Thread by @delong

braddelong.substack.com/p/briefly-note…

This—Gregory Clark: The Secret History of the Industrial Revolution—is an extremely interesting but ultimately, I think, not fully sustainable paper. In it, Greg Clark does the Greg-thing: taking an unsustainable position, turning all his ... 1/

...intelligence and industry to sustaining it, and getting remarkably far. His unsustainable position is that the British Industrial Revolution was not the try of modern economic growth—the 2%/year economy-wide improvements in lab or productivity broadly distributed... 2/

...over sectors that we have seen since 1870—but rather the last two of the post-Medieval discrete localized and sector-specific industrial advances. Steam and textile machinery are therefore classified as things like the caravel, printing. It was only, Clark claims... 3/

...“accidents of demand, demography, trade, and geography” that made this spurt appear different, but it was really, like its predecessors, a discontinuous stroke of genius that was eventually self-limiting. In the absence of the coming of the technologies of the Second... 4/

...Industrial Revolution fueled by the industrial research lab to discover and develop and the coming of the modern corporation to develop and deploy, we might well still, today, be in a very impoverished steampunk world. That last part of the argument may, I think, well... 5/

...be correct. But it is nevertheless the case that the differences in “demand, demography, trade, and geography” made the British Industrial Revolution decisively different than anything that had come before. Just as the caravel made spices essential free—but the demand... 6/

...for spices was small and quickly satiated, so the impact was limited—and just as the printing press made books essentially free—but the demand for books was small and quickly satiated, so the impact was limited—so the steam engine made coal-for-heating essentially... 7/

...free and textile machinery made spinning and weaving essentially free. And if Britain had been an autarchic economy with a stable population, full stop. But Britain was not. That the price-elasticity of demand for spinning and weaving were, over a substantial range... 8/

...worldwide, significantly greater than one did make a huge difference, one large enough to make the BIR experience different in kind and not just the last post-medieval efflorescence with nothing to do with modern economic growth.

The way Clark puts the argument is... 9/

...in historical 1860 Britain’s TFP was 100, compared to 65 in 1780. But remove Britain’s ability to export cotton textiles and require that it move labor counterfactually out of export industry into the production of goods that were historically acquired via importing... 10/

...and counterfactual 1860 TFP drops to 85. And remove cotton—the only fiber the machines could work on—and counter actual 1860 TFP drops down to 75.

Thus we have a non-cotton economy TFP growing from 65 to 75—15%—from 1780 to 1860; a static-exports economy growing to 85... 11/

...—another 15%—from 1780 to 1860, and the historical export economy growing to 100—another 23%. And the population growing from 8 to 20 million, creating enormous food-resource scarcity at home that requires an export machine of previously unprecedented size.

I agree... 12/

...this is not modern economic growth. But it is also not (merely) Dutch intensive agriculture and commerce, the caravel (although note that the caravel’s effects ex-Europe were momentous, even genocidal, it was just its effects within Europe that were substantial-but-not-... 13/

...overwhelming), or printing (although Jeremiah Dittmar notes that printing does not just make books cheap, but makes the knowledge engine-of-growth get in gear),

Gregory Clark: The Secret History of the Industrial Revolution: ‘Other places in Europe in the years... 14/

...1200 to 1760 saw similar episodes of productivity growth that were as substantial as those in England from 1760 to 1860… between 1550 and 1650 the Netherlands saw significant productivity advance. The appearance that the Industrial Revolution in England represented a... 15/

...decisive break from the past is largely a product of the unusual demographic experience of England in the Industrial Revolution years… driving up land rentals and creating urbanization, spurred… changes… the enclosure of common lands, improvements in transportation... 16/

..., the expansion of coal mining, and perhaps also the fall in interest rates…

LINK: <faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark…> 17/END