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.
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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...
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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
Posted by Hugo Pottisch | September 4, 2007 10:05 AM