Podcasts about Joel Mokyr

La révolution industrielle au 19e siècle, est-ce que c'est un avancée ou un traumatisme qui nous habite encore ? Note: merci à @EdwinVan57 de l'avoir souligné. En 1871 la France a perdu l'Alsace et la Moselle et non la Lorraine entière.  Adhérez à cette chaîne pour obtenir des avantages : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCN4TCCaX-gqBNkrUqXdgGRA/join Script: Maxime Testart de @laratplace et Laurent Turcot https://www.youtube.com/@laratplace Montage et réalisation: Laurent Turcot Pour soutenir la chaîne, au choix: 1. Cliquez sur le bouton « Adhérer » sous la vidéo. 2. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/hndl 00:00 Introduction 02:30 C'est quoi la Révolution industrielle ? 06:14 Les origines au 18e siècle 12:23 Pourquoi la Grande-Bretagne ? 23:04 Des innovations qui changent le monde 29:30 Toujours plus vite et plus loin 33:31 Des villes industrielles 41:29 Deuxième révolution industrielle 46:17 Une source de conflits 56:05 Conclusion Musique issue du site : epidemicsound.com Images provenant de https://www.storyblocks.com Abonnez-vous à la chaine: https://www.youtube.com/c/LHistoirenousledira Les vidéos sont utilisées à des fins éducatives selon l'article 107 du Copyright Act de 1976 sur le Fair-Use. Sources et pour aller plus loin: Roland Marx, La révolution industrielle en Grande-Bretagne, Paris, Armand Colin, 1992 (1970). Nadège Sougy et Patick Verley, « La première industrialisation (1750-1880) » Documentation photographique, janvier-février 2008 Patrick Verley, La révolution industrielle, Paris, Gallimard, 1997 (1985). Jean-Pierre Rioux, La révolution industrielle 1780-1880, Paris, 1989 (1971). Chantal Beauchamp. Révolution industrielle et croissance économique au 19e siècle, Paris, Ellipses, 1997. Jean-Pierre Rioux et Dominique Redor, La révolution industrielle en Grande-Bretagne, Paris, Hatier, 1980. J.M. Roberts et O.A. Westad, Histoire du monde. 3. L'Âge des révolutions, Paris, Perrin, 2016. Joel Mokyr (dir.), The British Industrial Revolution: An Economic Perspective, Westview Press, 2018. Riello, Giorgio. Cotton: The Fabric That Made the Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Vintage, 1980 (1963). Smith, Bonnie G. et al. World in the Making: A Global History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Jürgen Osterhammel, La transformation du monde, une histoire globale du XIXe siècle, Paris, Nouveau Monde. 2017 (2009 Louis Chevalier, Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses pendant la première moitié du XIXe siècle, Paris, Plon, 1958. E. J. Hobsbawm, Histoire économique et sociale de la Grande-Bretagne. tome 2, de la révolution industrielle à nos jours, Paris, Seuil, 1977 (1968). E. J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day. 1999. Sidney Pollard, Peaceful Conquest: The Industrialization of Europe, 1760–1970, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1981. David S. Landes, Richesse et pauvreté des nations. Pourquoi des riches ? Pourquoi des pauvres ?, Paris, Albin Michel, 2000 (1998) Jean-Charles Asselain, Histoire économique de la France du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours. Paris, Points, 2011, (1984), Emma Griffin, A Short History of the British Industrial Revolution, London, Bloomsbury, 2010. N. F. R. Crafts, British Economic Growth during the Industrial Revolution, Clarendon Press, 1985 François Crouzet, Histoire de l'économie européenne, 1000-2000, Albin Michel, Paris, 2000 Paul Bairoch, Révolution industrielle et sous-développement, Paris, éd. de l'E.H.E.S.S., 1974 (1963). https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puddlage Jean-Charles Asselain, « Révolution industrielle » [en ligne]. In Encyclopædia Universalis. Disponible sur : https://www-universalis-edu-com.biblioproxy.uqtr.ca/encyclopedie/revolution-industrielle/ Samir Amin. « Industrie » - Industrialisation et formes de société [en ligne]. In Encyclopædia Universalis. Francis Demier. « Multiplication des inventions » [en ligne]. In Encyclopædia Universalis. https://www.geo.fr/histoire/quest-ce-que-la-revolution-industrielle-208173 « LA RÉVOLUTION INDUSTRIELLE | Je révise avec toi | #08 », Je révise avec toi, 8 mars 2023. « LA SECONDE RÉVOLUTION INDUSTRIELLE | Je révise avec toi | #40 », Je révise avec toi, 7 mai 2023. « Révolution industrielle : Le Charbon, Moteur de la Puissance Britannique | Partie 1 | SLICE HISTOIRE », SLICE Histoire, 30 septembre 2024. « L'Industrialisation », RÉCIT Univers social, 20 août 2019. « L'HISTOIRE PAR L'IMAGE | La révolution industrielle », Grand Palais, 2 octobre 2020. « Coal, Steam, and The Industrial Revolution: Crash Course World History #32 » CrashCourse, 20 août 2012. Autres références disponibles sur demande. #histoire #documentaire #revolutionindustrielle #revolutionaryinventions #industrialrevolution #industrialrevolution

Warum ist Europa viel reicher als der Rest der Welt? Um diese Frage zu beantworten reisen wir in dieser Folge zurück in die Geschichte der Industriellen Revolution.  Es erklärt der Historiker Andreas Resch.Andreas Resch ist Historiker an der Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien. ***Drei Buchtipps von Andreas Resch:A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy von Joel MokyrThe British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective von Robert AllenGreat Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy von Kenneth Pomeranz***Weiterführende Links zum InterviewAdam Smith und die Nadelfabrik (Arbeitsteilung)David Ricardo und sein komparativer Kostenvorteil, einfach erklärtDie Studie zu Bangladesch, die Andreas zitiert hat: Manufacturing growth and the lives of Bangladeshi womenDie Erfolge Indiens bei der Armutsbekämpfung kann man etwa bei der Brookings Institution nachlesenÜber die Wichtigkeit von Institutionen hat etwa Joel Mokyr geschrieben: The Institutional Origins of the Industrial RevolutionDouglass North hat den Nobelpreis für seine Arbeit zu Institutionen gewonnen. Seine Rede hier ist eine gute EinführungRobert Allen über die Spinning Jenny: The Industrial Revolution in Miniature: The Spinning Jenny in Britain, France, and India.Die Arbeit von Acemoglu, die angesprochen wurde: The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change and Economic GrowthNoch eine ganz zentrale, einflussreiche Arbeit von Acemoglu: The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical InvestigationPeer Vries: The California School and Beyond: How to Study the Great Divergence?Jan de Vries: The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution  ***Erklär mir die Welt hilft dir dabei, die Welt besser zu verstehen. Hilf wie 370+ andere Hörer:innen mit, den Podcast zu finanzieren. Danke an alle Unterstützer:innen! ***So kannst du noch mithelfen Schick uns deine Fragen und Wünsche für EpisodenErzähl uns von dir! Mach bei der Hörer:innen-Befragung mit ***Du willst mehr?Bewirb dich als Hörer:in des MonatsHol dir Updates zum Podcast per WhatsApp, Newsletter, Telegram oder SignalFolge uns bei Tiktok, Instagram und FacebookQuatsche mit anderen Hörer:innen auf DiscordAlle Folgen ab Mai 2023 gibt es mit Video auf YouTubeSchau im Merch-Shop vorbeiHier kannst du Werbung im Podcast buchenAndreas' Buch "Alles gut?!" darüber, was er im Kampf gegen Armut auf der Welt beitragen kann ***Das Team:Mitarbeit: Sidonie SagmeisterVermarktung: Missing LinkAudio Production: Audio Funnel Video Production: DomotionLogo: Florian HalbmayrMusik: Something Elated by Broke For Free, CC BYBeatbox am Ende: Azad Arslantas

durée : 00:35:45 - France Culture va plus loin (l'Invité(e) des Matins) - par : Guillaume Erner - Y a-t-il des facteurs culturels à la prospérité ? Nous en discutons avec Joel Mokyr, auteur de "Une culture de croissance : les origines de l'économie moderne", paru chez Gallimard en 2019. L'occasion d'interroger l'histoire et les défis futurs de l'économie européenne. - invités : Joel Mokyr professeur d'économie et d'histoire à l'université Northwestern à Evanston (Illinois)

durée : 02:28:27 - Les Matins - par : Guillaume Erner - .

