Joel Mokyr, historiador econômico - entrevista (Revista Exame)

“Não é o vírus que tira meu sono”

O historiador americano Joel Mokyr diz que a sociedade tem mais condições para enfrentar pandemias

Por Fabiane Stefano

 

Revista Exame, 18/06/2020 às 05h30

https://exame.com/revista-exame/nao-e-o-virus-que-tira-meu-sono/ 

O historiador econômico Joel Mokyr, professor na Universidade Northwestern, em Chicago, acredita que a sociedade hoje tenha muito mais ferramentas para enfrentar pandemias como a do novo coronavírus. E, por isso, crê que seus efeitos serão limitados. O que ele teme, porém, são as investidas de líderes populistas contra a democracia e as instituições  (Agence Opale/Alamy/Fotoarena)

O historiador econômico naturalizado americano Joel Mokyr costuma se diferenciar de seus pares por um olhar otimista sobre a capacidade da sociedade de enfrentar os desafios que os tempos atuais impõem. Um dos maiores especialistas do mundo em economias industriais modernas e professor na Universidade Northwestern, em Chicago, Mokyr acredita que os avanços científicos e tecnológicos tenham criado uma resiliência muito maior das economias perante as adversidades. São essas conquistas que o fazem pensar que o impacto do coronavírus deve ser limitado.

O historiador, porém, diz que tem se preocupado muito mais com retrocessos na democracia, nas instituições e nas liberdades individuais. “Essa é a vulnerabilidade da sociedade hoje. A prosperidade econômica exige um alto grau de liberdade, inconformismo e gente pensando fora da caixa”, afirma Mokyr. 

Leia a seguir a entrevista concedida à ­EXAME.

Do ponto de vista da história econômica, como o senhor dimensiona a pandemia do novo coronavírus?

>A pandemia vai trazer mudan­ças permanentes, mas, pensando num cenário mais amplo, não acho que mudará o curso da sociedade. Continua­remos a ter um crescimento econômico baseado em avanços cie­ntíficos e tecnológicos. É fato que não vivemos nada parecido com isso nos últimos 100 anos. Surgiram novos vírus, como o zika e o HIV. Pense na aids: quando surgiu, era asso­ciada a grupos como o de homossexuais e o de hemofí­licos. Não havia um medo co­­letivo de contrair aids. No caso da covid, sabe-se que os assintomáticos são capazes de transmitir a doença, mas não há segurança de como e quando isso ocorre, o que exigiu que tudo fosse fechado e as pessoas se recolhessem em casa.

Mas os impactos econômicos serão profundos…

Sim, os efeitos de longo prazo vão persistir. Talvez sejam necessários dois ou três anos para estarmos no patamar do PIB global anterior ao da pandemia. Mas os efeitos são dispersos e desiguais. Há setores que foram duramente atingidos, como o transporte aéreo. Um grande número de pequenas empresas, talvez 50%, não voltará a operar nos Estados Unidos. Negócios como restaurantes, oficinas, salões de beleza não vão sobreviver à crise. Mas é como ocorre depois de um incêndio florestal: o meio ambiente é tão favorável que outras árvores vão nascer naquele lugar. No caso de um restaurante, por exemplo, a demanda deve continuar lá, os profissionais permanecem disponíveis. Outros virão.

Mas quais mudanças a pandemia deverá trazer?

Haverá, obviamente, ajustes na economia. E nem todos serão ruins. Muitas pessoas descobriram que conseguem trabalhar produtivamente de casa, e o teletrabalho será cada vez mais comum. Vamos repensar a utilização dos espaços, que na prática são aproveitados somente 50% do tempo. Metade do tempo nós estamos em casa; e metade, no trabalho. É muito desperdício.

As pandemias do passado não nos prepararam para a atual?

