Joel Mokyr: evaluation

Transcript context

…You’ve argued that during the Industrial Revolution, the British have a notable advantage in human capital over, say, the French. What are the ultimate roots of that advantage? Where does it come from? Is it Protestantism? Something else? No. In fact, are the British Protestants? The Anglican Church is sort of a weird mixture of a lot of Protestant belief minus the pope, right? I’m not sure that you could call them Protestant. They’re kind of Anglican. But, no, it’s not religion. I think that’s a load of nonsense. What happens in Britain is, and this is something worth pointing out because this is the sort of new book that I’m writing right now. It’s based on some articles you’ve seen. The new book is basically arguing that the main thing that gave Britain its advantage of other things was that they had more skill and that their skilled workers were better than everybody else. The question is where do these skills come from? There’s only one answer. That is apprenticeship because there’s no engineering schools. There’s no technical schools. Basically, every skilled engineer, artisan, mechanic, shipbuilder, whatever you are looking at, they are all trained by other people like that. Their apprentices are trained as masters. That’s how it works. It works like that everywhere. The difference is that, in England, the system is market-based. In Europe and on the continent, until the French Revolution came around, this is controlled by guilds. It’s very heavily regulated. It’s very heavily scripted. In England, it’s a much freer system. Every young lad who’s looking for a master, can go around and choose the master that he likes best and that is most suitable to him. What you get is that because this market is competitive, you get a quality of education to these people, which is vastly better than it is in continent. People are more diverse. They’re more flexible. They’re better trained. Certainly, by the middle of the 18th century, this is what everybody is saying. The French and the Germans and the Dutch and the Austrians and the Spanish, all know that if you want to build a sophisticated piece of equipment, you need an English engineer to run it. That’s what they do. These people are all over the continent. Of course, Britain is worried about this, so they passed these laws prohibiting the immigration of artisans which, of course, they couldn’t enforce. The fact that that is so is by now, I think, not really disputed. The argument that we’re making is that, inventors are all good and nice, but if you don’t have the people to scale it up and maintain it and install it and operate it, it’s not going to do you any good. That’s where the skills are, and that’s what they had. We have hundreds of pages of evidence on that. We’re looking at every industry you can imagine, and it pops up over and over and over again. Several years ago, you had a piece in the Journal of Political Economy with Morgan and Cormac on living standards, and you gave a somewhat more optimistic perspective on the Industrial Revolution living standards. Could you explain what you find in that piece?…

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