During the years 1760 to 1830, British industry exploded. Thanks to advances in machinery, and forward-thinking inventions, the country shifted from a predominantly agricultural nation, to a modern state. This movement has become known as the Industrial Revolution. But why did these changes take place in Britain and not somewhere else? What were its impacts at the time, and how has it come to shape the modern world? And, are we indeed still living through it? From Noiser, this is a short history of the Industrial Revolution. Written by Dan Smith. With thanks to Joel Mokyr, Professor of Economics and History at Northwestern University, and the Sackler Professor at the University of Tel Aviv. Get every episode of Short History Of a week early with Noiser+. You'll also get ad-free listening, bonus material, and early access to shows across the Noiser network. Click the Noiser+ banner to get started. Or, if you're on Spotify or Android, go to noiser.com/subscriptions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Happy New Year— RSJHappy 2024, dear readers! We hope 2023 was good for all of you. If it wasn't, we are glad that it's behind you. We didn't have too bad a 2023 ourselves. This newsletter went along swimmingly (or so we think) and we had our book ‘Missing in Action: Why You Should Care About Public Policy' published on 23 January 2023. Why haven't you bought it yet? Anyway, it seems to be doing well based on the modest expectations we had of it. I'm yet to see the pirated versions of it peddled at traffic signals. Heh, that will be the day. But then I see it on shelves of all decent bookstores and that's quite reassuring. That apart, Pranay had another book (one productive chap, I tell you), When The Chips Are Down on semiconductor geopolitics which is an area that's going to get more interesting and contentious in this decade. All in all, we ended up writing 44 editions during the year totaling up to over a hundred thousand words. A good year, I guess.On to 2024 then. Like in the past, we will indulge ourselves a bit in the first edition of the year. First, looking back at our predictions for 2023 and seeing how badly off we were and then next week, I will be doing a bit of crystal ball gazing for 2024.Before I bore you with that, let me share with you this wonderful excerpt from a paper I read recently. Titled ‘Enlightenment Ideals and Belief in Progress in the Run-up to the Industrial Revolution: A Textual Analysis', it covers an area of eternal fascination for me - Enlightenment and its impact on Western Europe. Interesting conclusions and a must-read:“The role of cultural attitudes—specifically, of Enlightenment ideals that had a progress oriented view of scientific and industrial pursuits—in Britain's economic takeoff and industrialization has been emphasized by leading economic historians. Foremost amongst them is Joel Mokyr (2016), who states that the progress-oriented view of science promoted by great Enlightenment thinkers, such as Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, among many others, was central to what would become the “Industrial Enlightenment,” and ultimately Britain's Industrial Revolution. In this paper, we test these claims using quantitative data from 173,031 works printed in England in English between 1500 and 1900. A textual analysis resulted in three salient findings. First, there is little overlap in scientific and religious works in the period under study. This indicates that the “secularization” of science was entrenched from the beginning of the Enlightenment. Second, while scientific works did become more progress-oriented during the Enlightenment, this sentiment was mainly concentrated in the nexus of science and political economy. We interpret this to mean that it was the more pragmatic works of science—those that spoke to a broader political and economic audience, especially those literate artisans and craftsmen at the heart of Britain's industrialization—that contained the cultural values cited as important for Britain's economic rise. Third, while volumes at the science-political economy nexus were progress-oriented for the entire time period, this was especially true of volumes related to industrialization. Thus, we have unearthed some inaugural quantitative support for the idea that a cultural evolution in the attitudes towards the potential of science accounts in some part for the British Industrial Revolution and its economic takeoff.”2023 Predictions ScorecardI had 8 predictions across the global economy, Indian economy and Indian social and political order. So, this is how does the 2023 report card looks like.Global EconomyThis is what I had written:#1 The trend of securing your supply chain for critical products will get stronger.….but it is clear to most large economies that on issues that concern national security, it will be foolhardy to not plan for worst-case scenarios any longer. And national security could mean anything, really, but I can see on energy and key technology, nations will opt for more secure supply chains with watertight bilateral partnerships than be at the mercy of distributed, multilateral chains. I won't go as far as calling it ‘de-globalisation' yet, but this ‘gated globalisation' is a trend that's here to stay.This is playing out but a bit slower than what I expected. Disentangling and building domestic capabilities isn't easy. And it is costly. But through the year we had increasing curbs on what hi-tech (GPU chips, AI research) and defence companies domiciled in the West could export to China. At home, we continued the push on PLI on electronics and tech equipment with debates on how much value-added manufacturing is really coming through in these schemes. Also, interestingly, we are continuing down the path of decoupling from global ‘default platforms' especially in financial services. The Rupay platform is continuing to get bigger with a specific push from the government to derisk payment infrastructure from global networks like Visa and Mastercard. Also, in a recent statement, the central bank has suggested building a homegrown Cloud Computing infrastructure that will be used on regulated entities in India so that they aren't tied into global Cloud service providers. #2 The fears of elevated inflation and a recession in the US in 2023 are overblown. The recession is due, but it will come a bit laterMy view is that as supply chain issues ease up with China opening up, energy demand going up and the US continuing to be at almost full employment, we might have a 2023 where for the most part, the US inflation will be higher than target, Fed will continue to remain hawkish, and the growth will hold up. This will mean the real risk of recession will be more toward the end of the year than now.Turns out I was accurate. In fact, the US economy has held up even better than I expected. And the Fed almost softened their tone by their last meeting of the year.#3 Big Tech will continue to be under the coshI half expect India to gradually move all payment and eCommerce arms of Big Tech into a structure that's domestically controlled and owned in 2023. Third, FTC, with Hina Khan at the helm, will accelerate antitrust and competition law changes to reduce the dominance of Big Tech.I think I got this right in a big way. Through the year, fintechs have offloaded ‘troublesome' shareholders (read Chinese investors) and there is a real trend of what's called ‘reverse flipping' where unicorns that were domiciled outside of India for tax and regulatory reasons are coming back home. Reason? Well, if you ask them they will tell you because they believe in the India story. That's very convenient. The real reason is domestic regulators are making it difficult for a non-domiciled company to get a full bite of the Indian apple. From data security and storage requirements to tax and fund transfer regulations, the entities that are essentially Indian but are registered outside India to avoid ‘regulatory inconvenience' are now facing business inconvenience in following that model. Here's more on this. Indian EconomyI think I wrote more about the Indian economy in 2023 than any previous year. Much of it was about my surprise, in a positive way, on how much better it was doing than my expectations. Now as I read what I had written at the start of 2023, I think I had somewhat forgotten during the year that I was quite optimistic about the economy at the start of the year. Here's what I had written:#1 Greater optimismI am a bit more optimistic about the broader numbers than most, and I will explain why. I think GDP growth will come in around 6.5 per cent for FY24, and inflation will be around 5 per cent. We might see a couple of rate hikes in the next few months, taking the repo rate to 6.75 per cent, but that will be it. I see domestic consumption to remain strong and exports, in the light of the shift away from China, to be good for manufacturers, and how much ever I might struggle to get behind the PLI scheme, it will yield some short-term benefits. IT exports might be a dampener, but on balance, I see more upside to these predictions.Couldn't have gotten it more right. I think the growth for FY 24 might come in at 7 per cent. Repo ended up at 6.5 per cent and domestic consumption and manufacturing have stayed strong while IT exports have gone worse over the year. #2 Digitalisation: Wave 2There will be a significant push on digitalisation in lending and eCommerce. The UPI infrastructure has revolutionised payments and, along with GST, has accelerated the formalisation of the economy..... Also, as I mentioned in an earlier point, doing this will also mean shifting the balance of power from Big Tech-owned entities to an open platform or domestically controlled entities. I sense a strong push in this direction in 2023.This was a no-brainer, really. I expected a bit more traction on platforms like OCEN and ONDC which haven't taken off yet. The digitisation of the financial services sector has made low-value credit much easier for people to access. And UPI and digital KYC have enabled that to an extent that unsecured individual lending saw its biggest year ever in 2023. In fact, by the end of the year, we saw the central bank intervening to increase risk weights on these advances for banks and NBFCs and trying to bring down growth rates. The risk of an asset bubble because of faster and easier access to credit seems to become real based on the data they were reading. #3 The expected capex cycle push from the government will not come.There are a couple of reasons for it. First, this government has always been careful about fiscal deficit, and it is particular about the risk of the fiscal space. The government has committed to a 4.5 per cent target for the union government deficit in the next 3 years from the current levels, that's expected to be 6.4 per cent. I see a tightening in the fiscal stance during the year with a gradual reduction in some of the pandemic-related subsidies and better targeting of the benefits improving distribution efficiency. The other reason for a muted capex spend is the likely belief that the private sector credit capex cycle seems to be picking up. Got it mostly right except for the private sector capex cycle bit. That didn't show up in 2023 as I was expecting. Government capex actually slowed as it kept its glide path to a 4 per cent union deficit by 2026. The efficiency improvement in tax collections and subsidy disbursement also helped in broadly sticking to the fiscal plan for the year. And as I expected, this government doesn't need to loosen its purse strings in an election year. It has multiple other tools in its armoury to swing people's opinion in favour of it.  India: Political and SocialI had generally anticipated a more-of-the-same year despite some of the noise surrounding opposition efforts at the start of 2023. BJP with PM Modi at the helm, is possibly the most formidable political force in the world and it can turn its missteps too into its advantage. We saw this during the pandemic when its response was poor and too late. But that's all water under the bridge now. It is also helped by a coincidence of circumstances where China has gone off-track and India is able to play its ‘swing power' role to its fullest advantage in global geopolitics. All of this has meant it has a compelling domestic narrative to offer to the people of India rising in global prominence. This has tremendous capital at least among the middle class and the Hindi heartland. Back to what I wrote at the start of the year:#1 More of the sameThe expected consolidation of opposition forces to counter the BJP isn't going to happen early enough for it to mount a credible challenge in 2024. There are eight state elections in 2023, and I suspect BJP will see reverses or very close fights in a couple of them where it is the incumbent (MP and Karnataka)....But it is hard to see opposition consolidation or a credible case that they can make to counter the electoral juggernaut of the BJP at this time. Congress, the other national party, isn't capable of moving the masses either with its agenda or its leadership. The vacuum in national politics looks set to stay.Ho hum. BJP lost Karnataka like I thought they would. MP was a surprise and it only shows how poorly Congress has performed through the year. Everything else is, as they say, same same.#2 More Exit, Less VoiceI have made the point in the past about social fault lines tripping us up while we magically have a growth window that's opened up for us again. This holds true. The space for opposition or dissent has shrunk; more importantly, even the fight for protecting or broadening that space has gone out....The state would be dependent on citizens if they value their loyalty and would then pursue a policy that listens to their voice. However, if the state doesn't value it and the citizens know their voice won't matter, the only option is to exit. For certain sections of our citizenry, they are possibly at this stage of engagement with the state. This scenario might not hurt the majority today, but we would do well to remember it has never been a good idea for the state to not value the loyalty of its citizenry in the long run. Nothing has changed on this. I guess this macro trend has only exacerbated in 2023.So there I am with my report card. Not too bad, I guess though Pranay may again complain that these were quite generic and unless we make very specific predictions, it all seems to come true at the end of the year. Well, I will try to do that next week with my 2024 predictions. But don't hold your breath on that, Pranay.  A Framework A Week: Four Components of an Economic StrategyTools for thinking about public policy— Pranay KotasthaneMontek Singh Ahluwalia writes that any economic strategy has four components: slogans, targets, programmes, and policies. Slogans refer to rhetoric employed by the government. Ahluwalia calls it the “front end” of economic strategy. Rhetoric is necessary in a representative democracy for communicating the government's position on an issue in a simple, catchy form without going into the details of the accompanying policy measures. Think Garibi Hataao, Shining India, Inclusive Growth, Sabka Saath Sabkaa Vikaas, and Minimum Government and Maximum Governance. Targets are specific, measurable goals of an economic strategy. An example is the articulation that India will become a developed country by 2047. The World Bank comes up with a GDP per capita threshold for classifying an economy as a high-income one. So the target becomes a guiding light for policies and programmes and also serves as a tool for holding the government accountable.Programmes refer to government-led measures involving public expenditure. Policies are government directives that allow or disallow specific economic activities. The difference can be understood using another popular three-fold classification which says that all governments do only three things — produce, finance, and regulate. This means programmes are government actions that involve producing or financing, while policies are about regulating. For example, bank recapitalisation is a programme where the government is financing public sector banks. In contrast, the Foreign Trade Policy 2023 lays down the rules that govern all exports and imports. This four-fold classification is useful for policy analysts for two reasons. One, it doesn't look at slogans cynically. Economic narratives are important. Slogans are often launchpads for powerful narratives.Secondly, differentiating policies from programmes is crucial. The default government tendency is often to bat for government-run programmes. Think Production-linked Incentives (PLI) and export subsidies. There are enough and more programmes from the past to tinker with and regurgitate them into a new programme to “solve” the economic problems of the day. However, chronic economic problems might need a fundamental change in policies that cannot be fixed by programmes alone. India's manufacturing underperformance is one such example. Though there have been many a programme for overcoming this challenge, the solution lies in changing trade, tax, labour, and doing business policies. Another example comes from the 1991 economic reforms. At the time, many politicians thought that India only needed a debt restructuring programme. However, the reformers successfully argued that India needed a change in tax, business, and investment policies; a new programme alone wasn't good enough. For an illustration of this framework, check this article by Montek Singh Ahluwalia on the problem with India's public sector banks.PolicyWTF: Screws are Strategic This section looks at egregious public policies. Policies that make you go: WTF, Did that really happen?— Pranay KotasthaneThe Department to Ground Foreign Trade, or less accurately, the Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT), is a gift that keeps giving. Their latest policy move is to restrict the import of cheap screws so that India can become a self-reliant vishwaguru of screws. A screwpower, maybe? In a notification issued on 3rd Jan, the DGFT banned the imports of screws priced lower than ₹129/kg. Indian manufacturers used to import these from France, China, Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, and Belgium.So, the government wants to do an import substitution of a humble product that costs ₹129 per kg and already has a diversified supply chain. If this isn't ridiculous enough, think about the impact on Indian manufacturers who relied on these imports. They are the ones getting screwed here because they will end up paying more for the same product. Long-time readers might experience déjà vu as there was a similar policy restricting the imports of mosquito electronic racquets in 2020, to which RSJ had paid proper obeisance in edition #129. In other news, one of the issues blocking the India-UK FTA is that Indian EV car manufacturers don't want the high import duties to be dropped. Currently, electric cars priced above $40000 are slapped with a 100 per cent import duty, while those below $40000 are levied a 70 per cent duty. Domestic manufacturers argue that a reduction in import duty will stall the sunrise industry. These two stories in recent months illustrate the slippery slope of industrial policy in low state capacity conditions. A domestic subsidy for manufacturers can still be justified because every other country is doing that. It's become an entry pass of sorts to play the manufacturing game. But to couple domestic production subsidies with import restrictions makes these policies scarily close to the import substitution regime in the pre-1991 era. Every government makes mistakes. However, low state capacity results in governments repeating the mistakes of the past as there is no institutional memory. We seem to be reaching that point with India's industrial policies. This observation also stands empirically. Check out the New Industrial Policy Observatory (NIPO) released by the IMF (hat-tip to Niranjan Rajadhyaksha for sharing the accompanying paper on X). The database classifies industrial policy actions over the last few years into eight categories: export barriers, import barriers, domestic subsidies, export incentives, FDI measures, Public procurement measures, Localisation content measures, and miscellaneous. This is by far the most detailed database of industrial policy measures I've seen—a fantastic tool for scholars working in economic policy.Now here's my initial analysis looking at the data for India in NIPO. Of the 195 industrial policy measures that India has taken, 55 are distortionary trade measures, illustrating that we are repeating import substitution ideas of the past. There's more to this. In the database, one can also classify industrial policies sectorwise. Here again, we see that import tariffs feature across most sectors. Such mindless import substitution will lead to export contraction, as Indian companies become uncompetitive and bow out of international competition. We have seen this movie before.P.S.: Look at this chart of trade as a per cent of GDP for the world's five largest economies. Trade is a higher proportion of India's GDP than is the case for Japan and China. It's been that way for the last ten years. Trade is far more important to India than we realise. HomeWorkReading and listening recommendations on public policy matters* [Book] Vivekananda: The Philosopher of Freedom is a thoroughly enjoyable, myth-busting biography. * [Blogpost] This post has a mind map of market failures and corresponding government interventions. A boon for anyone interested in public policy.* [Podcast] Listen in to a Puliyabaazi with economist Rohit Lamba on India's future economic trajectories. This is a fun episode. * [Paper] A useful take on Foreign Trade Policy 2023 in Economic and Political Weekly. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit publicpolicy.substack.com

We finish up the crime issues, the bloody codes, private prosecution of crime, transportation to Australia, that we began last episode.  Then we move into the consequences of the Glorious Revolution, legitimacy and the changing role of Parliament, and Parliament as a meta institution.  We get a flavor of Joel Mokyr's coverage of intellectual property rights, with views expressed in favor of the patent system by Goethe, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, and valid complaints made by Charles Dickens and Charles Babbage.As usual with British institutions, we contrast them favorably with continental institutions, no matter how shambolic, the British institutions are so often better.