Sempre soubemos do risco de novas pandemias. Os governos têm sido alertados para isso e sobre como deveriam responder adequadamente. Historicamente, o meio ambiente joga contra os seres humanos. Doenças antigas sofrem mutações e podem se tornar mais agressivas. Foi isso que aconteceu com a varíola. Era um vírus que sempre esteve por aí e, entre os séculos 16 e 17, uma mutação o tornou muito mais virulento. As pessoas ficaram apavoradas, pois era uma doen­ça terrível e mortal. Aí descobriu-se a vacina em 1796 e foram necessários 200 anos para que a doença fosse erradicada. Um processo parecido ocorreu com a pólio nos anos 1920 e 1930, quando surtos da doença provocaram pânico. E aí veio a vacina nos anos 1950. Essas coisas se repetem. É uma eterna guerra entre os humanos e os microrganismos que tentam nos matar.

Laboratório na Itália: “O sequenciamento genético do novo coronavírus levou semanas para ser feito” | Antonio Masiello/Getty Images

Laboratório na Itália: “O sequenciamento genético do novo coronavírus levou semanas para ser feito” | Antonio Masiello/Getty Images (Divulgação/)

Mas os avanços científicos não colocam a humanidade numa situação muito mais vantajosa hoje?

A humanidade tem hoje ferramentas que há 100 anos, quando emergiu a gripe espanhola, nem sequer poderiam ser imaginadas. Em 1918, as pessoas não sabiam que a gripe espanhola era causada por um vírus, que foi isolado apenas em 1933. Já o sequenciamento genético do coronavírus foi feito em semanas, em meio a uma crise sanitária que surgiu há seis meses. A gripe espanhola matou 50 milhões de pessoas no mundo. Nos Estados Unidos, as estimativas apontam que morreram aproximadamente 600.000 pessoas na época, numa população equivalente a um terço da atual. Se a covid-19 tivesse a mesma mortalidade da gripe espanhola, ela mataria 2 milhões de americanos. E isso não vai acontecer. Vamos derrotar o vírus e, no processo, vamos aprender mais e criar novas soluções que serão aplicadas a outras coisas. E na próxima pandemia seremos ainda mais rápidos.

A sociedade se tornou mais resiliente, portanto?

Somos mais resilientes a qualquer tipo de choque porque a prosperidade das nações hoje é construída com base em conhecimento e tecnologia. Isso é difícil de destruir. A pobreza no mundo vem caindo rapidamente nos últimos 20 anos, sobretudo por causa do crescimento econômico da China e da Índia. Esses fundamentos devem continuar os mesmos. Sendo muito franco, o que me tira o sono não é um vírus, mas os ataques à democracia e às instituições. Essa é a vulnerabilidade da sociedade hoje. O risco para a prosperidade futura não vem da natureza, de pandemias ou terremotos, mas, sim, dos seres humanos.

Quais riscos o senhor vê?

Nos últimos 20 anos, porém, houve um declínio acentuado na prevalência e na popularidade das democracias liberais. Isso faz parte de um “ciclo normal”. As democracias liberais são processos confusos e difíceis de manejar, geralmente repletos de corrupção. Então, as pessoas se cansam delas e escolhem populistas autoritários ou machos “lei e ordem”, como Rodrigo Du­terte, nas Filipinas, e Hugo Chávez, na Venezuela, somente para descobrir que são dez vezes piores, e depois querem os democratas de volta.

Por que isso ocorre?

O problema é que existe uma assimetria: é fácil votar em líderes democráticos inaptos ou desonestos — essa, afinal, é a ideia por trás da democracia. Mas os autoritários, em geral, exigem muito mais esforço para ser desalojados: veja o horrível Viktor Orbán, na Hungria, para não falar de Vladimir Putin, na Rússia, e Xi Jinping, na China. Foi preciso uma guerra para livrar o mundo de Mussolini e uma espera de 30 anos para fazer o mesmo com Franco, na Espanha. Eles compartilham entre si uma visão anti-intelectual e anticiência, sem compromisso com valores como a liberdade de expressão. Eles não são conservadores, mas criam uma mistura tóxica de ideologia nacionalista reacionária, criptofascista e raivosa.

O presidente Jair Bolsonaro já se envolveu em muitas polêmicas desde que foi eleito e agora tem minimizado os impactos da pandemia no Brasil. Como o senhor avalia o presidente brasileiro?

