We are back to what actually happened 1700-1848, and then on to 2010 and beyond, a rise of income per person by a factor by the end, let us say very conservatively, of 16. The happening was recognized slowly in the twentieth century. Among many economists and economic historians the recognition slowly killed the notion that thrifty saving was the way to massive and colossal productive forces. In 1960 the economist Friedrich Hayek questioned “our habit of regarding economic progress chiefly as an accumulation of ever greater quantities of goods and equipment.”¹

So: it was not capital. Nor was it any such thing. It was not for example the better allocation that comes with better institutions, or commercialization. Yet even many good economists could not grasp that static allocation is not the key to the success of market societies. Nice though it is, efficiency — making supply equal to demand — is not the main point. Innovation is. The inefficiency of democratic socialist regimes, therefore, is a pity, but it has not yet been a catastrophe either politically or economically. It has not led down the road to serfdom, which is why Western Europe’s moderate version of socialism has proven viable.² True, empirically, as a contingent fact about human nature, the dignities and liberties of the bourgeoisie do result in more innovation. But the “social market economies” of Finland and Holland continue to deliver pretty well, because they do not rigorously assault the dignities and liberties. The supply curves keep moving out in Holland and Sweden.

It could be, conceptually, that the nature of man under the other, more rigorous socialism — central-planning, zero property, shoot-the-bourgeoisie socialism — would result in such a rise in public spirit, say, or such a reduction of alienation, that desirable innovation would flourish, and the supply curves move out. Since nothing would stand in the way of the use of the Caspian Sea for irrigation, all would be well, and no destruction of the environment would result. The Public Good would be served by consulting the Volonté General. But the evidence is in, and it speaks unambiguously. Serf socialism is a catastrophe and probably always will be. In 1917 one might reasonably have believed that a society without an admired and enabled bourgeoisie would in fact innovate more than one with the appalling bourgeoisie in power, and thereby socialism would pull the poor out of their poverty. By now the belief that Stalinism is Good For You is unreasonable. “Communist” China innovates, but does so precisely in its capitalist, bourgeois-admiring parts, only. Elsewhere it constructs by government fiat great armies to crush dissent and great dams that will silt up in twenty years.

All right. Again: what then explains innovation?

New thoughts, new habits of the mind, what Mokyr calls the “industrial Enlightenment.” “The rise of our standard of living,” wrote Hayek, “is due at least as much to an increase in knowledge” as to accumulation of capital.³ The great economist Simon Kuznets, notes his student Richard Easterlin, believed that “the ‘givens’ of economics — technology, tastes, and institutions — are the key actors in historical change, and hence most economic theory has, at best, only limited relevance to understanding long-term change.”⁴ Mokyr and Goldstone and Jacob and Tunzelmann and I and some others would go one step further, to ideas. It was ideas of steam engines and light bulbs and computers that made Northwestern Europe and then much of the rest of the world rich, not new accumulations from saving. As Nicholas Crafts wrote: “The hallmark of the Industrial Revolution was the emergence of a society that was capable of sustained technological progress and faster total factor productivity growth.”⁵ The new society was one of innovation.

Many scholars with whom I agree on many other points, however, think that it was in particular the ideas of the Scientific Revolution that caused the innovation.⁶ Lay people (not the scholars) speak loosely in a portmanteau phrase of “science-and-technology” making us better off. The phrase makes it possible to ignore the political and social change, the bourgeois Revaluation, that put the science to work. There’s politics in it. With “science-and-technology” as the explanation of the modern world one can sit comfortably on the left, for example, and contrary to the opinion of Marx and Engels will not need to admit that the bourgeoisie has created more massive and colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations. Or one can sit comfortably on the right, too, and admire the aristocratic genius of the Great Scientists — not the alertness of the mere vulgar businesspeople who made the science economically relevant. Combining “science-and-technology” in one hurriedly pronounced phrase mistakes the past, certainly, and much of the present, justifying a worshipful attitude towards science that is not entirely economically justified. The phrase needs to be broken in two. Science. Technology.