Does technological progress automatically translate into higher wages, better standards of living, and widely shared prosperity? Or is it necessary to steer the development of technological improvement to ensure the benefits don't accrue only to the few? In a new book, two well-known economists argue the latter. I'm joined in this episode by one of the authors, Simon Johnson.Simon is the Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT. He and Daron Acemoglu are authors of the new book Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity. Simon is also co-author with Jonathan Gruber of 2019's Jump-Starting America, now out in a new paperback.In This Episode* Is America too optimistic about technology? (1:24)* Ensuring progress is widely shared (11:10)* What about Big Tech? (15:22)* Can we really nudge transformational technology? (19:54)* Evaluating the Biden administration's science policy (24:14)Below is an edited transcript of our conversationIs America too optimistic about technology? James Pethokoukis: Let me start with a sentence or two from the prologue: “People understand that not everything promised by Bill Gates, Elon Musk, or even Steve Jobs will likely come to pass. But, as a world, we have become infused by their techno-optimism. Everyone everywhere should innovate as much as they can, figure out what works, and iron out the rough edges later.” Later, you write that that we are living in a “blindly optimistic” age.But rather, I see a lot of pessimism about AI. A very high percentage of people want an AI pause. People are very down on the concept of autonomous driving. They're very worried that these new technologies will only make climate change worse. We don't seem techno-optimistic to me. we certainly don't see it in our media. First of all, let me start out with, why do you think we're techno-optimistic right now, outside of Silicon Valley?Simon Johnson: Well, Silicon Valley is a very influential culture, as you know, nationally and internationally. So I think there's a deep-running techno-optimistic trend, Jim. But I also think you put your finger on something very important, which is since we finished the book and turned in the final version in November, I think the advance of ChatGPT and some of our increased awareness that this is not science fiction — this is actual, this is real, and the people who are developing this stuff have no idea how it works, for example—I wouldn't call it pessimism, but I think there's a moment of hesitation and concern. So good, let's have the discussion now about what we're inventing, and why, and could we put it on a better path?When I think about the past periods where it seemed like there was a lot of tech progress that was reflected in our economic statistics, whether it's productivity growth or economic growth more broadly, those were also periods where we saw very rapid wage growth people think very fondly about. I would love to have a repeat of 1995-2000. If we had technologies that could manage that kind of impact on the economy, what would be the downside? It seems like that would be great.I would love a repeat of the Henry Ford experience, actually, Jim. Henry Ford, as you know, automated the manufacturing of cars. We went from producing tens of thousands of cars in the US to, 30 years later, producing millions of cars because of Ford's automation. But at the same time Ford and all the people around him — a lot of entrepreneurs, of course, working with Ford and rivals to Ford — they created a lot of new jobs, new tasks. And that's the key balance. When you automate, when you have a big phase of automation, and we did have another one during World War II and after World War II. We also created a lot of new tasks, new jobs. Demand for labor was very strong. And I think that it's that balance we need. A lot of the concerns, the justified concerns about AI you were mentioning a moment ago, are about losing jobs very quickly and faster than we can create other tasks, jobs, demand for labor in other, non-automating parts of the economy.Your book is a book of deep economic history. It's the kind of book I absolutely love. I wonder if you could just give us a bit of a flavor of the history of what's interesting in this book about those two subjects and how they interact.We tried to go back as far as possible in economic and human history, recorded history, to understand technological transformations. Big ones. And it turns out you can go back about 1000 years with quite reliable information. There are some things you can say about earlier periods, a little bit more speculative to be honest. But 1000 years is a very interesting time period, Jim, because as you know, that's pretty much the rise of Europe timeframe. A thousand years ago, Europe was a nothing place on the edge of a not very important part of one continent. And through a series of technological transformations, which took a long time to get going — and that's part of the medieval story that we explore — [there was] a huge amount of innovativeness in those societies. But it did not translate into shared prosperity, and it was a very stop-start. I'm talking about over the period of centuries.Then, eventually, we get this Industrial Revolution, which is initially in Britain, in England, but it's also shared fairly quickly around northwest Europe: individual entrepreneurship, private capital, private ownership, markets as a dominating part of how you organize that economy. And eventually, not immediately, but eventually that becomes the basis for shared prosperity. And of course, that becomes the basis for American society. And the Americans by the 1850s to 1880s, depending how you want to cut it, have actually figured out industrial technology and boosted the demand for labor more than the Europeans ever imagined. Then the Americans are in the lead, and we had a very good 20th century combining private capital, private innovation with some (I would say) selective public interventions where a private initiative didn't work. And this actually carried a lot of countries, including countries in that European tradition, through to around 1980. Since 1980, it's become much more bumpy. We've had a widening of income inequality and much more questioning of the economic and political model.Going back into the history: Oftentimes people treat the period before the steam engine and the loom as periods of no innovation. But there was. It just didn't have the impact, and it wasn't sustained. But we were doing things as a society before the Industrial Revolution. There was progress.There was technological progress, technological change. Absolutely.The compass, the printing press, gunpowder — these are advances.Right. The Europeans, of course, were sort of the magpies of the world at that point. A lot of those innovations began in China. Some of them began in the Arab world. But the Europeans got their hands on them and used them, sometimes for military purposes. They figured out civilian uses as well. But they were very innovative. Some people got rich in those societies, but only a very few people, mostly the kings and their hangers-on and the church. Broad-shared prosperity did not come through because it was mostly forced labor. People did not own their labor. There was some private property, but there wasn't individual rights of the kind that we regard as absolutely central to prosperity in the United States, because they are central to prosperity and because they're in the Constitution for a reason, because it was coming out of feudalism and the remains of that feudal system that our ancestors in the United States were escaping from. So they said, “Let's enumerate those rights and make sure we don't lose them.” That's coming out of 800 years of hard-learned history, I would say, at that point. And that's one reason why, not at the moment of independence but within 50 to 70 years, the American economy was really clicking and innovating and breaking through on multiple technologies and sharing prosperity in a way that nobody had ever seen before in the world.Before that period in the 1800s, the problem was not the occasional good idea that changed something or made somebody rich; it was having sustained progress, sustained prosperity that eventually spread out wide among the people.Absolutely. And I think it was a question of who benefited and who was empowered and who could go on and invent the next things. Joel Mokyr, who's an economic historian at Northwestern, one of our favorite authors, has written about the sort of revolution of tinkerers. And that's actually my family history. My family, as far back as we can go, was carpenters out of Chesterfield in the north of England. They made screws for a hundred years starting in the mid-19th century in Sheffield. They would employ a couple of people at any one time. Maybe no more than eight, maybe as few as two. They probably initially polished blades of knives and eventually ended up making specialized screws. But very, very small scale. There was not a lot of formal education in the family or among the workforce, but it was all kind of relationships with other manufacturers. It was being plugged into that community. Alfred Marshall talked about these clusters and cities of regional entrepreneurship. That's exactly where I'm from. So, yes, I think that was a really key breakthrough: having the institutions, the politics, and the social pressure that could sustain that kind of economic initiative.In the middle of the Industrial Revolution, late 1800s, what were the changes that we saw that made sure the gains from this economic progress were widely shared?If we're talking about the United States, of course, the key moment is the mechanization of agriculture, particularly across the West. So people left their farms in Nebraska or somewhere and moved to Chicago to work for McCormick, making the reapers that allowed more people to leave their farms. So you needed a couple of things in that. One was, of course, better sanitation and basic infrastructure in the big cities. Chicago grew from nothing to be one of the largest cities in the world in period of about a decade and a half. That requires infrastructure that comes from local government. And then there's the key piece, Jim, which is education. There was what's known as a “high school movement.” Again, very local. I don't think the national government knew much about it until it was upon them. [It was] pushing to educate more people in basic literacy and numeracy and to be better workers. At the same time, we did have from the national government, of course particularly in the context of the Civil War, the land grant universities, of which MIT is very proudly one of by the way — one of the only two that became private for various reasons. But we were initially founded to support the manufacturing arts in Massachusetts. That was a state initiative, but it was made possible by a funding arrangement, a land swap, actually, with the federal government.Ensuring progress is widely sharedThe kind of interventions which you've already mentioned — education and infrastructure — these seem like very non-controversial, public-good kinds of things. How do those kinds of interventions translate into the 2020s and 2030s in advanced countries, including the United States? Do we have need to do something different than those?Well, I think we should do those, particularly education, better and more and update it really quickly. I think people are going to agree on that in principle; there may be argument about how exactly you do that. I do think there are three things that should be on the table for potential serious discussion and even potential bipartisan agreement. The first is what Jaron Lanier calls “data dignity,” which is basically [that] you and I should own the data that we produce. This is an extension of private property rights from the right of the political spectrum. The left would probably have other terminology for it. But what's basically happening, and the value that's being created in these large language models, is those models are taking data that they find for free — actually, it's not really free, but it's not well protected on the internet, digital data — and they're using that to train these very large models. And it's that training process that's generating, already and will train even more, huge value and potential monopoly power for incumbents there. So Jaron's point is, that's not right. Let's have a proper organization and recognition of proper rights, and you can pay for it. And then it also gives consumers the ability to bargain potentially with these large monopolies to get developers some technologies rather than other technologies.The second thing is surveillance. I think everyone on the right and the left should be very uncomfortable with where we are on surveillance, Jim, where we've slipped into already on surveillance, and also where AI is going to take us. Shoshana Zuboff has a great book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism on exactly this, going through where we are in the workplace and where we are in in our society. And then of course there's China and what they're doing in terms of surveillance, which I'm sure we're not going to do. In fact, I think the next division of the world may be between the low-surveillance or safeguarded-surveillance places, which I hope will include the US, and the high-surveillance places, which will be pretty much authoritarian places, I would suggest. That's a really different approach to the technology of how you interact with workers, citizens, everybody in all their various roles in life.The third one we're probably not going to agree on right away, but I do want us to have some serious discussion about it, is corporate taxation. Kim Clausing from UCLA, a former senior Treasury person, points out that we do have a graduated corporate tax system in the US but bigger companies pay less. Smaller companies' effective tax rate is higher than bigger companies because they move their profits around the globe. That's not fair and that's not right. And she proposes that we tax mega profits above $10 billion, for example, at a higher rate than we tax smaller profits to give the big companies that are very successful, very profitable an incentive to make themselves smaller. The reason I like Kim's proposal is I want competition, not just between companies directly in terms of what they're offering, but also between business models and mental models. And I think what we're getting too much from Microsoft and Google and the others who are likely to become the big players is machine intelligence, as they call it, which basically means replacing people as much as possible. We argue for machine usefulness, which is also, by the way, a strong tradition in computer science — it's not the ascendant tradition or ascendant idea right now — that is, focusing technology on making humans more effective. Like this Zoom call is making us more effective. We didn't have to get ourselves in the same room. We are able to leverage our time. We're able to organize our lives differently.Find those kinds of opportunities, particularly for lower-income workers. We are not getting that right now because we lack competition, I think, in the development of these models. Jim, too much. You joked at the beginning that the Silicon Valley is the only optimist. Maybe that's true, but they're the optimists that matter because they're the ones who control the development of the technology. Almost all those strings are in their hands right now, and you need to give them an incentive to give up some of that. I'm sure we can agree on the fact that having the government break things up, or the courts, is going to be a big mess and not where we want to go.What about Big Tech?Does it suggest caution, as far as worrying about corporate size or breaking up these companies, that these big advances, which could revolutionize the economy, are coming from the very companies you're worried about and are interested in breaking up? Doesn't it argue that they're kind of doing something right, if that's the source of this great innovation, which may be one of the biggest innovations of our life?Yes, potentially. We're trying to be modest and we're trying to be careful here, Jim. We're saying if you make these really big profits, you pay the higher tax rate. And then you have a conversation with your shareholders about, do we really need to be so big? When Standard Oil was broken up before World War I, it was broken into 25 or 26 pieces, Rockefeller became richer. That created value for shareholders. More competition was also good, I think we can say safely at this distance, it was good for consumers. Competition for consumers is something I think we should always attempt to pursue, but competition in mental models, competition for ideas, getting more plurality of ideas out there in the tech sphere. I think that's really important, Jim. While I believe this can be — and we wrote the book in part because we believe it is — a very big moment in sort of technological choices that we humans have made and will continue to make. This is a big one. But if it's all in the hands of a few people, we're less likely to get better outcomes than if it's in the hands of hundreds of people or thousands of people. More competition for ideas, more competition to develop ways to make machines and algorithms useful to people. That's our focus.You have OpenAI, a company which was invested in by Microsoft, and Google/Alphabet is working on their version. And I think now you have Facebook and Amazon devoting more resources. Elon Musk is talking about creating his own version. Plus you have a lot of companies taking those models and doing things with them. It seems like there's a lot of things going on a lot of ferment. It doesn't to me seem like this kind of staid business environment where you have one or two companies doing something. It seems like a fairly vibrant innovation ecology right now.Of course, if you're right, Jim, then nobody is going to make mega excess profits, and then we don't have to worry about the tax rate proposal that I made. My proposal, or Kim's proposal, would have bite only if there are a couple of very big winners that make hundreds of billions of dollars. I'm not a computer scientist, I'm an economist, but it seems…Right, but it seems like those mega profits might be competed away, so I'd be careful about right now breaking up Google into eight Googlettes.Fine. I'm not trying to break them up. I'm saying give them a tax system so they confront that incentive and they can discuss it with their shareholders. The people who follow this closely, my computer science colleagues at MIT, for example, feel that Microsoft and OpenAI are in the lead by some distance. Google, which is working very closely with Anthropic, which broke away from OpenAI, is probably a either a close second or a slightly distant second. It's sort of like Manchester City versus the rest of the Premier League right now. But the others you mentioned, Facebook, Amazon, are some years behind. And years are a big deal here. Elon Musk, of course, proposed a pause in AI development and then suggested he get to launch his own AI business — I suppose to take advantage of the pause.That's a little suspicious.There's not going to be a pause. And there's not going to be a pause in part because we know that China is developing AI capabilities. While I am not arguing for confrontation with China over this or other things necessarily, we do have to be cognizant that there's a major national security dimension to this technology. And it is not in the interest of the United States to fall behind anyone. And I'm sure the Chinese are having the same discussion. That's going to keep us going pretty much full speed. And I think is also the case that many corporate executives can see this is a potential winner-take-all. And on the applications, the thinking there is that we're going to be talking very soon about a sort of supply chain where you have these fundamental large language model, the [General-Purpose Technology] type at the bottom, and then people can build applications on top of them. Which would make a lot of sense, right? You can focus on healthcare, you can focus on finance, but you'll be choosing between, right now it looks like, one or two of the large language models. Which does suggest really big upstream profits for those fundamental suppliers, just like how Microsoft has been making money since the mid-1980s, really.Can we really nudge transformational technology?With an important technology which will evolve in directions we can't predict, can we really nudge it with a little bit of tax policy, equalizing capital labor rates? Can we really nudge it in the kind of direction that we might want? If generative AI or machine learning more broadly is as significant as some people say, including folks at MIT and Stanford, I just wonder if we're really operating at the margins here. That the technology is going to be what the technology is. And maybe you make sure we can retrain people, and we can change education, and maybe we need to worry a bit about taxing this profit away if you're worried about corporate power. But as far as how the technology interacts with the workplace and the tasks people do, can we really influence it that much?I think that's the big question of the day, Jim. Absolutely. This is a book, not a policy memo, because we feel that the bigger issue is to have the discussion. To confront the question, as you pose it, and to discuss, what do we as a society want? How do we develop the technology that we need? Are we solving the problems that we really want to solve? Historically, of course, we didn't have many of those conversations. But we weren't as rich then as we are now. Hopefully we're more aware of our history now and more aware of the impact of these choice points. And so it's exactly to have that discussion and to say, if this is as big as people say, how are we going to move it in various directions?I like, as you know, to propose specific policy. I do think, particularly in Washington, it's the specifics that people want to seize. “What do we mean by surveillance? What do we mean by s safeguards over surveillance? How could you operationalize protections against excessive surveillance? By whom? By employers, by the police, by companies from whom you buy stuff? From your local government?” That conversation still needs to be had. And it's a very big, broad conversation. So let's have it quickly, because the technology is moving very quickly.What does the more recent history of concerns about technology, what lessons should we draw? I think of, I think of nuclear technology, which there are lots of concerns and we pass lots of rules. We basically paused that technology. And now we're sitting here in the, you know, in the 2020s worried about climate change. That, to me, is a recent powerful example of the dangers of trying to slow a technology, delay a technology that may evolve in ways you don't understand, but also can solve problems that we don't understand. It's, to me, are the history of least in the United States of technology over the past half century has been one of being overly cautious, not pedal to the metal gungho, you know, you know, let's, let's just keep going as fast as possible.As I think you may remember, Jim, I'm a big advocate for more science spending and more innovation in some fundamental sense across the whole economy because I think that generates prosperity and jobs. In my previous book, Jump-Starting America, we went through the nuclear history, as you flag. And I think the key thing there is at the beginning of that industry, right after World War II, there was over-optimism on the part of the engineers. The Atomic Energy Commission chair famously promised free electricity, and there was very little discussion about safety. And people who raised the issues of safety were kind of shunted to one side with the result that Three Mile Island a little bit and Chernobyl a lot was a big shock to public consciousness about the technology. I'm in favor of more innovation…I wonder if we've overlearned that lesson, you know? I think we may have overlearned it.Yes. I think that's quite possibly right. And we are not calling for an end to innovation on AI just because somebody made a movie in which AI takes over the world. Not at all. What we're saying is there are choices and you can either go more towards replacing people, that's automation, and more towards new task creation, that's machine usefulness. And that's not a new thing. That's a very old, thousand-year or maybe longer tension we've had in the history of innovations and how we manage them. And we have an opportunity now, because we're a more conscious, aware, and richer society, to try and pull ourselves through various means — and it might not be tax policy, I'll grant you that, but through various means — towards what we want. And I think what we want is more good jobs. We always want more good jobs, Jim. And we always want to produce useful things. We don't want just to replace people for the sake of replacement.Evaluating the Biden administration's science policySince you brought it up, I'm going to take the opportunity to ask you a final question about some of your other work about trying to create technology hubs across America. It seems like those ideas have to some degree made their way into policy during the Biden administration. What do you think of its efforts on trying to spend more on R&D and trying to spread that spending across America and trying to make sure it's not just Austin and Boston and New York and San Francisco and LA as areas of great innovation?In the Chips and Science Act, there's two parts: chips and science. The part that we are really advocating for is the science part. And it's exactly what you said, Jim, which is you spend more on science, spread it around the country. There are a lot of people in this country who are innovative, want to be innovative. There are some really good resources, private sector, but also public sector, public-sector universities, for example, in almost every state where you could have more innovation in some basic knowledge-creation sense. And that can become commercialized, that can become private initiative, that can generate jobs. That's what we are supporting. And I think the Science Act absolutely did internalize that. In part, because people learned some hard lessons during COVID, for example.The CHIPS Act is not what we were advocating for. And that's going to be really interesting to see how that plays out. That's more, I would say, conventional, somewhat old-fashioned industrial policy: Pick a sector, back a sector, invest in the sector from the public sector perspective. Chips are of course a really important sector, and the discussion of AI is absolutely part about that. And of course we're also worried, in part because of COVID but also because of the rise of China, about the security of supply chains, including chips that are produced in, let's say, parts of Asia. I think there are some grounds for that. There's also some issues, how much does it cost to build a state-of-the-art fab and operate it in the US versus Taiwan or South Korea, or even China for that matter? Those issues need to be confronted and measured. I think it's good that we're having a go. I'm a big believer in more science, more science spending, more responsible deployment of it and more discussion of how to do that. The chips industrial policy, we'll see. I hope something like this works. It would be quite interesting to pursue further, but we have had some bumps in those roads before. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: What if they gave an Industrial Revolution and nobody came?, published by jasoncrawford on May 17, 2023 on LessWrong. Imagine you could go back in time to the ancient world to jump-start the Industrial Revolution. You carry with you plans for a steam engine, and you present them to the emperor, explaining how the machine could be used to drain water out of mines, pump bellows for blast furnaces, turn grindstones and lumber saws, etc. But to your dismay, the emperor responds: “Your mechanism is no gift to us. It is tremendously complicated; it would take my best master craftsmen years to assemble. It is made of iron, which could be better used for weapons and armor. And even if we built these engines, they would consume enormous amounts of fuel, which we need for smelting, cooking, and heating. All for what? Merely to save labor. Our empire has plenty of labor; I personally own many slaves. Why waste precious iron and fuel in order to lighten the load of a slave? You are a fool!” We can think of innovation as a kind of product. In the market for innovation there is supply and demand. To explain the Industrial Revolution, economic historians like Joel Mokyr emphasize supply factors: factors that create innovation, such as scientific knowledge and educated craftsmen. But where does demand for innovation come from? What if demand for innovation is low? And how much can demand factors explain industrialization? Riffing on an old anti-war slogan, we can ask: What if they gave an Industrial Revolution and nobody came? Robert Allen thinks demand factors have been underrated. He makes his case in The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, in which he argues that many major inventions were adopted when and where the prices of various factors made it profitable and a good investment to adopt them, and not before. In particular, he emphasizes high wages, the price of energy, and (to a lesser extent) the cost of capital. When and where labor is expensive, and energy and capital are cheap, then it is a good investment to build machines that consume energy in order to automate labor, and further, it is a good investment to do the R&D needed to invent such machines. But not otherwise. And, when he's feeling bold, Allen might push the hypothesis further: to the extent that demand factors explain the adoption of technology, we don't need other hypotheses, including those about supply factors. We don't need to suppose that certain cultures are more inventive than others or more receptive to innovation; we don't need to posit that some societies exhibit bourgeois virtues or possess a culture of growth. Let's examine Allen's argument and see what we can learn from it. First I'll summarize the core of his argument, then I'll discuss some responses and criticism and give my own thoughts. High wages and cheap energy In the first half of the book, Allen establishes that pre-industrial Britain was indeed a high-wage, cheap-energy economy. Wages Here are workers' wages in various cities around the world. By the 18th century, wages in London and Amsterdam were more than twice that of other major cities: Nor is it just that prices were higher in those cities. Here are the wages deflated by the cost of a “subsistence basket,” the bare minimum of food, clothing, and other goods needed to live. Workers in Vienna, Delhi, or Beijing were only a little above subsistence; those in Amsterdam or London were ~4x above: There is also qualitative evidence of high wages. Workers in Northwest Europe ate better diets, “in view of the apparent widespread consumption of expensive and highly refined foods like white bread, meat, dairy products and beer. In contrast, workers and peasants in France, Italy, India and China ate a quasi-vegetarian diet of grain, often boiled, with scarcely any animal pro...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: What if they gave an Industrial Revolution and nobody came?, published by jasoncrawford on May 17, 2023 on LessWrong. Imagine you could go back in time to the ancient world to jump-start the Industrial Revolution. You carry with you plans for a steam engine, and you present them to the emperor, explaining how the machine could be used to drain water out of mines, pump bellows for blast furnaces, turn grindstones and lumber saws, etc. But to your dismay, the emperor responds: “Your mechanism is no gift to us. It is tremendously complicated; it would take my best master craftsmen years to assemble. It is made of iron, which could be better used for weapons and armor. And even if we built these engines, they would consume enormous amounts of fuel, which we need for smelting, cooking, and heating. All for what? Merely to save labor. Our empire has plenty of labor; I personally own many slaves. Why waste precious iron and fuel in order to lighten the load of a slave? You are a fool!” We can think of innovation as a kind of product. In the market for innovation there is supply and demand. To explain the Industrial Revolution, economic historians like Joel Mokyr emphasize supply factors: factors that create innovation, such as scientific knowledge and educated craftsmen. But where does demand for innovation come from? What if demand for innovation is low? And how much can demand factors explain industrialization? Riffing on an old anti-war slogan, we can ask: What if they gave an Industrial Revolution and nobody came? Robert Allen thinks demand factors have been underrated. He makes his case in The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, in which he argues that many major inventions were adopted when and where the prices of various factors made it profitable and a good investment to adopt them, and not before. In particular, he emphasizes high wages, the price of energy, and (to a lesser extent) the cost of capital. When and where labor is expensive, and energy and capital are cheap, then it is a good investment to build machines that consume energy in order to automate labor, and further, it is a good investment to do the R&D needed to invent such machines. But not otherwise. And, when he's feeling bold, Allen might push the hypothesis further: to the extent that demand factors explain the adoption of technology, we don't need other hypotheses, including those about supply factors. We don't need to suppose that certain cultures are more inventive than others or more receptive to innovation; we don't need to posit that some societies exhibit bourgeois virtues or possess a culture of growth. Let's examine Allen's argument and see what we can learn from it. First I'll summarize the core of his argument, then I'll discuss some responses and criticism and give my own thoughts. High wages and cheap energy In the first half of the book, Allen establishes that pre-industrial Britain was indeed a high-wage, cheap-energy economy. Wages Here are workers' wages in various cities around the world. By the 18th century, wages in London and Amsterdam were more than twice that of other major cities: Nor is it just that prices were higher in those cities. Here are the wages deflated by the cost of a “subsistence basket,” the bare minimum of food, clothing, and other goods needed to live. Workers in Vienna, Delhi, or Beijing were only a little above subsistence; those in Amsterdam or London were ~4x above: There is also qualitative evidence of high wages. Workers in Northwest Europe ate better diets, “in view of the apparent widespread consumption of expensive and highly refined foods like white bread, meat, dairy products and beer. In contrast, workers and peasants in France, Italy, India and China ate a quasi-vegetarian diet of grain, often boiled, with scarcely any animal pro...

