Joel Mokyr: evaluation

Transcript context

…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? If you’re talking about the JPE article that we published in 2023, that piece wasn’t so much about living standards. It really was about regional distribution of Britain’s industry and how the center of gravity of the economy moved from the south to the north of England, at least temporarily, I should say. It was really mostly about skill. What is true, in that argument, is not so much that the living standards were increasing, but that they were just higher and that, basically, the quality of life in Britain as early as 1700 was higher than anywhere on the continent with the exception of the Netherlands. There’s very good evidence that the British were better fed, better educated, better housed, and on and on and on. As a result, the reduced form of looking at that is height. The data showed that, on average, British soldiers, which are the people that are getting measured, were two inches taller than the French. The reason for that is because, as children, they experienced better living standards. I think that is the way of thinking about it. Now, that feeds back again into the fact that the quality of workers in general is substantially higher than it is on the continent. Therefore, their wages are higher. The notion that they were innovative because people were trying to save labor because wages were so high in England, misses sight of the fact that the reason wages were higher was because British workers on average were more productive. I would be hesitant to say that I’ve ever convinced myself that living standards were rising during the sort of heyday of the Industrial Revolution. That turns out to be a complicated issue because, at the same time that Britain was developing technologically very quickly and establishing factories, they have very rapid population growth. It’s population growth that’s driven by higher birth rates rather than by lower death rates. What that means, of course, is that you have a very large chunk of people who are young and still not productive but need to be fed. The rise in the dependency ratio, in addition to the fact there’s more people around, is essentially putting a constraint on the rise of living standards. That abates at some point in the middle of the 19th century. Then you see living standards rising very rapidly. During the Industrial Revolution, the evidence that things were getting better is very mixed. I know there are optimists and there are pessimists about this. I would count myself as probably somewhere in between. Things weren’t getting a lot worse. Things weren’t getting a lot better. A lot depends on for whom. There’s groups that are gaining clearly. There are groups that are losing clearly. There are groups where we don’t know. On balance, I would say, probably overall living standards in Britain in 1840 were not much better than they were in 1760, but they were different. One of the reasons that people don’t do well is they live in cities, which are terrible at the time. standards in Britain in 1840 were not much better than they were in 1760, but they were different. One of the reasons that people don’t do well is they live in cities, which are terrible at the time. This is widely described. The most famous book about that was, of course, Friedrich Engels’ Condition of the Working-Class in England, which was largely plagiarized from a whole bunch of doctors living in the Midlands and observing these places. That is a complication in the history of living standards during the Industrial Revolution. That really means that it isn’t so obvious that this was good for the people living through it. It was very good for their grandchildren.…

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