Tyler Cowen is doing a book club on Greg Clark's A Farewell to Alms. Tyler, like me, is sceptical of the book's central claim: that the Industrial Revolution happened in Britain because the English elites outbred the poor.
Tyler offers this explanation for the growth:
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.
I am tempted to resist this interpretation--was there really no inventiveness in various Chinese cities? But Tyler is unlikely to have missed the trend; he's no cultural imperialist. So on this matter, I will outsource my opinion to him.
Hmm... Me reckons that the Industrial Revolution is just a symptom of the Renaissance in general? Leonardo Da Vinci anybody? It has helped the English to have had a strong literary tradition in translating Greek and Latin Classics? All that Newton did was to translate fragments (those not burned or missed by the Church) of Epicurus (who wrote about a lot more than just simple gravity - he also explained relativity and atomic theory as well as evolution..) but that is besides the point? The point is that it was the English who dug out Hero's ancient documentation of the steam engine?
For me personally - the mystery is even older. As Berkeley University poses the question:
Why No Industrial Revolution in Ancient Greece?
One of the oldest and hardest puzzles in economic history is the failure of Ancient Greek Eastern Mediterranean civilization to make some kind of breakthrough--to more rapid development of labor-saving technology, to faster technological progress, and to an industrial revolution. There have always been three theories as to why this did not happen:
The "insufficient density" theory--not enough thinkers, not enough tinkerers, not enough ability to shape metal finely and precisely for the set of those interested in scientific progress and technological development to reach critical mass.
The "lack of a market economy" theory: those who would have sought wealth and power through entrepreneurship and enterprise in a modern market economy instead, because trade was small in volume and under the thumb of politics, went into the army or into politics. This misallocation of talent stalled human progress.
Fuzzier explanations based on the role of slavery in classical civilization and on the elective anti-affinity between the existence of slavery on the one hand and elite interest in boosting productivity on the other.
Now comes The Economist with an article on Greek metalworking prowess and interest in astronomical models that chips away at the likelihood of the first theory...
_______________
Definitely NOT the first point in my book. After all - small Athens - with her few thousand literate citizens - has produced MORE ideas and thinking than our 4 billion literate humans today could come close to?
I'd say that the vast majority of our knowledge has Greek roots. We have optimized it over millennia with billions of mental slaves... but our improvements are often based on trial and error, exploration or mere hyperbole (let's make that micro/telescope 100 times bigger)... but not "thinking"?
Being a specialist in Ancient Greece was a slave's work. Something to be pitied - something that limits the human potential for consilience.
To truly appreciate all this one must have read:
Epicurus - via Titus Lucretius Carus (c. 99 - c. 55 BCE): DE RERUM NATURA
"And it came in England, mostly for reasons of "national character."
This is not very far from what Clark is saying.
Hugo_Pottisch: If someone says that "There's only so many times you can divide something", that's not the same thing as "explaining atomic theory".
Person: If someone says that "There's only so many times you can divide something", that's not the same thing as "explaining atomic theory".
No it is not - I agree. Einstein would not have used the expression "standing on the shoulders of giants" based on such a claim alone! Go on - read De Rerum Natura and find out for yourself... then judge the thinking?
PS: I do do believe that the implies separation of church and state - as well as initial democratic efforts have helped the industrialization of England.
Should read: "I do believe that the implied separation of church and state.."
Without writing a doctoral thesis from memory (or, worse, digging out references and doing it with citations), the enlightenment comes to Europe via the populations changes brought on by the black death and political and religious battles drive innovation from one country to another, ending in England just as all the pieces are in place for the industrial revolution to take off.
As you watch the scope of history, humanity almost reaches the enlightenment (an emphasis on individuals and the quality of life here and now rather than groups and preparation for an afterlife) a number of times. A large middle class and high literacy are the key components. What happens over and over again is that the civilization that is getting near that break through gets invaded, or its leaders crack down on freedom of thought for the common people in an effort to consolidate power, or the ruler who is fueling the renaissance that is happening dies and divides his kingdom amongst his heirs who all start fighting each other, or some combination of all of the above happening in slow motion over a couple centuries.
The black death left Europe with a huge middle class and a lot of excess wealth. All the knowledge that had formerly been trapped in highly stratified societies was let loose in a society that was ripe for change. At the same time, block printing is becoming popular and playing cards are teaching even the peasants to think in a linear, logical way, priming the population to process information in a way compatible with the inquiry of the renaissance.
The printing press accelerated this spread of knowledge and literacy. The Chinese knew about printing using moveable type, but it was not much use to them, not only because of the number of characters they wrote with, but because there was not a need for a huge number of books. Their audience was limited. In Europe the audience was unlimited and everyone who had any chance at gaining knowledge and the prosperity that came with it wanted more. The moveable type in Gutenburg's press is what allows this to happen.
The centers of this knowledge economy move around europe, and the printing presses are loaded onto wagons and moved just ahead of revolutions and crackdowns on knowledge a number of times.
The pieces of the industrial revolution (interchangeable parts being one of the keys) are actually put in place in France, but the intellectual climate there is stifled (I can't remember if it was a religious crackdown, or political...they tended to be mixed together then) and the center of printing, and therefore knowledge moves again, this time to England.
England has been getting the fruits of all this change second hand, but laws loosing control of printing coincide with everything tightening up on the continent. The knowledge economy is dumped into the lap of a population ready to make use of it.
It is not the elite outbreeding the poor that fuels the Industrial revolution. It is the poor's children becoming middle class and the middle class's children becoming elites, all with a chance to contribute their knowledge and skills.
Clark's thesis may hold a little bit true for maybe one generation as the elites who financed the first looms with interchangeable parts' children go on to become industrialists; somebody's money went into those first steam driven factories. But their children had smaller families and those children went to good schools, hung out in cafe's, and got choice jobs in prestigious firms rather than driving any sort of revolution.
I think Clark may be mistaking a symptom for the cause.
kudos to Troy for a sound analysis! the printing press and freer economics indeed played a role and facilitated the corresponding rise of the middle class. "The knowledge economy is dumped into the lap of a population ready to make use of it." is an excellent statement to round it off?
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