We move into the analysis of how the Enlightenment affected the Industrial Revolution.    The Primary text for this arc will be Joel Mokyr's The Enlightened Economy.Science, philosophy and the sharing of information links the Enlightenment in Britain to the Industrial Revolution.  But...really?

Sometime in the 18th century, the world began to grow at much faster rate. Economic Historians have debated the reasons for this Industrial Revolution, but it almost certainly has to do with the growth of technology and a culture of scientific inquiry. Joel Mokyr is both an economist and a historian. He is also a professor of both Economic and History at Northwestern University. In addition, Joel has authored several books on history and the economy over the years. His latest book, A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy, is about how science and technology evolved in ways that reinforced each other.Joel and Greg discuss the connections between the industrial and scientific revolutions and between scientific discovery and technological adaptation. They discuss the decline of the guilds in England and the subsequent diffusion of English artisans and mechanics accross Europe They also discuss Darwin not being a darwinian, and how Caldwell'ss law leads to the decline in growth.Episode Quotes:Apprenticeship in Britain42:07: Engineers, mechanics, chemists, and technicians of any kind, whether they're carpenters, blacksmiths, or millwrights, are not produced in schools. They are not produced in universities. They're produced by other artisans through personal contact, which is called apprenticeship, and apprenticeship is all over the world. This is how people were trained, and what happens in Britain is, for historical reasons, apprenticeship worked much better than anywhere else.What makes the study of society complicated?28:15: The study of society is infinitely more complex and difficult because we humans are damn complicated creatures, and our minds have some level of complexity that defies anything that the quantum theorist can think about. So, in principle, we can, and we've made some progress in understanding certain things about society. Where it gets difficult is utilizing that kind of knowledge. Our power over natures keeps on increasing but our wisdom in handling that power is not26:30: There's something we can learn from the evolutionary people, which is yes, there is progress in certain dimensions and not others. And part of the problem is that these dynamics are not in sync with one another. And that creates these equilibria. It creates all kinds of trouble. And that is, to some extent, the great dilemma of the modern age: power over nature keeps increasing, but our wisdom and benevolence in handling that power is not.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Francis BaconRobert GordonStephen Jay GouldSteven PinkerDouglass NorthBarry R. WeingastFriedrich HayekMilton FriedmanJames WatsonCardwell's LawThe Narrow CorridorGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Northwestern University (Department of Economics)Faculty Profile at Northwestern University (Department of History)Profession Profile at The British AcademyProfessional Profile on NobelPrize.orgProfessional Profile on CIFARHis Work:Articles on AeonThe Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic ProgressThe British Industrial Revolution: An Economic Perspective (American & European Economic History) 2nd EditionA Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy (Graz Schumpeter Lectures)The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge EconomyThe Economics of the Industrial Revolution (Routledge Revivals) The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850 (The New Economic History of Britain seri) Why Ireland Starved: A Quantitative and Analytical History of the Irish Economy, 1800-1850 (Economic History)

We're in the 21st century, and it would seem that the world is finally moving towards gender equality, right? Not so fast. Alice Evans joins Amit Varma in episode 297 of The Seen and the Unseen to discuss why some parts of the world are crawling slower than others. (For full linked show notes, go to SeenUnseen.in.) Also check out: 1. Alice Evans on her blog, website, YouTube, podcast, Google Scholar, King's College and Twitter. 2. Rocking Our Priors -- Alice Evans's podcast. 3. Ten Thousand Years of Patriarchy, Updated! -- Alice Evans. 4. An Intellectual History of the Patriarchy -- Alice Evans. 5. Friendships and Women's Liberation -- Alice Evans. 6. 3 Things I Got Wrong About Patriarchy -- Alice Evans. 7. What Don't We Know About Patriarchy? -- Alice Evans. 8. Overcoming the Global Despondency Trap -- Alice Evans. 9. Ideas of India: The Great Gender Divergence -- Alice Evans on Shruti Rajagopalan's podcast. 10. Ideas of India: Female Friendships and Fraternal Capital -- Alice Evans on Shruti Rajagopalan's podcast. 11. Select episodes of The Seen and the Unseen that discussed gender with Shrayana Bhattacharya, Paromita Vohra, Kavita Krishnan, Urvashi Butalia, Namita Bhandare, Manjima Bhattacharjya and Mahima Vashisht. 12. Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome. 13. We Should Celebrate Rising Divorce Rates (2008) — Amit Varma. 14. Metrics of Empowerment — Episode 88 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Devika Kher, Nidhi Gupta & Hamsini Hariharan). 15. The Loneliness of the Indian Woman — Episode 259 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shrayana Bhattacharya). 16. Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh — Shrayana Bhattacharya. 17. Chup: Breaking the Silence About India's Women -- Deepa Narayan. 18. Terror as a Bargaining Instrument -- Francis Bloch and Vijayendra Rao. 19. Russia: Bill to Decriminalize Domestic Violence -- Human Rights Watch. 20. The Argumentative Indian -- Amartya Sen. 21. Climate Change and Our Power Sector -- Episode 278 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Akshay Jaitly and Ajay Shah). 22. Nuclear Power Can Save the World — Joshua S Goldstein, Staffan A Qvist and Steven Pinker. 23. Emergent Ventures prizes for best new and recent blogs -- Tyler Cowen. 24. Zotero -- Your Personal Research Assistant. 25. Most of Amit Varma's writing on DeMon, collected in one Twitter thread. 26. On the Origins of Gender Roles: Women and the Plough -- Alberto Alesina, Paola Giuliano, Nathan Nunn. 27. The Ties That Bound -- Barbara A Hanawalt. 28. Jared Diamond and Paul Collier on Amazon. 29. Pseudoerasmus.-- Blog about economic history & comparative development. 30. Daron Acemoglu on Amazon. 31. Naila Kabeer on Twitter, LSE, her own website.and Google Scholar. 32. Sylvia Chant at LSE and Google Scholar. 33. Claudia Goldin at Harvard and Google Scholar. 34. Early Indians — Tony Joseph. 35. Tony Joseph's episode of The Seen and the Unseen. 36. Who We Are and How We Got Here — David Reich. 37. Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages — Peggy Mohan. 38. Understanding India Through Its Languages — Episode 232 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Peggy Mohan). 39. On the Economic Origins of Restricting Women's Promiscuity -- Anke Becker. 40. Herding, Warfare, and a Culture of Honor: Global Evidence -- Yiming Cao, Benjamin Enke, Armin Falk, Paola Giuliano and Nathan Nunn. 41. The Politics of Marriage in Medieval India: Gender and Alliance in Rajasthan -- Sabita Singh. 42. The Ulema-State Alliance: A Barrier to Democracy and Development in the Muslim World -- Ahmet T Kuru. 43. Gendered Morality -- Zahra Ayubi. 44. Parkinson's Law — C Northcote Parkinson. 45. Sowmya Dhanaraj and Vidya Mahambare speak to Alice Evans on her podcast. 46. Structural Transformation and Employment Generation in India -- Amit Basole. 47. Networks and Misallocation: Insurance, Migration, and the Rural-Urban Wage Gap -- Kaivan Munshi and Mark Rosenzweig. 48. Curse of the Mummy‐Ji: The Influence of Mothers‐In‐Law on Women in India -- S Anukriti, Catalina Herrera‐Almanza, Praveen Pathak and Mahesh Karra. 49. Gender, Intersectionality and Smartphones in Rural West Bengal -- Sirpa Tenhunen. 50. Private Truths, Public Lies — Timur Kuran. 51. The Rise and Fall of Imperial China: The Social Origins of State Development -- Yuhua Wang. 52. Penis pins. 53. Female Monarchs and Merchant Queens in Africa -- Nwando Achebe. 54. The Enlightened Economy: Britain and the Industrial Revolution, 1700-1850 -- Joel Mokyr. 55. The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa -- Nathan Nunn and Leonard Wantchekon. 56. Michael Pollan on coffee. 57. Public Goods and Ethnic Divisions -- Alberto Alesina, Reza Baqir and William Easterly. 58. The Progress of Humanity -- Episode 101 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Steven Pinker). 59. Claiming the State -- Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner. 60. Capable Women, Incapable States -- Poulami Roychowdhury. 61. The Big Questions -- Steven Landsburg. 62. A Godless Congregation — Amit Varma. 63. Honour and Shame: Women in Modern Iraq -- Sana Al-Khayyat. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. And subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free! Episode art by Simahina.

Dr. Jared Rubin is the co-author of How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth, which he wrote with Mark Koyama, a previous guest on the podcast. We are so happy to welcome Jared to the show today to discuss the thesis of his book, and what he and Mark aimed to add to the literature on the subject of economic growth in the contemporary context. This is a fascinating and thoughtful conversation, packed with insight and nuance on important arguments of the past, what is needed to broaden and enhance our understanding of economic growth, and how far these projects might go towards enabling us to see a better future. Dr. Rubin answers some questions about geographic, legal, and technological explanations for growth, and stresses the importance of synergy and interplay between these theories for a more illuminating picture. So to hear all this and a whole lot more, including many reasons to pick up his latest book, tune in today!   Key Points From This Episode:   •   Introducing the role of culture in economic growth, and tracing the roots of this inquiry. •   Positioning How the World Became Rich in the lineage of literature on the subject of growth.  •   Looking at England and the emergence of modern growth; arguments over the most important factors. •   Why Dr. Rubin tried to bring different theories into conversation through writing this book. •   Unpacking the argument for the role of liberal speech norms in the history of development, proposed by McCloskey. •   Technological progress and geographic endowments; why this relationship is worth exploration. •   Dr. Rubin's perspective on the role of law and legal systems in the growth trajectory of a country. •   Discussing the relative slowing of growth in the Western world and what this may mean. •   Dr. Rubin briefly comments on an argument for total factor productivity growth being linear. •   Thoughts on big picture topics through a micro lens. •   The lessons we can take from history for the most impactful policies for growth in the future.     Links Mentioned in Today's Episode:   https://www.jaredcrubin.com/ (Dr. Jared Rubin) https://www.chapman.edu/ (Chapman University) https://www.amazon.com/How-World-Became-Rich-Historical/dp/1509540237 (How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth) https://twitter.com/jaredcrubin?lang=en (Dr. Jared Rubin on Twitter) https://economics.gmu.edu/people/mkoyama2 (Mark Koyama) https://chartercitiesinstitute.org/podcast/charter-cities-podcast-episode-16-state-capacity-religious-toleration-and-political-competition-with-mark-koyama/ (Charter Cities Podcast Episode 16 with Mark Koyama) https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1995/lucas/biographical/ (Robert Lucas) https://economics.northwestern.edu/people/directory/joel-mokyr.html (Joel Mokyr) https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Growth-Origins-Schumpeter-Lectures/dp/0691168881 (Culture of Growth) https://henrich.fas.harvard.edu/ (Joe Henrich) https://www.britannica.com/biography/Max-Weber-German-sociologist (Max Weber) https://www.amazon.com/Protestant-Ethic-Spirit-Capitalism/dp/1603866043 (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1992/becker/facts/ (Gary Becker) https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo5970597.html (Culture and the Evolutionary Process) https://press.princeton.edu/our-authors/o-grada-cormac (Cormac Ó Gráda) https://www.deirdremccloskey.com/ (Deidre McCloskey) https://growthecon.com/ (Deitrich Vollrath) https://www.amazon.com/Fully-Grown-Stagnant-Economy-Success/dp/0226820041 (Fully Grown) https://www.stern.nyu.edu/faculty/bio/thomas-philippon (Thomas Philippon) https://www.chartercitiesinstitute.org/...

On the inaugural episode of Risk Talking, Joel Mokyr, the pathbreaking economic historian, joins Allison Schrager to discuss the past, present, and future of innovation and the modern economy. What sparked the industrial revolution? What are the intellectual underpinnings of economic growth? What is the future of work in an increasingly technologized world? And does today's stifling political environment threaten our prosperity? Mokyr and Schrager take up these questions—and much more.

This episode measures France against the 5 standard theories for the origins of the Industrial Revolution.1. Special unique culture that accorded dignity and freedom of action to the middle classes.   This is McCloskey and Paul Slack among others.  Clear fail.2. The production function idea that high wages drives investment in labor saving machinery which kicks off a self reinforcing cycle, that is the miracle.  The idea is associated with Robert Allen, though well developed by many.  France did not have high wages, though they did have access to and use all the english technology.  Clear fail.3. This is the culturally neutral idea that all strive for betterment.  It is just that rapacious elites destroy incentives to betterment.  Very popular idea, very attractive, with some good dark humor embedded in it.4. This is the idea associated with Joel Mokyr that the supply of technical skills and knowledge among the population makes invention and improvements possible and self reinforcing.  Often seen in contrast to theory 2.  Despite this being episode 84, with have less background knowledge on this theory than the others.  Still, given French high science, France is number 2, and French military engineering is superb.  This is where France does best among the theories.5.  The kitchen sink theory.  You need all these things working for you to have the Industrial Revolution.  That's why we never had one before.  Then we bring up some theories from historians.  And discuss for a while the idea that it was the period of Puritan/middle class rule in England after the ECW that was so important.