In one respect I am inclined to agree with the Science-Did-It scholars, and even the Science-and-Technology lay people, because the impulsive force is then ideas rather than matter alone. As Richard Easterlin put it, “the growth of scientific knowledge [he instances biological discoveries improving public and then private health] has been shaped much more by internal [that it, intellectual] factors than external factors such as market forces.”⁷

But of course one problem that has to be faced by advocates of science is that Chinese and at one point Islamic science and technology, separately and together, were superior to Western in every way, and yet resulted in no industrial revolution. Another is that the inspiriting discoveries of a Newtonian clockwork universe, and the great mathematization in Europe of earthly and celestial mechanics in the eighteenth century, had practically no direct industrial applications until the late nineteenth century at the earliest. The historian of technology Nathan Rosenberg noted that “before the twentieth century there was no very close correspondence between scientific leadership and industrial leadership,” instancing the United States, which had negligible scientific achievement around 1890 and yet industrial might, and Japan, ditto, around 1970.⁸

Mokyr concludes that “the full triumph of technology was only secured after 1870 with the arrival of cheap steel, electrical power, chemicals, and other advances associated with the second Industrial Revolution,” and associated sometimes with science.⁹ “Cheap steel,” though, is not a scientific case in point. Tunzelmann notes that even in the late nineteenth century “breakthroughs such as that by Bessemer in steel were published in scientific journals but were largely the result of practical tinkering.”¹⁰ My own early work on the iron and steel industry came to the same conclusion. Such an apparently straightforward matter as the chemistry of the blast furnace was not entirely understood until well into the twentieth century, and yet the costs of iron and steel had fallen and fallen for a century.

The economic heft of late-nineteenth-century innovations that did not depend at all on science (such as cheap steel) was great: mass produced concrete, for example, then reinforced concrete (combined with that cheap steel); air brakes on trains, making mile-long trains possible (though science-dependent telegraph was essential to keep them from running into each other); the improvements in engines to pull the trains; elevators to make useful the tall reinforced concrete buildings (though again science-based electric motors were better than a steam engine in every building more than four storeys tall, though the “science” in electric motors was hardly more than noting the connection between electricity and magnetism); better “tin” cans; faster rolling mills; the linotype machine; cheap paper; and on and on and on.¹¹ In 1900 the parts of the economy that used science to improve products and processes — electrical and chemical engineering, chiefly, and even these sometimes using science pretty crudely — were quite small, reckoned in value of output or employment. And yet in the technologically feverish U.K. in the eight decades (plus a year) from 1820 to 1900 real income per head grew by a factor of 2.63, and in the next eight decades “scientific” decades only a little faster, by a factor of 2.88.¹² The result was a rise from 1820 to 1980 of a factor of (2.63) (2.88) = 7.57. That is to say, since 2.63 is quite close to 2.88, nearly half of the world-making change down to 1980 was achieved before 1900 — in effect, before science. This is not to deny science after science: the per capita factor of growth in the U.K. during the merely twenty years 1980 to 1999 was fully 1.53, which would correspond to an 80-year factor of an astounding 5.5. The results are similar for the United States, though as one might expect at a more frenetic pace: a factor of 3.25 in per capita real income from 1820 to 1900, 4.54 from 1900 to 1980, and about the same as Britain after 1980.¹³

But understand the main point here: even today a great deal of economic growth in a country has little or nothing to do with science. The spread of economic growth to places like Brazil or Russia or India or China uses some science-based technologies, but uses also a great many merely technology-based technologies free of much input from science (I offer again reinforced concrete). And the international spread of growth has on the contrary intensively used the social “technology” of bourgeois dignity and liberty.

I do not deny that economic growth nowadays depends to some degree on science. We are all very thankful for the physical and biological scientists among us — though observing that most of them work on problems that will never bear technological fruit (an extreme case being modern pure mathematics, such as number theory). But I do deny that modern enrichment by an unprecedented and Malthus-denying factor has been heavily dependent on the physical and biological sciences. Just as Britain in 1850 was far from exclusively a steam-driven cotton mill, so the world now is very far from a computer-driven automatic lathe. Strictly speaking a world without modern electrical, electronic, chemical, agronomical, aeronautical, or for that matter economic science would still be very much richer than the world of 1800.

Tunzelmann also notes that Britain was not “particularly conspicuous as a leader in science,” which is to say, propositional as against applied science and especially technology. Scientific advance was pan-European from Copernicus to Carnot, and then became strikingly German. Yet the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century was strikingly British, and despite the mistaken rhetoric of late Victorian “failure” the British continued into the late nineteenth and indeed into the twentieth century to be great innovators. It is conventional to observe in explanation that unlike the French or Germans the British were not significant theorists (with rare if glorious exceptions like Newton, Darwin, Maxwell, Kelvin, Hawking), but that they were very significant tinkerers and muddlers through. Technologists.

