Brad DeLong: belief

Transcript context

…What was Britain doing wrong those years then? Well, there are the standard arguments that were applied to Holland before and that are applied to the US today: financialization, rent-seeking, an over-mighty state taxing the economy in order to accomplish geopolitical goals. For Britain, it does seem to have been an unwillingness to focus the attention of society on pushing engineering forward. Once you start to lose the concentrations of the communities of engineering practice, it’s quite easy to lose more, and it’s quite easy to get yourself into a vicious spiral. Now, I would always talk about how Americans and Germans would be much more willing to invest in enterprise, and that in Britain, you really did not have the growth of the large intermediaries, like the Deutsche Bank on the one hand and the J.P. Morgan partnership on the other, that saw themselves as being in the business of intermediating information — intermediating information between people who had money that they needed, whether they wanted to save and invest, and people who had ideas that they needed to deploy. The rationalization and routinization of that through investment banking, universal banking in the years after 1870 played a substantial role. I was never really able to nail that down to my full satisfaction, but that was always my guess. I would have to say, we really do not know, but that it does tell you how quickly, within one or two generations, what we think of as technological leadership and technological supremacy can ebb away as a matter of position in leading sectors, of the sheer mass of engineers engaged in communities of engineering practice, and also the educational system certainly played a big role. Germans were being trained to manipulate molecules in organic chemistry while Britons were being trained to write verses in the style of Macaulay, which would be the poems that the Romans would’ve written if they had been Scots, as a focus of their educational system. What do you take to be the best understanding of the 17th-century Scientific Revolution, if indeed you view it as a 17th-century revolution?…

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