How exactly am I able to communicate with you? We're not in the same room - we're likely not even in the same state. And if my listener stats are accurate - 30% of you reading this right now live in a completely different country! So... how did we get here? What makes the world modern - technologically, socially, morally - is often under-appreciated, but the history of the modern world is a history of progress. The Roots of Progress founder Jason Crawford believes that understanding that history is key to empowering the next generation to progress ever further.The Roots of ProgressWe Need a New Science of Progress, by Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen for The AtlanticWhy Did We Wait So Long for the Bicycle? - The Roots of ProgressScientists May Have Discovered How the Ancient Greeks' ‘First Computer' Tracked the Cosmos - Smithsonian MagazineA Dashboard for Progress - The Roots of ProgressProgress, Stagnation, and Flying Cars - The Roots of ProgressTechnological Stagnation - The Roots of ProgressThe Roots of Progress Is Now a Nonprofit Organization - The Roots of ProgressIndustrial Literacy - The Roots of ProgressProgress Isn't Natural, by Joel Mokyr for The Atlantic1984 World's Fair1982 World's FairThe Institute for ProgressAcademy of Thought and IndustryFollow Jason on Twitter: @jasoncrawford----------Email: wherewegopod@gmail.comInstagram: @wwgnpodcast

Welcome to another season of your favourite podcast! We are starting off the season by exploring the many explanations of The Industrial Revolution with economic historian and writer Davis Kedrosky. You can learn more about Davis' work from his excellent newsletter here. You can also listen to this podcast through all the other options here. The transcript of the conversation is below.TRANSCRIPTTobi; So briefly, what is the Industrial Revolution? And what is its significance? I mean, we've all seen the charts, you see these different trend lines charting world living standards from the Middle Ages, and then somewhere in the middle 18th century, there's this huge jump, you know, that is generally termed as around the time the Industrial Revolution started. So what's the Industrial Revolution, basically? And why is it significant? Davis; Right. So I guess what you've asked here is two impossibly three questions. So what is the Industrial Revolution? The Industrial Revolution is actually multiple events, which is the bad historian answer. But essentially, you first have the British Industrial Revolution. This is a period that starts around 1760 and continues for about a century until 1860. That's sort of the standard periodization and basically consists of the structural transformation of one economy, the British economy, from a largely agrarian country to one based on manufacturing, especially in a couple of key sectors, those being textiles, iron, and various types of steam goods. So this event is transformative in a number of ways. It's not transformative, in that it brings about a titanic increase in living standards. Because really, for most of the period, living standards in Britain do not rise. It's significant because it is really the first true stirring of economic dynamism anywhere in the world, with the possible exception of the Netherlands in the 17th century. But in this case, in Britain, the industrial revolution is truly sustained. And that brings us to the second part of the question, what is the Industrial Revolution? Because there's first the British Industrial Revolution, and then a European and then a Global Industrial Revolution. By the middle of the 19th century, the technologies that sustain the British Industrial Revolution are spreading to the European continent, and Britain's rivals - France, Germany, parts of Eastern Europe, and Northern Europe and southern Europe - are all starting to take part. And this becomes a continental phenomenon. And this is occurring toward the middle and the latter half of the 19th century, eventually spreading to North America, and is based on new technologies. Primarily based on the application of science to the growth process. And this growth, unlike, perhaps the British industrial revolution, and certainly unlike any growth episode in world history was sustained. Because we are where we are today. It was the beginning of modern economic growth. And so that actually gets into why this episode is significant because it is the spontaneous transformation of a largely stagnant, slow-growing economy, perhaps less so in Britain, but certainly the case in Europe and the rest of the world until something that increasingly approach the relatively rapid pace that we're seeing today, and learn to apply technological advances in a consistent fashion to the improvement of human welfare.Tobi; I'm curious, yeah, like you said, the data is usually put somewhere around 1760, to about 1860, for the first Industrial Revolution. Why did it happen when it did? Because usually, you get two sides of this story, where some scholars will argue it was a really long, slow buildup; while you get the impression from some other scholars that was a sudden discontinuity from a previous, longer trend. So why that period in time, what was different?Davis; If I said that I believe that the Industrial Revolution was a discontinuity from a long trend, I would have historians barking at my door for the next year, and I, you know, might not ever have a career in this discipline. But what I will say is that there are a number of theories about why the industrial revolution happened and how it happens. And this paints me as a historian, but I think it's sort of irresponsible to settle on one. So I borrow from all of them. But I'll just, you know, for the benefit of the listener, I will lay out as many as I can, that I think are relevant. So I guess in the classic phase of the debate, starting in the 19th century when people realize starting with people like Karl Marx... realized that the changes that had been occurring over the previous century in the economy of Britain had been of truly historic magnitude. Two competing theories for why the industrial revolution happens: and I'm borrowing from Deirdre McCloskey here - the conservative approach, which is to say, basically capitalists saved, they were frugal, they built up a larger capital stock, and eventually learned to make whatever gains and growth that they were achieving self-perpetuating. And of course, more capital per person means more productivity, more productivity means greater income per head. So that's the conservative interpretation. The Socialist interpretation is that of Marx, which is that the industrial revolution is based on expropriation, that a process of force was involved in first, the primitive accumulation of capital by capitalists and by capitalist farmers; in dispossessing the peasantry from the countryside and driving them into the factories where they could serve as low wage labour. This increase the profits of the capitalists, and in turn created the self-perpetuating growth process that we are observing continuing today. Both of those continue to be influential, and certainly, their strains have been incorporated into the modern economic history discourse. But so far as we're concerned in talking about economic history, I think that there are really three main theories. And so one of them is definitely the slow growth over time take. And that's the unified growth theory of people like Oded Galor and David Weil, and they essentially argue that an evolutionary process occurs over time whereby a combination of selection and population growth leads to the accumulation of technologies, increase in the rate of innovation. And then this innovation in turn leads to economic growth. And that is also abetted by fertility transition, such that population growth is no longer correlated with economic growth. And that leads to a growth in income per head. Then we have... I think it's about the same year - the end of the first decade of this millennium, we had two theories that have really transformed economic history come out that really set the terms for the causes of the Industrial Revolution debate.The one that's been, I think, most influential among economists is that of Bob Allen. And in his book, The British Industrial Revolution and Global Perspective, he argues that Britain had a unique combination of factor prices - that wages were extremely high in Britain, and capital and energy were extremely cheap. And so what this led producers to do was to substitute labour for capital and also make innovations that would have this labour-saving effect by using lots of capital and energy. The prime example is the steam engine, which used cheap British coal to perform the work that would otherwise have been performed by muscle power. And so the continual creation of these labour-saving inventions is sort of the basis for the Industrial Revolution and increases worker productivity. This is the Allen theory. The Allen theory has received some very strong critiques. People like Jane Humphries and Judy Stevenson have really attacked the empirical basis of Allen's work. They've suggested that wages in Britain were not nearly as high as Allen had computed and that his series made some improper assumptions that led it to be inflated and this really changed the sorts of profits to technological innovation that Allen had to suppose would be driving this process. And so that's where the Allen theory stands today. It's sort of the cleanest mechanism for describing the industrial revolution in an economic sense, but it faces some factual challenges. The other one that occurred about the same time is that of Joel Mokyr. He wrote a book called The Enlightened Economy, I believe in 2009, in which he argued that it was rather ideas rather than economic incentives that led to the transformation of Britain. That it was industrial enlightenment that occurred, and a culture of improvement that swept Britain and led many people of the intellectual class of the country to start taking an interest in practical matters, devising innovations that would improve society, that would make doing practical tasks easier, and then crucially, sharing them with the people around them in a sort of Republic of Letters - in which intellectuals across England and across the continent all communicated to iterate upon each other's technical ideas. And this, in turn, provided the creative spark for modern economic growth and crucially incorporates the sort of scientific aspects that is the foundation of the second or European Industrial Revolution. These are the two main competing theories and people like Nicholas Crafts have attempted to synthesize them into a single argument suggesting that, you know, one explains the demand and one explains the supply of inventions. But others hold that they're incompatible. But you can kind of pick and choose your favourite aspects as Crafts did.Tobi; Yeah, I mean, I get that. But from a global perspective, you're looking at other parts of the world like India, Africa. There are other - I'd say, maybe within the economic history profession - not so popular, but quite popular with the lay public. For example, the institutionalist view of Acemoglu and Robinson who claim in their book and also in some of their papers that the Glorious Revolution laid the foundation for the Industrial Revolution. That's one, I'll like you to address some critiques of that. And secondly, what's the difference between Galor's Unified Growth Theory and sort of the Neo Malthusian story that people like Gregory Clark are constructing?Davis; Okay, I'll start with the Acemoglu and Robinson theory about the Glorious Revolution. So [what] they essentially argue is that the Glorious Revolution is a watershed event that turns England into a participatory democracy, in which people are free to possess, transfer and use private property without fear of expropriation from the supposedly tyrannical monarchy that existed beforehand. And in the institutionalist view, the security of property rights and participatory democracy are both crucial for economic growth because they allow people to transfer assets to their most productive uses. And these sort of efficiency gains also lead to investment and modern economic growth is supposed to follow from that. Yeah, so Acemoglu and Robinson are sorts of making a distinction between inclusive and extractive institutions. Extractive institutions are supposed to be the sort of, European and broadly global pattern whereby elites have no incentive to promote economic growth and do not allow participation by the common citizen in the political discourse. Whereas inclusive institutions are very much the exception but are established in Britain in the sense that I've previously described, in both the economic and political spheres.They allege that, and I quote, "the industrial revolution started and made its biggest strides in England because of her uniquely inclusive economic institutions. These, in turn, were built on the foundations laid by the inclusive political institutions brought about by the Glorious Revolution, and that they gave man of talent and vision such as James Watt, the opportunity and incentive to develop their skills and ideas and influence the system in ways that benefited them and the nation". So yeah, that's the Acemoglu and Robinson view. Um... I'm not so fond of this one. Tobi; Why? Davis; I have to be careful because there are many people who see a sort of, attack on Acemoglu and Robinson, or even a critique of Acemoglu and Robinson as a critique of institutionalism itself, and I am by no means an anti institutionalist. Because I mean, it's painfully obvious that institutions are extremely important in explaining differential development. But some empirical flaws with the Acemoglu and Robinson contention, especially in its "Why Nations Fail" iteration is that the Glorious Revolution really didn't actually bring about the sort of sweeping political changes that they suppose occurred. British Parliament was still corrupt, the electorate was tiny and dominated by landed elites rather than merchants. Certainly, industrialists come [in the] early part of the 18th century. So those sorts of sweeping changes couldn't really have had a very big influence on the beginning of Britain's economic transformation. Second of all, Parliaments just do not guarantee economic growth anyway, there are plenty of examples of Parliaments filled with wealth holders and merchants who use their political powers in order to just extract rents from the economy at large. So this happens in places like Poland, for example, where parliament is so strong that the ruler cannot issue any legislation without its consent. But that power is then used by the Polish parliament to support the feudal rights of landowners over their serfs and that leads to agricultural stagnation rather than economic growth. So parliament is not necessarily the keystone of economic transformation. Finally, private property in England was already quite secure by the time of the Glorious Revolution. And that event did not bring about any kind of radical transformation in the way that property was treated in England. The Bill of Rights that was passed in 1689 did not impose any limits on Parliament's ability to confiscate property. So you basically see the replacement of the monarch's despotic power over property such as it existed, which was in curtailed form by Parliament. So it's not clear to me that you can attach an economic discontinuity to a political discontinuity in this way. I mean, indeed, in the century following the Glorious Revolution, there really isn't an economic discontinuity. There is perhaps an acceleration in the rate at which the British population is moving out of agriculture, but that had been occurring for over a century in Britain. Those are some of the main difficulties with the Acemoglu and Robinson theory. Then I believe you asked about...um...Tobi; Yeah, Greg Clark and...Davis; Right. So this is not an area that I've really worked with very much. And by the way, there are a number of iterations on the Unified Growth Theory. But as best as I understand it, unified growth theory is concerned with the sort of, the transition between a Malthusian regime and a post-Malthusian regime through the lens of the demographic transition and the returns to innovation. And in their model, population growth tends to increase the rate of technological progress, and technological progress, in turn, increases the returns to investing in human capital. And there's sort of a positive feedback loop between investment in human capital and the rate of technological growth, which has the additional effect of decreasing fertility and a sort of quality versus quantity trade-off. Clark's hypothesis is a little bit different. So Clarke, as I recall, argues most famously in the Farewell to Arms, sorry, A Farewell to Alms. (That is quite a slip there). His argument there is that, basically, the differential reproductive rates of the wealthy lead people of their habits and mindset to become the dominant subset of the population in certain advanced regions, and their behaviour - the behaviour that made them wealthy - is sort of the basis for growth-inducing economic interaction. Those are the main differences. I guess they don't interact with one another that directly, in my point of view.Tobi; So I mean, as long as we are interrogating several theories of the causes of the Industrial Revolution, I read McCloskey's trilogy, right? And I mean, she spent a lot of time criticizing all these other theories about the causes of the Great Enrichment, as she called it. And at the end of the day, she basically, well, I'm not an expert, but in my opinion, she resorted to a bit of a sleight of hand as well, which is to say that well, the cause of this Great Enrichment is liberalism. The spread of freedom, and basically attributed that to luck. Do you buy that? And how does that differ from say, Acemoglu and Robinson, you know... Feels a bit arbitrary.Davis; As I understand it, liberalism is only a part of the McCloskey hypothesis. There's also an aspect to which it has to do with the spread of the bourgeois virtues among the people of Britain and an economic mentality that had not previously existed, and that these sorts of behaviours are the key to an efficiently transacting and innovating culture. Yeah, so there's not just liberalism uber alles. But as far as liberalism is concerned, it's clearly not a sufficient condition for economic growth, it has to be combined to be even beneficial with certain kinds of state capacity such as the provision of some kinds of basic essential services, especially infrastructure, and the provision of social overhead capital in order for the benefits of industrialization not to be winnowed away. I mean, a good example is Britain, in fact, where certain kinds of laissez-faire behaviour by the state are actually detrimental to the British economy. British cities grow much too fast for their infrastructure, and in many ways, they really are the sort of hives of scum, filth, and overcrowding they're drawn up as in your standard Charles Dickens novel. And part of the reason for that is because much of the investment in public infrastructure was shunted away from the state and toward private individuals and this process did not occur as seamlessly as it might have. And so, you know, there's poor sanitation, improper access to good drinking water, inadequate housing stocks, and all these social bads, actually, probably, reduced the rate of economic growth. So if liberalism is to be helpful, it has to be an appendage of a larger growth process. And I really do not think it's either sufficient or necessary for industrialization. You can look straight to one of the foremost industrializing countries of the last four decades in China, where industrialization has occurred apace in, really, the absence of political liberalism. And you can make arguments about whether that growth will be sustained. But there is certainly dynamism and there is certainly an improvement in per capita living standards and convergence with the West. You can even make the argument for Soviet Russia and its early years as Bob Allen has - that from about the late 1920s until 1970, Soviet Russia under a planning regime grew quickly enough to have some measure of convergence with the West, and certainly an increase in living standards.Tobi; Two final questions before I let you go. One of which would be, as you mentioned in the introduction, after the 1760 or thereabout event, a lot of economies in Europe, France, and of course, Germany, caught up with the British economy and, of course, by the end of the Second World War, America had become the preeminent global economic power. Why did the British economy decline?Davis; That's a question that some economic historians don't accept at all, and that I'm hoping to explore in the relatively near future. But the old Edwardian argument that Britain has just matured, and that it's had its spell as the leading industrial nation, but there are inevitable limits to growth, and that they've reached the limit of their possibilities and handed over the torch to the United States and to Britain's European rivals. You know, the answer here is obviously a little bit more complicated. But one of the standard responses is to say, well, the kind of growth that Britain experienced from 1760 to 1860, was of a fundamentally different character than that that made the United States and Western Central Europe successful during the 19th century. And that's basically down to this distinction between tinkering and engineering-based innovation that is responsible for the creation of many of the main inventions of the British Industrial Revolution and the application of science to technology, drives innovation during the Second Industrial Revolution. So in the first industrial revolution, you see, particularly in the textile sector, a range of innovations arising from learning by doing, from people within the industry solving problems that occur to them in the production process and making incremental improvements, really, without the aid of any kind of formal knowledge. Not all of these improvements are incremental, like inventions like the flying shuttle, the water frame, the spinning jenny, all these things bring about colossal improvements in productivity, and they make Britain by 1850 the world's leading textile exporter, but none of them required deep formal knowledge of how to construct machinery of the physics of the engineering process. Whereas by the end of the 19th century, some of the leading sectors like steel, electricity, the construction of automobiles, chemicals, all of these industries require significant scientific knowledge in order to advance to an appreciable degree. So there's the argument that Britain's success in tinkering-based innovation-led it to undervalue the importance of investment in human capital, specifically through an education system. And consequently, there was sort of an inadequate generation of young scientists and professional engineers coming through the ranks just at the time when they were most needed in transitioning the British economy toward the modern industries that we're taking hold in Germany and the United States. That's probably true to an extent. But there's also a degree to which Britain is simply following its comparative advantage in other kinds of industries in the face of the industrialization of the United States and the Central European powers. Britain is always going to have an advantage in the provision of financial services and shipping, and that is really one of the directions that the British economy takes in the years before World War One. And so the economic historian Simon Carly has argued that this isn't senescence, this is not the ageing and stagnation of the British economy, but really a movement in a new direction to conform with her resource possibilities and comparative advantages. Obviously, the United States is always going to have a much larger advantage in heavy resource-based industrialization, because of the massive reserves of ores, minerals, timber at its disposal.Tobi; Final question before I let you go, if we look at contemporary economic growth and policies, especially in countries that are still behind income-wise, what can we learn from the Industrial Revolution? Because a lot of people project different things depending on the causal story that they buy, or that they want to believe. Advocates of industrialization and the East Asian style of industrial policy take different lessons, people who favour the Institutionalists also use that to give their own sort of policy advice. People who favour liberalism will say, well, it's about political freedom. So what are we supposed to learn from the Industrial Revolution, so to speak, does that particular period of history have anything to teach us at all?Davis; You and every sort of public, economic intellectual in every country that has tried to develop ever since the Industrial Revolution wonders the same thing. And the thing that's really interesting and unique about the British Industrial Revolution is not just that it's the first of its kind, but that it's the only Industrial Revolution that occurs without a model. Because every other industrialization process in history looked back on the British experience, and said, you know, we should imitate this aspect and that aspect. And that where Britain has been successful, we should expect to be successful too. They've taken Britain's successes and applied them to their own, to some extent. The British Industrial Revolution is unique because there is no precedent, there is no model for what occurred. It really did happen spontaneously, because even though there may have been some elements in the British government that wanted to promote economic growth, that's the famous mercantilism of the 17th and 18th centuries and really, one of the reasons why Adam Smith writes his great book, The Wealth of Nations in 1776, is because these are all people interested in making the country wealthier. But they had no idea that industrialization was sort of what could or would follow. And so, in terms of the lessons that we can draw from this, they are to some extent limited. We know that because of the degree to which all of these countries that have attempted to follow the British model have either successfully or unsuccessfully failed to do so. The United States, for example, was moderately successful at industrializing, say, in New England, along British lines, but immensely successful in going its own way in a variety of Heavy Industries toward the end of the 19th century. Partly because of the simple scale, but also because of the human capital and skill advantages that we've been talking about. You know, it's quite reasonable to argue that many of the East Asian countries would have struggled to industrialize in the spontaneous fashion that Britain did because they were situated in a position in the global economy in which they did not have a comparative advantage in the industries that would end up transforming them until they employed industrial policy in order to break free and to get out of low level local agrarian traps. And I know that people will shout at me and say that Meiji Japan was already growing prior to the world wars. But I don't think it was necessarily true that Meiji Japan was set to grow in the spectacular fashion that Japan did after 1945. But all this is debatable. But what is certainly true from the British example, is that it demonstrates, in some respects, the extent to which a different combination of political liberalism and state capacity can make a difference in producing some economic separation. So if you have the right political economy, by comparison with your neighbours, you can have a bit of a growth advantage. This is not to say that if you have had Britain's political economy from the 18th century, you would somehow grow faster today. Rather, if you had Britain's advantage in political economy, you might have. But in my opinion, and this is not to sound too down, the genesis of the Industrial Revolution is primarily in the long process of the transformation of productive forces from the 16th century onward. And no hand was taken really by any institution in shaping them. And that spontaneity, and that mystery really, is what makes the Industrial Revolution so interesting. And so also just why it has been so difficult to copy. And why nations that have intentionally industrialized have needed to find their own recipes for doing so.Tobi; Finally, what are you working on right now? And why are you excited about it?Davis; Yeah, so I'm planning on obviously continuing with my Substack and blog, I never really know what to call it. I don't know if it's a newsletter or a blog, or what? I guess it just depends on...Tobi; I think it's both. Davis; Yeah, I guess it depends on how you access it. But yeah, I've got a couple of projects in various stages of production. I have an economic history paper that is presumably being refereed at the moment, so we'll see how that's received and whether major transformations will be needed to bring that toward publication. And then I also am in some of the very early stages of what could be an exciting project in Canadian economic history. But I don't want to reveal too much about that at the present. I'm not exactly like throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping that it sticks because I have way too much time in order to, sort of, incentivise desperation like that.But I do think it's, at this point, beneficial to engage in a diverse array of possibilities for work that I can consider doing.Tobi; It's been great talking to you, Davis, and I wish you all the best.Davis; Yeah, thanks. Fun conversation. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.ideasuntrapped.com/subscribe

