Joel Mokyr: belief

Transcript context

…The Romans are very good at infrastructure. You can go see the aqueduct in Segovia or the waterworks in Istanbul, the Roman system of roads. Isn’t there some notion of progress behind those developments with Caesar encountering what we now call Britain, right? No. I think the idea that they had a concept of progress—they were practical people. They needed to bring water from here to there. They did that. They needed to build roads so that their soldiers could march and occupy the world, or the world as they knew it. I don’t think there is a concept of progress the way we would think of it. It’s sort of an interesting little book that I published in my series, which you may want to look at, about Pliny. This is somebody who really knows Pliny. He really points this out, that Pliny, you cannot find anywhere. Pliny was sort of the type to summarize—essentially, a little encyclopedia of what was known—basically, there is no concept that things were getting better over time. This is a book by Richard Saller. He was one of the great classical scholars of our time. Essentially, there is no concept of progress in there. There is no concept of progress in any of the Roman writers. Now, some of the engineers, obviously, were trying to make things work better, but it is not really a social movement, and as soon as a problem had been solved, they say, “Okay, we solved that, and that’s it.” Whereas in Europe, it’s never good enough. You make water mills more efficient, you make them even more efficient, and on and on and on. That is the engine that drives sustainable growth. The idea that whatever we have today, we can make it better. That’s maybe not a natural insight. Maybe it’s not hard-wired in us. 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?…

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