was often in trouble and moving to evade authorities, leading him to flee from Italy to Switzerland and later, England, Poland and Moravia. Second, the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press around 1440 enormously lowered the cost of widely disseminating knowledge over large areas. Third, an extraordinary intellectual community evolved—Voltaire and others called the Republic of Letters—that made the dissemination of new information (through letters to fellow scientists) obligatory for anyone who wanted to gain respect in the growing international community of scientists.
The author further observes that while a lively intellectual environment was present elsewhere, notably China, it lacked the favorable conditions prevailing in Europe. Confucian philosophy still dominated Chinese thinking and the content of the all-important civil service examination, so modern scientific scholars seldom became members of that civil service. Moreover, there were no alternative political parties or jurisdictions for innovative thinkers to flee to. In short, the country’s monopolistic government bureaucracy stifled innovation.
While “A Culture of Growth” makes an important contribution to our understanding of this crucial period, the book’s almost single-minded emphasis on intellectual ferment and scientific advancement as the prime determinants of economic growth is somewhat overstated. The scientific revolution that Mr. Mokyr describes occurred a century or more before the Industrial Revolution would raise the incomes of Britons. Bacon died in 1626—nearly 150 years before the spinning jenny of James Hargreaves or the steam engine of James Watt. Newton published his Principia in 1687. Bacon was dead almost 200 years before it was finally clear that incomes in England were breaking out of the economic gravitational pull that had previously restrained them.
The spinning jenny, the use of coke in iron smelting, and the steam engine did not need Newton’s calculus, Harvey’s theory of the circulation of the blood, the heliocentric approach to astronomy or other scientific advances of the day. Deirdre McCloskey’s great “Bourgeois Equality” (2016) suggests it was ultimately liberty that made England’s leap forward so unique. Middle-class folks could increasingly engage in entrepreneurial activities without being stifled by the aristocracy or the state. It became first acceptable, then profitable, to have bourgeois virtues of thrift, hard work, ingenuity and even a bit of greed. Smart craftsmen invented simple but highly productive machines in this environment of freedom and the rule of law. That said, after the Industrial Revolution had passed (say after 1870), more sophisticated technological advances required the scientific foundation that Mr. Mokyr emphasizes.
Mr. Mokyr’s book, while excellent, suffers from one common malady of many academics: He uses lots of obscure foreign and English words unknown to most relatively literate readers. He never talks about followers or imitators, but rather “epigones.” Instead of “middle-class treachery,” he talks of trahison de la bourgeoisie. That said, to engage in a bit of rhetorical overkill of my own, during this annus mirabilis, one of our country’s great economic historians has helped us better understand the greatest transformation in human welfare our planet has ever seen.
Mr. Vedder teaches economic history at Ohio University and is an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
©Wall Street Journal 2016