Goldstone defends the science-based argument this way:

The distinctive feature of Western economies since 1800 has not been growth per se, but growth based on a specific set of elements: engines to extract motive power from fossil fuels, to a degree hitherto rarely appreciated by historians; the application of empirical science to understanding both nature and practical problems of production; and the marriage of empirically oriented science to a national culture of educated craftsmen and entrepreneurs broadly educated in basic principles of mechanics and experimental approaches to knowledge. This combination developed from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries only in Britain, and was unlikely to have developed anywhere else in world history.¹⁴

One can agree especially with the “since 1800″ specification. The economic historian George Grantham has argued that the real economic payoff from Continental science — chemistry and plant science in particular — came as a result of the massive up-scaling of science in the German universities during the 1840s, allowing the training of hundreds of careful experimenters and theorists, some of whom made breakthroughs such as the discovery of the carbon ring. Until then Continental science had been pursued mainly an aristocratic hobby. “For science to develop on a wide base, it could not continue to rest on a small number of wealthy persons supporting themselves in a life of research. The growth of organized science thus implied an institutional structure in which researchers are salaried.”¹⁵ “From an intellectual standpoint,” Grantham concedes, “the Scientific Revolution takes its roots in the breakthroughs of the seventeenth century.” But “from the institutional perspective, the Revolution belongs to the nineteenth.”¹⁶ Without a doubt Western science eventually pays off to some degree economically. Look around at your light bulbs and TV sets and synthetic fibers and cell phones and ample food supply, and offer up prayers of thanksgiving to the physical and biological scientists. But the payoff was late in modern economic growth, and it would not have had such consequences without dignity and liberty for the bourgeoisie.

The relative price of bourgeois standing changed, and made for large innovation in total. In doubting with Tunzelmann and me that theoretical science had much to do with the Industrial Revolution, Robert Allen quotes a fine passage from an author whom Adam Smith and I do not much admire, Bernard Mandeville, in 1714. The people who merely “inquire into the reason of things,” declared Mandeville, are “idle and indolent,” “fond of retirement,” and “hate business.”¹⁷ Until 1871 Oxford and Cambridge excluded Nonconformists (that is, non-Anglicans such as Quakers, Unitarians, Baptists, Congregationalists, and later in great numbers Methodists), which left the dissenting academies to give Nonconformist children an education that did not inspire the hating of business, or favor retirement in studying the argument from design or the three forms of indirect speech in Attic Greek. From around 1700 the Scottish universities took a practical turn, notes Alastair Durie, and were “not merely concerned with the niceties of theology but endeavored to relate scientific enquiry to industrial application.”¹⁸ Theology itself in Britain joined enthusiastically with Newtonian science, whether inside or outside the universities. Scottish intellectuals invented a social “natural theology” in parallel with the physical one of their English neighbors, one step towards the Scottish discovery of economics.¹⁹

Celestial mechanics and anti-clericalism, in other words, could not by themselves have revolutionized Europe, any more than the great lead in science until 1600 or so by China and the Muslim world had revolutionized them. Mere curiosity and originality by a handful of Galileos and Newtons does not an industrial revolution make. Mandeville’s dialogue again: “Horatio: It is commonly imagined that speculative men are best at invention of all sorts. Cleomenes: Yet it is a mistake.” It is impossible to imagine our world view without Galileo’s Dialogo or Newton’s Principia or Hutton’s Theory of the Earth or Darwin’s Origin of Species. But it is easy to imagine our industry up until about 1900 without them. The new dignity and liberty for the bourgeoisie were essential. Greece’s invention of most of the arts and sciences (with borrowings from eastern sources), and its partial freedom to doubt the gods, had not revolutionized the Greek economy or enriched its poor. Ancient Greek society despised physical work as slavish and womanly, and devalued gadgets (with Archimedean exceptions), and above all looked down on the bourgeoisie. French science in the eighteenth century depended notably on aristocrats such as Lavoisier and Laplace and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, retaining a glorious and axiomatic impracticality imparted first by Descartes. As Jacob emphasizes, “the aristocratic character of French scientific institutions” was in sharp contrast to the workmanlike and practical tone in Britain.²⁰ Science in the Anglophone world depended much more on bourgeois, working, experimental figures like Newton or Priestley or Franklin or Hutton or Davy or Thomson.