Bolsonaro representa uma tendência global em direção ao declínio da qualidade institucional e à corrupção da governança básica. O que a história nos conta é que, ao contrário da tecnologia que sempre melhora, isso não se aplica aos governos, que ora avançam, ora retrocedem. Mas a diferença entre esses novos líderes populistas está nas restrições institucionais que enfrentam: Duterte e Putin podem se safar de assassinatos, Xi é ainda pior, Trump não pode fazer da maneira que ele gostaria. Vamos torcer para que Bolsonaro acabe mais como Trump e menos como Putin. Mas não invejo os brasileiros.

A polarização foi ampliada pelas redes sociais?

Não estou convencido de que isso seja tão novo assim. Muito lixo já foi publicado nos jornais antes do surgimento do Twitter e do Facebook. Nos Estados Unidos, Joseph McCarthy liderou uma rede de notícias falsas em nome do combate ao comunismo na década de 1950. A vantagem da internet e das redes sociais é que o acesso é muito barato. As pessoas costumam ler basicamente o que confirma o que elas pensam. Se olharmos para os anos 1950 e 1960, não era tão diferente assim. Acho que o impacto atribuído às redes sociais é exagerado.

Mas qual é a diferença hoje?

A diferença está nas pessoas­ que têm poder e tomam as decisões. Trump acabou de cortar relações com a Organização Mundial da Saúde. Isso não é uma notícia falsa, é política. Existe um movimento de desmantelamento da cooperação global que pode resultar em políticas mais agressivas contra, por exemplo, a redução dos efeitos das mudanças climáticas. Isso não ocorre somente nos Estados Unidos. Veja o que acontece na China. Os chineses abandonaram o comunismo, abriram seu mercado e tornaram-se uma economia capitalista. Mas uma economia capitalista exige mais democracia, porque são coisas que andam juntas. E Xi Jinping, em particular, virou as costas à democracia, à proteção dos direitos individuais, à liberdade de expressão. É o que estamos vendo também nos protestos em Hong Kong. O filósofo e historiador alemão ­Friedrich ­Schiller [1759-1805] disse que “contra a estupidez até os deuses lutam em vão”.

Com a pandemia, temos visto muitos ataques às cadeias globais de produção, sobretudo as da China. Essa é uma preocupação legítima ou é uma desculpa para uma guerra comercial?

Diria que o fato de a pande­mia ter iniciado em Wu­han, na China, é nada mais do que um azar. E daí? É responsabilidade dos chineses? É verdade que sob a administração Trump há claros sinais de aumento da sinofobia, especialmente porque Peter Navarro [conselheiro econômico de Trump] tem alegado que a China está trapaceando, roubando a tecnologia e destruindo a indústria americana. Resumindo, para Navarro os chineses são pessoas terríveis. Obviamente, ele não menciona que a China é quem há anos fornece produtos baratos que foram incrivelmente favoráveis aos consumidores americanos. Provavelmente, 50% das coisas que tenho na minha casa foram feitas na China. Os chineses não são perfeitos, claro, mas também não são essa força do mal. Dito isso, a China ficou mais agressiva sob a liderança de Xi, o que explica o aumento dos ataques por parte do governo Trump.

Há riscos contra a globalização?

Ela não está morta, mas profundamente abalada. A globalização foi uma força para o bem. Fez muita gente enriquecer e tornou o mundo mais integrado. Não foi boa para todo mundo, como quase nada é, mas foi a principal responsável por tirar milhões de pessoas da pobreza. É só olhar para o que aconteceu em Bangladesh, um lugar absurdamente miserável. O setor têxtil lá passou a produzir para as grandes marcas globais, a um custo baixíssimo, em condições de trabalho horríveis. O que aconteceu com a pandemia? Todas as fábricas fecharam e o que era ruim ficou pior. E foi isto que a globalização fez: deu a pessoas muito pobres uma chance de sobreviver. Elas não vivem bem, certamente poderia ser melhor, mas tirar isso delas é tornar tudo pior — tanto que as fábricas de vestuário estavam reabertas em maio. A globalização fez muito pelas pessoas, mas pode colapsar muito rápido. Essa parte da economia é pouco resiliente.