Jeremiah recounts the best books from 2021, including books on gentrification, political organizing, economic growth, comedy's role in society, economic dynamism, the history of evolution, and much more!  Part 1 of this episode - https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-neolib-podcast/episode/best-books-of-2021-part-1-85453491 Utopia, LOL? - http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/utopia-lol/ There Goes the Hood, conversation with Lance Freeman -  https://www.patreon.com/posts/60147903 Politics is for Power with Eitan Hersh - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/politics-is-for-power-ft-eitan-hersh/id1390384827?i=1000520028193 A Culture of Growth with Joel Mokyr - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/explaining-economic-growth-ft-joel-mokyr/id1390384827?i=1000543484704 To make sure you hear every episode, join our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/neoliberalproject. Patrons get access to exclusive bonus episodes, our sticker-of-the-month club, and our insider Slack.  Become a supporter today! Got questions for the Neoliberal Podcast?  Send them to mailbag@neoliberalproject.org Follow us at: https://twitter.com/ne0liberal https://www.instagram.com/neoliberalproject/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/1930401007051265/   Join a local chapter at https://neoliberalproject.org/join  

“I tell my students, ‘If somebody utters the sentence that starts with the words, “History teaches us” the rest of the sentence is probably wrong.' History has no direct lessons for almost anything. Our own age is sufficiently different, sufficiently unique, from what happened in the past that any facile lessons from history are more likely to mislead than to enlighten.” That series of caveats comes from Joel Mokyr, who, perhaps counter-intuitively, is an economic historian. And in fact, the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences and professor of economics and history at the Chicago-area Northwestern University shows in this Social Science Bites podcast that there's quite a bit to learn from history if you keep your expectations in check. For example, he explains that “the good old days weren't all that good and that the very best time to be born in human history is today. That sounds hard to believe in an age where we're all running around with face masks and facing quarantine, but it's still true.” For his own part, Mokyr tells interviewer Dave Edmonds, “I use economics to understand history, and I use history to understand economics.” Mokyr's ties to economic history are deep: he was president of the Economic History Association in 2003-04, spent four years in 1990s as senior editor of the Journal of Economic History, was editor-in-chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History, and is currently editor-in-chief of the Princeton University Press Economic History of the Western World series of monographs. From that perch, he explains, presumably with a smile, that his peers work with ‘expired data.' Economic historians “scour the past looking for large data sets that we can use in some way to make inferences. The issue of causality becomes somewhat of an obsession in economics these days, and economic history is very much a part of this.” In this interview, Mokyr details how the improvement in the human condition he cited above is connected to the Industrial Revolution. “The Industrial Revolution is particularly important because that's where it all started -- before 1750 almost nowhere in the world were living standards approaching anything but miserable and poor.” Economic activity before the year 1750 was mostly the story of trade, he explains, while after 1750, it became the story of knowledge. “The Industrial Revolution was the slow replacement of trade and finance and commerce by another thing, and that is growing knowledge of natural phenomena and rules that can be harnessed to material welfare of people.” To demonstrate this approach, he offered the example of steel. While it has been made for centuries it wasn't until 1780 that anyone knew roughly why  this alloy of iron and carbon resulted in such a useful metal, and therefore could exploit its properties more by design than by chance. “If you don't know why something works,” Mokyr said, “it's very difficult to improve it, to tweak it.” Mokyr's scholarship has earned him a variety of honors, including the biennial Heineken Prize by the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences for a lifetime achievement in historical science in 2006. He has also written a number of prize-winning books, including The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy, and most recently, A Culture of Growth.

One of the central questions of economics is "Why are some countries rich and some countries poor? And how did rich countries become rich in the first place?" Economic historian Joel Mokyr joins the podcast to discuss these questions and more.  Why did the Industrial Revolution happen in England, and not elsewhere? How did political fragmentation lead to the flourishing of innovations? What lessons can we draw from the Republic of Letters?  And what does this teach us about promoting economic growth today? Dr. Mokyr tackles all these questions and more! Further reading: A Culture of Growth - https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691180960/a-culture-of-growth Plagues Upon the Earth - https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691192123/plagues-upon-the-earth The Enlightened Economy - https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300189513/enlightened-economy   To make sure you hear every episode, join our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/neoliberalproject. Patrons get access to exclusive bonus episodes, our sticker-of-the-month club, and our insider Slack.  Become a supporter today! Got questions for the Neoliberal Podcast?  Send them to mailbag@neoliberalproject.org Follow us at: https://twitter.com/ne0liberal https://www.instagram.com/neoliberalproject/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/1930401007051265/   Join a local chapter at https://neoliberalproject.org/join  

Episode: 2694 Science and the Second Industrial Revolution.  Today, science, invention, and a revolution of sorts.

Will Hutton discusses the Oxford Divinity School, the 5 plus 2 diet and the 2006 Companies Act Will Hutton discusses with Ivan six things which he thinks should be better known. Will Hutton is co-chair of The Purposeful Company. He was Principal of Hertford College, University of Oxford from 2011 to 2020, and Chair of the Big Innovation Centre, an initiative from the Work Foundation. He was chief executive of the Work Foundation from 2000 to 2008. He was formerly editor-in-chief for The Observer. American football https://www.the42.ie/basic-guide-to-american-football-and-the-nfl-2265086-Feb2018/ Oxford Divinity School https://discoveroxfordshire.com/things-to-do/the-divinity-school/ The Enlightenment Economy by Joel Mokyr http://www.enlightenmenteconomics.com/blog/index.php/2010/01/review-of-the-enlightened-economy-by-joel-mokyr/ 5 plus 2 diet https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/the-5-2-diet-guide Pickled Herring and Acqua Vit https://www.capebretonpost.com/opinion/the-taste-of-denmark-pickled-herring-and-aquavit-20245/ Section 172 of the 2006 Companies Act https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/business-law-blog/blog/2017/09/section-172-uk-companies-act-2006-desperate-times-call-soft-law This podcast is powered by ZenCast.fm

Lo scorso 24 febbraio Stroncature ha ospitato la presentazione del libro "Una cultura della crescita. Le origini dell'economia moderna" di Joel Mokyr, Northwestern University. Con l'autore dialogano Amedeo Lepore, Università della Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, Luigi Mascilli Migliorini, Università degli Studi “L'Orientale”, Vincenzo Pascale, Stroncature/ Long Island University.

Attitudes, Aptitudes, and the Roots of the Great Enrichment: How Attitudes (cultural beliefs) and aptitudes (technical competence) played central roles in the British Industrial Revolution and the origins of modern growth Prof Joel Mokyr is a Professor of Economics and History at Northwestern University and a Professor of Economics at the University of Tel Aviv. He specializes in economic history and the economics of technological change and population change. His most recent book is A Culture of Growth. He has authored over 100 articles and books in his field. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/scientificsense/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/scientificsense/support

Joel Mokyr is a Netherlands-born American-Israeli economic historian. He is a professor of economics and history at Northwestern University, where he has taught since 1974. In 1994, he was named the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences. He is also a Sackler Professorial Fellow at the University of Tel Aviv's Eitan Berglas School of Economics. Learn more: https://www.history.northwestern.edu/people/faculty/core-faculty/joel-mokyr.html

Skilled artisans were needed to build, improve and mend the machines that powered the industrial revolution. Joel Mokyr tells Tim Phillips how this can help explain why the revolution happened when - and where - it did.

Mankind has come a long way since the caves of our prehistoric ancestors. What has made “the ascent of man” (in the words of Jacob Bronowski) possible? How do we keep it going?   For some answers, check out our discussion with Jason Crawford, author of The Roots of Progress and the creator of Progress Studies for Young Scholars. Learn more about Crawford’s work at RootsOfProgress.org.   Subscribe in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you’re listening right now.   Also check out:   Progress Studies for Aspiring Young Scholars: https://progressstudies.school “We Need a New Science of Progress” by Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/we-need-new-science-progress/594946/ A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy by Joel Mokyr : https://amzn.to/2Cz2XES “Progress Isn’t Natural” by Joel Mokyr: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/11/progress-isnt-natural-mokyr/507740/ The Alchemy of Air by Thomas Hager: https://amzn.to/30efNAh

In the sixth episode of The Torch of Progress, we sit down with Joel Mokyr, the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts & Sciences and Professor of Economics & History at Northwestern University. Mokyr explores the shifting attitudes on progress and its causes throughout history. Guest Speaker: Joel Mokyr - Economist and Historian Links: Progress Studies for Young Scholars: progressstudies.school The Academy of Thought and Industry: thoughtandindustry.com The Roots of Progress Blog: rootsofprogress.org/ Higher Ground Education: tohigherground.org Guidepost Montessori: guidepostmontessori.com

In the fourth episode of The Torch of Progress, we talk with Dr. Max Roser, the researcher and editor behind ourworldindata.org. Key Topics: - Our World in Data - Global Development and its relations to progress studies - What people get wrong about data In This Episode We Discuss: (0:25) Introductions – Progress Studies, a 6 week course covering the history of technology and global living standards (1:20) Speaker Series – upcoming: Deirdre McCloskey, Joel Mokyr, Noor Siddiqui, Anton Howes, and Danica Remy (2:54) Jason Crawford and Max Roser introductions (4:20) What is “global development”? (5:52) Introduce Our World In Data – ourworldindata.org (8:15) You once said that—before coronavirus—Our World in Data had a reputation as “the good news guys”. What does that mean and where did it come from? (10:55) Did we just get lucky in the last 4 or 5 decades that we had all this progress instead of more global catastrophe? (12:22) Chart of how happy people report they are vs how happy they estimate their average countryman is. Basically everybody thinks their country is less happy than it is. Personal optimism vs. social pessimism (13:40) To what extent is the source of overpessimism a "data problem" and to what extent is it a mindset or philosophical problem—the wrong framework? And what's the relationship between the two? (16:50) How do you integrate both data and narrative in your research and in writing. Our World in Data does this really well. How do you put those two together without one driving too much? (19: 15) What do you most wish you could get good numbers about that he can't currently? (25:15) What data has surprised you most since he started doing this? (27:23) Have you been surprised enough to be able to predict where more surprises might be, if he dug into that data? (31:25) Relationship of air pollution to cognitive effects – what does the data point to? (34:15) What is the right way to use data to understand the covid pandemic? What are other people doing wrong in how they interpret and present covid data? (40:00) What advice commonly given to high schoolers is commonly wrong? Q&A (42:42) What has been the hardest thing when it comes to collecting data and taking conclusions from the data? (45:20) Do you think that education systems (e.g. high school) don't focus enough on using statistics and data to interpret history? If so, why, and what should people do about it? (48:20) You mentioned earlier, coal kills more people than nuclear power - but doesn't make for good news. How would you fix news/the media? (50:30) What is your favorite example of a thing that intuitively feels right, but turn out to be wrong when you look at the data? (53:15) Do you think that data can lull us into a sense of false security? Although poverty has decreased over the years, we should still work to eradicate it, but knowing about the decrease could decrease enthusiasm for change and progress, as people will settle for insufficient improvement once some change is made? (57:27) Is the data on global progress often surprising for other people to see? Why is it that they are surprised? Is it flawed education? The media? (59:40) Follow Max on twitter @maxcroser, @ourworldindata, ourworldindata.org (1:00:01) Matt Bateman on PSYS Course

Guest speakers include Michael Robinet, Edward Glaeser, Desmond Lachman, Max Roser, Steven Davis, Philip Fischer, Chris Arnade, Stephen Krasner, Dr. Charles Schwartz, Dr. Alan Gwertzman, Joel Mokyr, Ernest Freeberg, Dr. Jeremy Brown, Gary Saul Morson, and Jeff Shell.

Man must work. But how man works matters. Brendan Greeley sat down with Joel Mokyr, an economist and economic historian at Northwestern University, at an event on the future of work at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Policymakers tend to focus on the binary question of a job — do people have one, or not. But the quality of that work, the questions of meaning and satisfaction, are important to people, in a way that has political consequences. They wandered all the way back to Adam Smith, and eventually the curse of Adam himself, to talk about how the meaning and definition of "work" has changed, and why that matters now. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Is Human Progress Inevitable? Raj Persaud talks to Professor Joel Mokyr about his new book, 'A Culture of Growth' In this groundbreaking book, celebrated economic historian Joel Mokyr argues that a culture of growth specific to early modern Europe and the European Enlightenment laid the foundations for the scientific advances and pioneering inventions that would instigate explosive technological and economic development.