And scientists, by the way, are not always harbingers of progress. After all, a little after the stirrings of dignity for the bourgeoisie and its world-changing innovations, the most advanced scientists and the most Enlightened thinkers commonly became the most virulent enemies of economic innovation, and often the most virulent enemies, too, of the freedom to have children or the freedom to speak one’s mind or the freedom to live outside of a gulag. Consider, to take apparently hard cases, the much-admired geneticist and statistician R. A. Fisher (1890-1962), who passionately supported a racist eugenics; or the also-much-admired ecologist, as I have said, Garrett Hardin (1915-2003), who passionately supported compulsory sterilization. Though often very nice, the scientists and atheists — the two are not the same — are not automatically the best friends of human dignity and liberty.

The crux around 1700 was not the new sciences about anatomy and astronomy (neither of which much affected industrial development), but the new rhetoric about bourgeois innovation. True, some little of the New Science improved industry, as Jacob has argued for hydrology. Yet what mattered for the scale of innovation in total, Mandeville argued, is not to have scientists, but to have masses of “active, stirring, laborious men, such as will put their hand to the plow, try experiments [there's the scientific attitude], and give all their attention to what they are about.”²¹ And especially what matters is that the rest of the society honor and liberate such people.

Jacob and Mokyr would reply that such active people of whatever class were increasingly merged with the scientists. Mokyr for example argues that “eighteenth-century Britain was what we may call a technologically competent society. It was teeming with engineers, mechanics, millwrights, and dexterous and imaginative tinkerers who spent their time and energy designing better pumps, pulleys, and pendulums.”²² In the English-speaking world, however, such practical savants attended to business, and that is the main point. Mokyr continues: “Even wealthy landowners and merchants [in Britain] displayed a fascination with technical matters.” Yes. In 1752 an elaborate diagram of the “Yorkshire maiden” washing machine, which was in actual use, was displayed in the January 1752 edition of Gentleman’s Magazine. Note: by then “gentlemen” had long been presumed in Britain to have an interest in mechanical devices other than machines of war. The very word “engine,” which had once named hunting snares and then catapults and siege engines, comes by 1635 to name civilian machines, and gives rise by 1606 to “engineers” and their flourishing in England and Scotland and America and France towards 1800. It climaxes in the lives of the engineers, devoted to profitable (and unprofitable) projects of industrial design, experimenting madness. Henry Maudslay (1771-1831), for example, an English working class boy who became prosperously bourgeois, and redesigned machine tools, came upon the problem of screw-making. In the immortal words of the historian of the lathe, one Holtzapfell, “Mr. Maudslay effected nearly the entire change of screw making . . . to the modern exact and scientific method. . . . and he pursued the subject of the screw with more or less ardor and at enormous expense until his death.”²³

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Notes

1. [back] Hayek 1960, p. 42.
2. [back] Berman 2006.
3. [back] Hayek 1960, pp. 42-43.
4. [back] Easterlin 1997, p. 8.
5. [back] Crafts 2004 (2005), p. 10 of manuscript.
6. [back] The classic statement for science as the cause is Musson and Robinson 1969 and Musson 1972, but I refer here especially to later work by Jacob, Mokyr, and Goldstone.
7. [back] Easterlin 1995 (2004), p. 99.
8. [back] Rosenberg 1978, pp. 282-283; compare Rosenberg 1982, p. 13.
9. [back] Mokyr 2007a, p. 30.
10. [back] Tunzelmann 2003, p. 86.
11. [back] See for example on cement Prentice 2008.
12. [back] Maddison 2006, pp. 437, 439, 443, in 1990 international Geary-Khamis dollars, uncorrected for improved products à la Nordhaus.
13. [back] Maddison 2006, pp. 465, 466, 467.
14. [back] Goldstone 2002b, abstract.
15. [back] Grantham 2009, p. 13.
16. [back] Grantham 2009, p. 5
17. [back] Allen 2006, p. 14 of manuscript, quoting Mandeville, Vol. II, "Third Dialogue," p. 144.
18. [back] Durie 2003, p. 458.
19. [back] The economist and theologian Paul Oslington has argued so to me.
20. [back] Jacob 1997, p. 108.
21. [back] Mandeville, Vol. II, "Third Dialogue," p. 144.
22. [back] Mokyr 2003, p. 50.
23. [back] Bowden, Karpovich, and Usher 1937, p. 311. By the way, I believe the historian gets the date of Maudslay's death wrong-but after all he did not have the advantage of Google and Wikipedia other modern aids to high-class scholarship.

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