Os países estão gastando trilhões de dólares no combate à crise. O papel dos governos vai mudar com a pandemia? 

As dívidas vão aumentar para todos os paí­ses do mundo, sem dúvida nenhuma. No entanto, pragmaticamente, o que muda num país em que o endividamento de 90% do produto interno bruto passa temporariamente para 120%? O que espero é que as pessoas percebam que riscos como as pandemias exigem mais intervenção dos governos. É algo que o livre mercado jamais será capaz de lidar sozinho. Questões fundamentais virão quando surgir a vacina. Qual será o preço dela? Como será sua distribuição? Quem tiver dinheiro vai se vacinar antes dos mais pobres? Não sou um grande fã do Estado como regulador, mas esse é um caso em que as forças do mercado não podem agir sozinhas.

O presidente americano, Donald Trump, anuncia corte para Organização Mundial da Saúde: “Não é fake news. Isso é política”, diz Mokyr | Alex Wong/Getty Images

O presidente americano, Donald Trump, anuncia corte para Organização Mundial da Saúde: “Não é fake news. Isso é política”, diz Mokyr | Alex Wong/Getty Images (/)

Em quais outras situações os governos deveriam ser mais atuantes?

Um assunto urgente é a questão das mudanças climáticas. Sem a intervenção dos governos, esse será de longe um desastre muito maior do que a pandemia de covid-19 terá sido. A diferença é o tempo do impacto. Os efeitos das mudanças climáticas levam anos para se manifestar. É apavorante o que pode acontecer e ninguém está fazendo nada a esse respeito. Já sabemos o que precisa ser feito e também como fazer, mas isso demanda recursos que os governos só passam a gastar se outros governos também estiverem desembolsando. E, ainda assim, os recursos não serão suficientes. O mundo atingiu uma sofisticação tecnológica capaz de solucionar muitos dos nossos problemas, porém seguimos tendo líderes idiotas. A prosperidade econômica exige um alto grau de liberdade, inconformismo e gente pensando fora da caixa.

Joel Mokyr: How Europe became so rich (Aeon, Feb 15, 2018)

How Europe became so rich

In a time of great powers and empires, just one region of the world experienced extraordinary economic growth. How?

Joel Mokyr

Aeon, 15 February, 2017

https://aeon.co/essays/how-did-europe-become-the-richest-part-of-the-world

How and why did the modern world and its unprecedented prosperity begin? Learned tomes by historians, economists, political scientists and other scholars fill many bookshelves with explanations of how and why the process of modern economic growth or ‘the Great Enrichment’ exploded in western Europe in the 18th century. One of the oldest and most persuasive explanations is the long political fragmentation of Europe. For centuries, no ruler had ever been able to unite Europe the way the Mongols and the Mings had united China.

It should be emphasised that Europe’s success was not the result of any inherent superiority of European (much less Christian) culture. It was rather what is known as a classical emergent property, a complex and unintended outcome of simpler interactions on the whole. The modern European economic miracle was the result of contingent institutional outcomes. It was neither designed nor planned. But it happened, and once it began, it generated a self-reinforcing dynamic of economic progress that made knowledge-driven growth both possible and sustainable.

How did this work? In brief, Europe’s political fragmentation spurred productive competition. It meant that European rulers found themselves competing for the best and most productive intellectuals and artisans. The economic historian Eric L Jones called this ‘the States system’. The costs of European political division into multiple competing states were substantial: they included almost incessant warfare, protectionism, and other coordination failures. Many scholars now believe, however, that in the long run the benefits of competing states might have been larger than the costs. In particular, the existence of multiple competing states encouraged scientific and technological innovation.