Joel Mokyr is the Robert H. Strotz Professor of economic history at Northwestern University. He has a PhD from Yale, he has taught and studied all over the world, and has supervised many dozens of doctoral students in pursuit of the past. He joins us today to talk about his latest book, A Culture of Growth, and the creeping revolution that enriched the world.Further Readings/References:Mokyr, A Culture of Growth, Princeton University Press. 2017.Mokyr, Joel. The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700-1850. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2009.Prof. Mokyr’s biography & CVMusic by Kai Engel See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Guests: Robert J. Gordon - Stanley G. Harris Professor in the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Northwestern University. He is one of the world’s leading experts on inflation, unemployment, and long-term economic growth. Joel Mokyr - Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Economics and History at Northwestern University and Sackler Professor (by special appointment) at the Eitan Berglas School of Economics at the University of Tel Aviv. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I sit down with worldly philosopher Michael Gibson, founder of the 1517 fund. We talk about living the philosophical life, Nozick's vision of utopia, polycentrism, zen, and education.    Here's a list of resources mentioned in today's podcast: Blog Posts - David Chapman on Robert Kegan's 5 stages of adult moral development - Scott Alexander's Archipelago   Books - Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Robert Nozick - Philosophical Explanations by Robert Nozick - A Theory of Justice, John Rawls - The Lever of Riches, Joel Mokyr   

What follows is an edited transcript of my conversation with Judy Stephenson. Petersen: You're listening to Economics Detective Radio. My guest today is Judy Stephenson of Oxford University's Wadham college. Judy, welcome to Economics Detective Radio. Stephenson: Thank you very much. It's nice to be here. Petersen: So, our topic for today is economic history. Specifically we’ll be looking at some interesting research Judy has done on wage rates in the early modern period in London. This period is particularly interesting because it's the start of the Industrial Revolution which leads to a dramatic increase in the growth living standards and of technology and that trend of course is what has shaped our modern world and made it different from the world of the past. So, it's very important of course to understand this period if we want to understand the world as it is now. So Judy, start by giving us historical background. What was the world like in the period you study? Stephenson: Well, I work mostly on researching London, so urban environments. And London is very developed in this period between about 1600 and 1800. And London becomes the biggest city in the world during this period and as the biggest city in the world it's hugely vibrant, some of the largest merchant houses in the world are there, banking is advanced and developing. Most of the occupations of London are tertiary or service sector, even at this early date. The river is a huge source of both transportation and work, the port is where much of the capital, both physical and financial, from around the world comes through the city, and the professions and bureaucracy are well established in London in this period. It's growing at all levels of society, from the very poorest to the very richest exponentially. So, if you look at the population growth overall in the U.K. in the late 17th century from 1500-1600 to 1700, that actually is pretty much stable or slightly declining. But the population of London grows by a third or something in that period. London is this hugely vibrant commercial social and cultural center and it's pretty much overtaken Amsterdam, which has come to the end of its golden age in the mid 17th century, right at this period. So, although the world more generally and in a wider sense can be typified by pre-industrial or agrarian values, London is very commercial in this period. Petersen: Okay, so, if I were to get in a time machine and go back in time, maybe London would be more familiar to me, would seem, feel more modern than almost any other place. Stephenson: I think it would be very familiar to you the way of getting around would be a sedan chair or a carriage. You can hire them on the street, in fact you send your boy out to get one. It looks very like Uber, it's a gig economy. And most people working in unskilled, or who didn't have a trade or didn't have a profession or skill probably didn't have steady jobs. They thought of themselves as having work that they could rely on, but it wasn't wholly reliable and they definitely didn't have a contract that would keep them going, they probably didn't have many rights either. And they probably worked at two or three things and everything---the traditional literature about London in this period is one of inequality. So the very very poor literally scavenging on the streets among the smut because the streets were the sewers in those days, and the very very rich living in these incredibly grand environments with retinues and servants. It's a golden age for the aristocracy after they had a pretty rubbish time in the 16th century. It's a golden age for the aristocracy, it's a golden age for art, for architecture, for all these things but it is also a period of desperate poverty and mortality. The plague doesn't die out in London until the end of the 17th century, but still very very high infant mortality and living standards are nothing like they become in the later 19th century, after they sorted out all those things. But from a commercial point of view, you might well recognise it. Petersen: It's very interesting---and of course the whole period is interesting---but it's particularly interesting for what it becomes, really. The rest of the world starts becoming more like London, starting in this period. Stephenson: Yes. Petersen: And so you study wage rate of some of the day labourers and the workers in that period. How have economic historians gone about measuring things and getting data that far back in the past? Stephenson: Well, data on wages and prices for this period was originally gathered by a guy---Thorold Rogers---who was a 19th century historian who started collecting wages and prices in the mid 19th century and finished 40 years later, literally a broken man. These are seven volumes from around England and he basically went into any long run institution where there was an archive or records, as they were called in those days, and just noted the quantities and prices found in the books. But it was a huge project way before the days of even print noting, before the days of an efficient typewriter, let alone a computer. It was pretty haphazard as to what he was actually recording but it's very accurate. But he tended to take down labour costs or wages as day rates, and what he mostly found were builders because he was in big Oxford colleges and places like Westminster Abbey which had buildings from the 13th century and had required a lot of building maintenance and surprisingly he didn't find many other wages. So this way of recording had a sort of half dependence. These day rates because they were the only ones that people could find it was assumed that wages---wage rates are very hard to find but there's always good ones for builders---and it was assumed that builders were the same everywhere in terms of skill levels so these could be comparative. And Arthur Bowley---who is known as the father of modern statistics, an economist and statistician again working in the end of the 19th century and in the early 20th century---used builders in his first attempts to think statistically about an average wage, an average worker, and to establish a real wage. And Bowley’s work is absolutely seminal in the history of statistics, econometrics, and economic history. And he used Rogers' and others' wage rates of builders. And this tradition carried on as other historians gathered more rates, like Elizabeth Gilboy in the 1930s, and then Phelps Brown and Hopkins used all these people's data when they came up with the seminal Seven Centuries of Building Wages in 1955. And what Phelps Brown and Hopkins had done was they took all those day rates from the builders, and then they took a series of wages and prices and they created a basket of goods and they offset the wages against the prices and they came up with an index of the real wage or living standards across the ages. And this has been the standard for measuring welfare since 1955. And because it's very difficult to find wage rates for the 18th century for some of the reasons I spoke about a minute ago---not many people have jobs, etc etc etc---the dependence on builders' wages continued until, with the most amazing econometric and advanced econometrics techniques that Greg Clarke and Robert Allen were using, they still use that data from the 1930s. I think the latest good index Jeremy Boulton made in the early ‘90's, where he collected about 2,700 observations of wage rates. The key thing to remember here is all of these wage rates came from bills in the archives of the institutions. So they’re not really wages. In fact they are not wages at all. So, I don't know if you've ever worked for somebody and been charged out by the day, have you? Petersen: I have not, but my wife is charged out, she works in data science and yes, she gets one wage and she's charged out to other firms at a different rate. Stephenson: And what she's charged out is higher, right? So, when I worked in advertising, I cost my clients about 1,800 pounds a day, I saw about 350 of that. What a bloody enormous margin, actually. You got to look at how IPG were not making a really stonking profit on that but you know there's overhead and those kinds of things. Well, in the 18th century everything, but particularly in the building trades, that's exactly how you dealt with masons or bricklayers or carpenters or labourers. And any economy that has to organize production---and the building they were organizing was pretty big, the Great Fire of London destroyed the old city and was completely rebuilt in about a decade---there's some serious organizational coordination mechanism problems of making all that stuff happen. And the 18th century way of doing it is contract it out. Firms are a series of sub-contracts and so the way wage rates have been collected were the sums that were paid to contractors and what those contractors pay their men were substantially lower than those wages that Phelps Brown and Hopkins had used, or Robert Allen had used and Rogers and people have recorded. Petersen: Okay. In your paper you mention Robert Allen and he had a hypothesis that based on these faulty rage weights that high wages in London were a contributing factor in kicking off mechanization in the Industrial Revolution. So, can you talk a little bit about that hypothesis and how your new look at the data has, I suppose, called it into question? Stephenson: Yeah. So, Allen has made the most seminal contribution to the study of the Industrial Revolution. So, the Industrial Revolution is the savored big debate in economic history really and it's a favorite big debate for lots of parts or disciplines within economic history. The history of technology people like it because of the gadgets, the history of macroeconomics and supply and demand people like it because of the factor prices, the history of the organizational people and sociological people like it because of the institutions in the factories. So it has this broad appeal for everybody who's interested in the economics of the long run. Essentially, the core issue around the Industrial Revolution is it's unexplained. Why did it occur in England before anywhere else? It's this naughty problem that had never really been adequately explained until the early 2000s. Then there were two competing---well not two competing but two complementary---explanations by sort of giants of economic history in the same period. So, Bob Allen explained it through England being a high-wage economy and Joel Mokyr explained it through a series of innovations and enlightenment and how that brings about sort of an intellectual enlightment in scientific innovation. Allen’s theory was the economists’ theory and still is. And essentially what he proposed is that the high wages of England incentivized the owners of production to substitute capital for labour. Essentially because of the way series are constructed when you take all those comparative wage series of Amsterdam, London, Milan, Florence, Madrid, Antwerp, Strasbourg, when you sort of put them all together as a real wage series in the long run, the English wages looked substantially higher by comparison, particularly after 1650. It looked like the cost of labour for capital in England was much higher than it was in the rest of North Western Europe or Italy, where you had the traditional textile industries and banking, where there was some quite advanced commerce in places. Allen argued that the high wage economy first of all created those incentives but that also it had created higher human capital and skills, attracted capital to it, to prepare England for industrialization in the long run. But that the trigger was induced innovation through relative factor prices. And part of his theory also was that coal was cheap and available in England, which is very hard to argue that it wasn't, the coal in China is in Mongolia, the Dutch don't have any they've got coal in the Ruhr, of course. But you know coal has been at the center of English energy requirements for a very long time as Tony Wrigley has written about in a very distinct way actually in a lovely book called Energy and the English Industrial Revolution, which is the kind of thing your children could read. So the relative factor prices between energy and capital and labour were unique in England is Allen’s argument. So, obviously if you find out that the wages are 20% to 30% to even 40% lower than Allen thought, that presents a problem for that theory. Petersen: I believe I heard once that Germany had coal but it had to be transported over land and so was as good as useless to them before the age of the steam engine and trucking. Coal is really important. And so Robert Allen felt that high wages in London and in England were important but it seems like this issue of measuring the contract rate instead of the wage rate casts doubt on that, or even---does it close the whole gap between London and the rest of Europe? Stephenson: Good question. And that really depends on what sort of organizational form or coordination mechanism was in place in other countries. So,I've looked into this with Amsterdam and Antwerp quite a bit already. I've done some work with Heidi Deneweth who works on the Low Countries on economy and building particularly. She's at Ghent. And we're finding in the way that building is organized in Amsterdam, in London, is that in London very much the state has completely outsourced everything. So, the city doesn't employ people directly, that's too much hassle. It seems like the cost of management to something is very high in England because they outsource everything: the navy, the supply, the whole thing. Bits of the navy are integrated into it, but a lot of it, particularly the supply to it, is outsourced and all building is outsourced. Whereas in Amsterdam the city still employs people who are digging dikes, and looking after canals, and doing maintenance work on public buildings. Whereas in London the comparable projects which would be stopping London Bridge from falling down, or wharfing the fleet ditch and making these canals and things. Those are given to large contractors and the contractors are solely responsible for labour. Whereas there is some relationship between labour and the city, people are directly employed in Amsterdam, this is indicative only and we need to do a lot more work on comparing contracts in the same types of organizations. And then there's a guy called Luca Maccarelli, who is an established Italian historian of the building industry and industry in Milan generally and he has looked at some of the data for the wages for Florence and Milan particularly and he has shown that the day rate was only part of the wage there. In fact the contractors were throwing food, bonuses, cash savings, access to places to stay, and all sorts of perks at workers to try and induce them to work. So the wage in Italy was probably a little bit higher. In fact, Mark Reilly has said that we've understated Italy’s by 15-20% and then the person who's done the most work on France so far is Vincent Geloso, who's shown that the Strasbourg wages are probably problematic. But all this comparative stuff is at a really early stage. And we need people to get out into the field, the way I've been in the field in London, and look at more the form of employment and the form of the wage in those places. And really understand, the figures that we've got are they real or have they got other sort of recording factors like I've shown in London? So it's too soon to say although we started work on that. Petersen: So, for the modern era we have people collecting data and they're making a big effort to collect the same data across time and across place. Surveys asking the same survey question to everyone, or government data and making sure it's collected in the same way every year but when we're going back to the past, of course there was no one in the year 1700 collecting data on Italy, and London, and Amsterdam, and all these different places. And so we have to stitch it together from what is available and often that's very different datasets. Stephenson: Exactly, and different types of records. So, it may be the case that all the records are a bit skewed and you know there'll be a new schema once we have all the new data together that does reproduce the Allen’s story. And remember that we need to take the prices of goods into account. It's a real wage calculation he's done not just a nominal wage calculation. But until we've done that, what we do know is the living standards in England were not what Allen thought at the moment but you've got to do the whole comparative thing to know. Petersen: So, how do you distinguish the skilled from the unskilled? How do you make sure you're comparing the same kind of labour? Stephenson: That's a good question. Traditionally pretty much everywhere in Europe we've gathered two types of wage: a skilled wage for what we call craftsmen and craftsman are people who have completed an apprenticeship, who are qualified, that's the idea. So, a mason who has studied seven years in England---doesn't seem to be as long anywhere else---or a carpenter who has studied in the long run. So, who has invested time in the development of the human capital and acquired skills and then we think about the unskilled person as a counterpoint as being the labourer. And this is another important distinction because you know building labourers are actually of two kinds: there's the completely unskilled guy. Actually there are three kinds: there's the completely unskilled guy who's basically just handing them nails or wheeling a barrel around. But then there's the more skilled or semi-skilled assistant who actually is doing a lot more than that, who is preparing the work for the craftsman, who knows which tools go with which materials and who is fully assisting a craftsman and they couldn't really do the work without them. And you call that semi-skilled. And then there's a labourer who is hired really for their brawn. They've got a premium for being extremely strong and what you tend to see in building accounts is people who are actually hired by the load. They get 2 shillings and 8 to move a ton over a day or something---and probably need more than one man to do that---but so there's a brawn premium in these labourers or unskilled. And actually from Phelps Brown and Hopkins onwards we've taken this semi-skilled or brawn wage to be the unskilled wage, but these people aren't unskilled. Whereas the unskilled, the guy wheeling the barrel, or just picking out nails was paid a lot less than those. So, if the rate for the semi-skilled guy was 18 pence a day in 1700, the rate for the unskilled guy was 12 to 14. So you can see there's a considerable premium in here. That's another thing that colours our understanding of welfare because usually it's the unskilled or subsistence wage that the macroeconomist is interested in. They relate unskilled and subsistence even though they maybe should not. It's that unskilled wage that is an indication of supply and demand in the labour market, and the draw of that. So taking building labour to a semi-skilled to be unskilled leads to some problems because it implies that unskilled people in London could afford four times the subsistence basket of welfare goods in 1700, when actually they could barely afford two. So, if you're going to use a welfare basket these rates have a real issue and the distinction between skilled is… Petersen: So, the reason maybe we care more about unskilled wages is because that's the wage that you'd expect to see in other places in the economy. For instance unskilled work in agriculture or working in a shop or things that we don't have data for we can sort of guess because presumably there's a labour market and people have mobility and if there was too big a gap between wages for different unskilled jobs then people would move, they’d arbitrage away that difference. So your paper, it has some sort of case studies. You have data from particular construction projects. I thought those might be interesting to go through. So, one of them is the reconstruction of St Paul's Cathedral after the Great Fire of London, which is a massive project, could you talk a little bit about that? Stephenson: Well, yes it's a famous project because the old St. Paul’s had stood since I think the 14th century. It was this you know cultural and emotional symbol for Londoners apparently, and it had been redesigned---the front had been redesigned---by Indigo Jones, the kind of father of classical architecture in England. And it was completely destroyed by the fire and this was a sort of symbolic task to rebuild and so Christopher Wren hailed the King, came up with the design and you know Wren is pretty much the father of modern architecture and he's this enormous intellectual as well as architectural figure, he's very much part of the enlightenment. So the project lasted about 35-40 years, so they declared it finished in 1711 and the Great Fire was 1666 and it's still there today, absolutely intact, it survived the Second World War. So it's this incredible and very emotive building. The interesting thing from a work point of view is it's very much a craftsman's building, it's not an artist's building. So there is sculpture there, there is painting but nothing like a European cathedral like St. Peter's, St. Paul’s is very much a display of English craftsmanship and baroque style and most of it is stone faced. So, I have these wonderful papers, which are the day books of one of the Master Masons, one of the contracting masons who built the south west tower on the west front. His name was William Camster, his father was also a contracting mason on a separate contract and in the network of masons who served, ran and worked. We’d ran over 30 or 40 years and he was on site for about 10 years of the project from 1700 to 1709 or so and some after and I have his day books right, years of this, where he records every single man that was working for him and what they paid him. So, it's got an appeal because you can go and see what they did---which is very rare---working on the 18th century that you get some wage records and you can actually see the product as well. So, it's quite nice from that point of view. So, from an economist's point of view the interesting thing is the way that they contracted the construction because they just started out one contract at a time and then if it worked, they’d go "Yes. We'll do that again." So, they had these repeated idiosyncratic contingent claims contracting going on and on and on and obviously disputes arise and they resolve them, or people drop out and they get new contractors. But the whole thing is basically on a rolling contingent claims contract what Oliver Hart and Holmström said could never happen. Oliver Williamson would have had his head in his hands. But the other notable thing is that the contractors financed this really because the Crown didn't pay them. It did pay them but the Crown and the city, they leveraged the coal tax but mostly people waited two or three years on contracts to be paid. So, the cost of financing that was just swallowed up by the contractors, it was in the price. And that's one of the reasons why you see a margin on labour and materials. But the interest costs for St. Paul's were as a total of the entire bill over 35 years about 20%, and very little of that had been lent by citizens and the city, a lot of that had come from the contractors themselves through just rolling over bills. Petersen: That's interesting. So, we know not only what they were paying their day labours, but also implicitly we know the interest rate for that time. Stephenson: We do. Yes, 6% for to and from the cathedral. Six percent on an annualized basis. Stephen Quinn and Temin and Voth have found higher rates, above 8% for some private lending around the same time. And it is likely that these contractors will have had to have done some private borrowing or lending within their networks to keep rolling this finance over. Because they will have bought the stone, they will have paid the carter, they will have paid the labours who are working for the carter, they will have paid the craftsman, so they may have well have to borrow to do all those things but 6% is what they got from the cathedral. But the real question is then, so these networks of supply chains are surviving on that kind of finance. So really big contracts essentially on a very high level of trust or a very high level of interest. We need to do more work to find out which, but it does seem like these networks---because they repeatedly contract---they have good information and it's more effective than you would imagine those types of contracts to be. Petersen: And of course they're contracting---it's the government paying for it ultimately right? Stephenson: Yes, and it's financed through the coal tax which is also interesting. Bearing in mind the price of coal is relevant to development at this time. The coal tax was levied at a shilling a cauldron after the Great Fire to rebuild the churches for the city and then it was maintained through and into the Georgian period by parliament who kept sort of either adding to it or continuing it and apparently it was detested and greatly avoided. But we definitely need some more research on how this work, and how people avoided it, and and what it did to coal consumption. Because you find in the accounts that the coal tax, they're expecting this much per year from it and consistently about 10 to 15% less comes in. So they have to turn to the city or to commissioners and people who might have money to borrow from them and tide it over. So financing the thing was unconventional. Petersen: So, we usually think of government debt as being highly safe at least in the modern period but back then it may not have been. Stephenson: Yes, and I don't know what the connection to other Treasury things are and Bank of England and everything. At the time it looks like it's just private between St. Paul's and the commissioners for St. Paul’s and either citizens or contractors and that it wasn't actually securitized as a state promise, but there may have been connections. It's something I haven't delved into enough. Petersen: So, another construction project, in this case it's a maintenance project, is the famous London Bridge which of course in the nursery rhyme "London Bridge is falling down" which apparently was true. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Stephenson: So, well London Bridge was it was built the end of 13th century and it's 19 stone piers across the Thames. It must have been the most fascinating and amazing structure, it stood for pretty much 500 years, but by the end of the 16th century in the early 17th century it is falling down. And the Thames because this sort of development further up river as well, the Thames is actually a very strongly flowing tidal river at this stage and the force of the water force through those 19 piers is wearing away. So they built wooden starlings, so they built a wooden constructions they look like boats around the piers, trying to guide the water through and these of course made the problem worse and they made the waters faster. So to pass under the bridge in a boat at high tide apparently you could drop 10 feet through the rushing rapids beneath. So you pay the shootsman who was contracted by the bridge to guide you through the piers. And it was really quite dangerous. So, the bridge has a number of maintenance problems: the first is the starlings the mason repairs. The second is until the mid 18th century the bridge was covered in housing just like Ponte Vecchio in Florence as a proper living bridge the housing was also in a state of disrepair and some of it owned by the bridge and some of it owned privately. So the bridge tried to take over the property that isn't theirs and then get rid of the housing that isn't working, it's falling into disrepair over this period. And there's a guy called Mark Leighton who's written a brilliant thesis at the University of Leicester all about how the bridge masters and the City of London get rid of the housing in the mid 18th century. But essentially the bridge is the only crossing from side to side, from north to south or vice versa until 1750. There isn't another way to cross the Thames. There was a little wooden bridge up in Putney in 1729. London Bridge it's got all of the infrastructure of London basically. And so it's hugely congested and falling apart. So, the maintenance bills are are huge. Oh yeah as well. So as well as the starlings you then have water wheels which are basically bringing the water from the New River Company and the Thames to give water to the city. So those are also in operation, these whole teams of little engineers looking after the water wheels. So it's a really busy bridge it's got people scrambling over it all the time looking after it, not before the shootsman or anybody else doing any work on it and those people were paid not very much. The master craftsmen were paid for their contract and got a really good rate for looking after the contract, and then they hired others piecemeal so they'd hire well-known carpenters or masons. But they'd never have regular days or regular work and then the labourers were paid by the tide. So at high tide you could work on the bridge or you could work on the upper bits of the bridge if you were in a boat; at low tide you could access all those damaged starlings and piers. So at low tide they worked in boats and that meant that in the winter you might only get four tides in the week depending on when the tide and the light coincided, in the summer you could maybe get 11 and then when they didn't need any work done you wouldn't get any tides at all. So, there were quite a number of people. It varied from teams of 12 to teams of 80 or so who were employed in this fashion in a piecemeal just waiting for a little sort of bit of peace work on London Bridge. So, it's an interesting bit of contact with the sort of materiality of the world as well, everything was literally ruled by when the water came in. Petersen: Right. And since it's such a long period of time, I suppose you can get a decent time series of that change in the wages over that period. Stephenson: Yes, from a labour economist point of view, one of the fascinating things about the 18th century is this persistence of rates, particularly for labourers, it's a very monopsonistic market it's a classic monopsonistic market. It's a wage posting. One where employers basically will see who will come at this set wage and what happens is they don't change the wage. The fluctuation happens around the number of days worked. So people don't turn up, or don't get work when there is less to do. The number of days fall away and when there is high demand, an upward-sloping curve, the number of days go up for everybody. But a transaction cost analysis would suggest that the 18th century employer understood the costs of such information very well indeed because they weren't going to have any asymmetry of information. They were going to post ‘this is what you get,’ particularly the unskilled hand and the time or the amount of work that you got was how the fluctuations and the dispersion occurred. So there's a lot more work to be done on that because nobody's really ever looked at this kind of market in those modern terms, understanding it as monopsonistic or having search or information costs. And it's only with these levels of micro data that we can begin to understand that it might have worked like the labour market we know. Until about 20 years ago people thought---until much more recently actually, the last paper I can see about this is in 2007 by Leonard Schwartz---that essentially before 1840 it's a market dominated by custom not by market forces. But on a micro analysis it looks very much like there are just the kind of market forces at play that we understand today. So, wage posting at the lower level, a little bit of wage bargaining at the skills level, and supply and demand do actually equilibrate but not through the rate, through the number of days worked, which of course brings about the income. Petersen: So, the third construction project you discuss is the Westminster Bridge, which I suppose is that that second bridge you mentioned earlier. Stephenson: Yes, the second bridge, the cross rail of the 18th century. Petersen: Is that interesting from an economic history point of view, we have a lot of data from that? Stephenson: You get less data because I don't have anybody's nice little book saying who came in and on which day, so I don't have the number of days' work for Westminster Bridge. The interesting thing about Westminster Bridge is the different kinds of contract. Everybody, they were making contracts for hundreds of thousands of pounds with the masons and engineers and they also had a contract with a guy who had a horse and three piles for 27 pounds for the year. So, you've got this variation in value or risk from a financial point of view which is quite dramatic. But the key thing is that at Westminster Bridge you find the tide and the day model as well. So a much smaller number of days than you would expect that are actually billed to the institution, but this means of paying by the tide, which protects productivity from an employer's point of view. So that also occurs at Westminster Bridge. And what you find is that people are doing quite advanced and quite dangerous work, but without the danger money. They were given gin instead. So they sank caissons, this is one of the earliest uses of caissons designed to create the piers. So these things are experimental to say the least, and they put people in diving gear into the caissons and it must have been terrifying, you know, what if the stuff gave way and they went under the Thames. In February, because that's the time you want to be in the Thames! You know, in 18th century diving gear. And got them to work on the masonry or on the carpentry on the bed of the river for the same rate as you could be having quite a nice comfy time carving out something simple, or doing some basic maintenance work on a couple of windows on some bridge houses. So, yes very dangerous work. There seemed to be a lot of skill available, ready to do that work at those kinds of rates. Petersen: So, where do you see this research program going in the future? Stephenson: There's obviously an issue about the rate of welfare, the real wage and welfare in the 18th century and to be honest if we're going to make a serious contribution to that, we need to start looking at people who aren't builders. I've started a project with the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, where I spent a year before I went to Oxford, on London occupations. Because that Cambridge group, they are the masters of working on occupational structure in the long run in England and we are sampling institutions that bought goods and services widely. And the kind of bills and the kind of businesses that they deal with to understand what sort of people were employed where. So, to try and get some welfare and some wage data beyond builders that we can normalize and use properly. I think the second direction for this research is to understand how labour markets worked. Was there such a thing as custom? Because one of the old things we believe about the Industrial Revolution, and this idea doesn't really stand up anymore, but it's something that's still emotionally alluring for a lot of people, we see the Industrial Revolution as that sort of capitalism thing and our version of capitalism got going. But if people already understood transaction cost economics, and Christopher Wren writes like Oliver Williamson sometimes, then maybe the market didn't start then, maybe they already had a view of the market. And there are some organizational things that we need to be looking at from that point of view. Essentially the 18th century will always be interesting because it is a free market. It is unregulated, there's no corporation tax and the finance is not state controlled at all. This is before the gold standard, this is before states get interested in managing money in a big way. There is monetary policy but it's not in the same way we conceive it now. And so labour and capital have a relationship that is unencumbered by the state, by government, by regulation. So what is the outcome of that? Was it a race to the bottom, was there any equilibrium, what happened? So, there's a contribution to be made to studying that as a sort of a history of ideas thing as well. It's hugely rich but those are broadly the three things that are on my agenda right now. Petersen: My guest today has been Judy Stephenson. Judy thanks for being a part of Economics Detective Radio. Stephenson: Thank you very much. I very much enjoyed talking to you.  