The idea that European political fragmentation, despite its evident costs, also brought great benefits, enjoys a distinguished lineage. In the closing chapter of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1789), Edward Gibbon wrote: ‘Europe is now divided into 12 powerful, though unequal, kingdoms.’ Three of them he called ‘respectable commonwealths’, the rest ‘a variety of smaller, though independent, states’. The ‘abuses of tyranny are restrained by the mutual influence of fear and shame’, Gibbon wrote, adding that ‘republics have acquired order and stability; monarchies have imbibed the principles of freedom, or, at least, of moderation; and some sense of honour and justice is introduced into the most defective constitutions by the general manners of the times.’

In other words, the rivalries between the states, and their examples to one another, also meliorated some of the worst possibilities of political authoritarianism. Gibbon added that ‘in peace, the progress of knowledge and industry is accelerated by the emulation of so many active rivals’. Other Enlightenment writers, David Hume and Immanuel Kant for example, saw it the same way. From the early 18th-century reforms of Russia’s Peter the Great, to the United States’ panicked technological mobilisation in response to the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik, interstate competition was a powerful economic mover. More important, perhaps, the ‘states system’ constrained the ability of political and religious authorities to control intellectual innovation. If conservative rulers clamped down on heretical and subversive (that is, original and creative) thought, their smartest citizens would just go elsewhere (as many of them, indeed, did).

A possible objection to this view is that political fragmentation was not enough. The Indian subcontinent and the Middle East were fragmented for much of their history, and Africa even more so, yet they did not experience a Great Enrichment. Clearly, more was needed. The size of the ‘market’ that intellectual and technological innovators faced was one element of scientific and technological development that has not perhaps received as much attention it should. In 1769, for example, Matthew Boulton wrote to his partner James Watt: ‘It is not worth my while to manufacture [your engine] for three counties only; but I find it very well worth my while to make it for all the world.’

What was true for steam engines was equally true for books and essays on astronomy, medicine and mathematics. Writing such a book involved fixed costs, and so the size of the market mattered. If fragmentation meant that the constituency of each innovator was small, it would have dampened the incentives.

In early modern Europe, however, political and religious fragmentation did not mean small audiences for intellectual innovators. Political fragmentation existed alongside a remarkable intellectual and cultural unity. Europe offered a more or less integrated market for ideas, a continent-wide network of learned men and women, in which new ideas were distributed and circulated. European cultural unity was rooted in its classical heritage and, among intellectuals, the widespread use of Latin as their lingua franca. The structure of the medieval Christian Church also provided an element shared throughout the continent. Indeed, long before the term ‘Europe’ was commonly used, it was called ‘Christendom’.

If Europe’s intellectuals moved with unprecedented frequency and ease, their ideas travelled even faster.

While for much of the Middle Ages the intensity of intellectual activity (in terms of both the number of participants and the heatedness of the debates) was light compared to what it was to become, after 1500 it was transnational. In early modern Europe, national boundaries mattered little in the thin but lively and mobile community of intellectuals in Europe. Despite slow and uncomfortable travel, many of Europe’s leading intellectuals moved back and forth between states. Both the Valencia-born Juan Luis Vives and the Rotterdam-born Desiderius Erasmus, two of the most prominent leaders of 16th-century European humanism, embodied the footloose quality of Europe’s leading thinkers: Vives studied in Paris, lived most of his life in Flanders, but was also a member of Corpus Christi College in Oxford. For a while, he served as a tutor to Henry VIII’s daughter Mary. Erasmus moved back between Leuven, England and Basel. But he also spent time in Turin and Venice. Such mobility among intellectuals grew even more pronounced in the 17th century.

If Europe’s intellectuals moved with unprecedented frequency and ease, their ideas travelled even faster. Through the printing press and the much-improved postal system, written knowledge circulated rapidly. In the relatively pluralistic environment of early modern Europe, especially in contrast with East Asia, conservative attempts to suppress new ideas floundered. The reputation of intellectual superstars such as Galileo and Spinoza was such that, if local censorship tried to prohibit the publication of their works, they could easily find publishers abroad.