The Industrial Revolution (and period between 1500-1700) was an unprecedented age of technology and economic progress — not unlike today's, in fact — where we took “quantum leaps” forward in tech by taming electricity, making cheaper steel and refining iron cheaply, automating fiber looms, pumping water out of coal mines, figuring out how to measure longitude at sea, improving the quality of food, preventing smallpox, … even bleaching underwear. But what really triggered the Industrial Revolution? Why did it take place in Europe and spread beyond? It has to do with a competitive, open market of ideas — a transnational “Republic of Letters”, not unlike the early days of the blogosphere. And the conditions that created it (virtual networks, open access science, weak ties, and so on) are the very conditions we may need to sustain growth and prosperity even today, argues Joel Mokyr, professor of economics and history at Northwestern and author of the new book A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy. Despite fears of what new tech may bring, the alternative to not innovating is stagnation — “not doing it is worse”, argues Mokyr in this episode of the a16z Podcast. So how do we then measure that growth? How does this all play out internationally, and institutionally? And what happens when we bring shared focus to big problems, like climate change? If there's one pattern that continues to play out throughout history to today, it's that “Knowledge builds technology and technology builds knowledge.” image: Library of Congress

Economists Robert Gordon and Joel Mokyr present opposing views of future innovation.

What is the future of the economy? As the presidential election looms, this question continues to play a critical role in the discourse. Robert Gordon contends that economic progress will be slow—due to slower innovation, plateauing education, an aging population, and rising inequality and debt. On the other hand, Joel Mokyr argues that the future looks bright—driven by a new age of invention, especially in areas such as computing, robotics, materials, and bioengineering. According to the 2016 Chicago Council Survey, 57 percent of Americans believe the next generation will be worse off economically than today's workers. Is the best yet to come, or are the heydays of economic growth over? What should the next president do to foster growth? Join the Council for a lively debate.

My guest today is Joel Mokyr, an economic historian at Northwestern University. He focuses on technological progress, and how it affects growth. From Mokyr's perspective, we haven't seen anything yet. He's not trying to predict what will happen next; he's just confident and ready that big things will continue to happen. The topic is technology. In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss: Define technology The notion of playing God with technology How technology and economic growth are intertwined Why screwing up is part of technology The acceleration of technology New ways of measuring growth Anesthesia and antibiotics as technologies and imagining new technologies as revolutionary as them Moving from a wheat and steel economy into an information economy The factory, the separation between firm and household, and the Industrial Revolution The death of distance Why technology is often not reflected in the GDP Solving the language barrier through technology Why the global acceptance of the English language is driven by technology Why innovation isn't natural to us The declining respect of the writings of previous generations Why the median age will continue to increase Why we are moving into a mass-customization society Changes in material science The best way to think about the future Jump in! --- I'm MICHAEL COVEL, the host of TREND FOLLOWING RADIO, and I'm proud to have delivered 10+ million podcast listens since 2012. Investments, economics, psychology, politics, decision-making, human behavior, entrepreneurship and trend following are all passionately explored and debated on my show. To start? I'd like to give you a great piece of advice you can use in your life and trading journey… cut your losses! You will find much more about that philosophy here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/trend/ You can watch a free video here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/video/ Can't get enough of this episode? You can choose from my thousand plus episodes here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/podcast My social media platforms: Twitter: @covel Facebook: @trendfollowing LinkedIn: @covel Instagram: @mikecovel Hope you enjoy my never-ending podcast conversation!

Michael Covel speaks with Joel Mokyr on today’s podcast. Marc Andreessen, one of the founders of Netscape, tweeted that Mokyr was one of his heroes. This intrigued Covel, and hence his desire to have Mokyr on the show. Mokyr is a economic historian at Northwestern University. He focuses on technological progress, and how it affects growth. From Mokyr’s perspective, we haven’t seen anything yet. He’s not trying to predict what will happen next; he’s just confident and ready that big things will continue to happen. Covel and Mokyr define technology; the notion of playing God with technology; how technology and economic growth are intertwined; why screwing up is part of technology; the acceleration of technology; new ways of measuring growth; anesthesia and antibiotics as technologies and imagining new technologies as revolutionary as them; moving from a wheat and steel economy into an information economy; the factory, the separation between firm and household, and the Industrial Revolution; the death of distance; why technology is often not reflected in the GDP; solving the language barrier through technology; why the global acceptance of the English language is driven by technology; why innovation isn’t natural to us; the declining respect of the writings of previous generations; why the median age will continue to increase; why we are moving into a mass-customization society; changes in material science; and the best way to think about the future. Want a free trend following DVD? Go to trendfollowing.com/win.

Joel Mokyr of Northwestern University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the future of the American economy. Mokyr rejects the claims that the we are entering an area of stagnation or permanently lower economic growth. He argues that measured growth understates the impact on human welfare. Many of the most important discoveries are new products that are often poorly measured and not reflected in measures such as gross domestic product or income. The conversation closes with a discussion of the downsides of technology and why Mokyr remains optimistic about the future.

Joel Mokyr of Northwestern University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the future of the American economy. Mokyr rejects the claims that the we are entering an area of stagnation or permanently lower economic growth. He argues that measured growth understates the impact on human welfare. Many of the most important discoveries are new products that are often poorly measured and not reflected in measures such as gross domestic product or income. The conversation closes with a discussion of the downsides of technology and why Mokyr remains optimistic about the future.