Galileo’s ‘banned’ books were quickly smuggled out of Italy and published in Protestant cities. For example, his Discorsi was published in Leiden in 1638, and his Dialogo was re-published in Strasbourg in 1635. Spinoza’s publisher, Jan Riewertz, placed ‘Hamburg’ on the title page of the Tractatus to mislead censors, even though the book was published in Amsterdam. For intellectuals, Europe’s divided and uncoordinated polities enhanced an intellectual freedom that simply could not exist in China or the Ottoman Empire.

After 1500, Europe’s unique combination of political fragmentation and its pan-European institutions of learning brought dramatic intellectual changes in the way new ideas circulated. Books written in one part of Europe found their way to other parts. They were soon read, quoted, plagiarised, discussed and commented upon everywhere. When a new discovery was made anywhere in Europe, it was debated and tested throughout the continent. Fifty years after the publication of William Harvey’s text on the circulation of blood De Motu Cordis (1628), the English doctor and intellectual Thomas Browne reflected on Harvey’s discovery that ‘at the first trump of the circulation all the schools of Europe murmured … and condemned it by a general vote … but at length [it was] accepted and confirmed by illustrious physicians.’

The intellectual superstars of the period catered to a European, not a local, audience and enjoyed continent-wide reputations. They saw themselves as citizens of a ‘Republic of Letters’ and regarded this entity, in the words of the French philosopher Pierre Bayle (one of its central figures), as a free commonwealth, an empire of truth. The political metaphor was mostly wishful thinking and not a little self-flattery, but it expressed the features of a community that set rules of conduct for the market for ideas. It was a very competitive market.

Above all, Europe’s intellectuals contested almost everything, and time and again demonstrated a willingness to slaughter sacred cows. They together established a commitment to open science. To return to Gibbon: he observed that the philosopher, unlike the patriot, was permitted to consider Europe as a single ‘great republic’ in which the balance of power might continue to fluctuate and the prosperity of some nations ‘may be alternately exalted or depressed’. But this apprehension of a single ‘great republic’ guaranteed a ‘general state of happiness, system of arts and laws and manners’. It ‘advantageously distinguished’ Europe from other civilisations, wrote Gibbon.

In this regard, then, Europe’s intellectual community enjoyed the best of two worlds, both the advantages of an integrated transnational academic community and a com­petitive states system. This system produced many of the cultural components that led to the Great Enrichment: a belief in social and economic progress, a growing regard for scientific and intellectual innovation, and a commitment to a Baconian, ie a methodical and empirically grounded, research programme of knowledge in the service of economic growth. The natural philosophers and mathematicians of the 17th-century Republic of Letters adopted the idea of experimental science as a prime tool, and accepted the use of increasingly more sophisticated mathematics as a method of understanding and codifying nature.

The idea of knowledge-driven economic progress as the primum movens of the Industrial Revolution and early economic growth is still controversial, and rightly so. Examples of purely science-driven inventions in the 18th century are few, though after 1815 their number rises rapidly. Yet dismissing the scientific revolution as irrelevant to modern economic growth misses the point that without an ever-growing understanding of nature, the artisan-driven advances of the 18th century (especially in the textile industry) would slowly but ineluctably have ground to a halt.

Furthermore, some inventions still needed inputs from learned people even if they cannot be said to be purely science-driven. For instance, the marine chronometer, one of the most important inventions of the era of the Industrial Revolution (though rarely mentioned as a part of it) was made possible through the work of earlier mathematical astronomers. The first one was the 16th-century Dutch (more accurately Frisian) astronomer and mathematician Jemme Reinerszoon, known as Gemma Frisius, who suggested the possibility of what John Harrison (the ingenious watchmaker who cracked this thorny problem) actually did in 1740.

The triumph of scientific progress and sustained economic growth was no more predetermined than the evolution of Homo sapiens as dominant on the planet

It is interesting to note that the advances in science were driven not only by the emergence of open science and the growing sophistication of the transnational market for ideas. They were also driven by the appearance of better tools and instruments that faci­litated research in natural philosophy. The most important ones include the micro­scope, telescope, barometer and modern thermometer. All of them were developed in the first half of the 17th century. Improved tools in physics, astronomy and biology refuted many misconceptions inherited from classical antiquity. The newly discovered notions of a vacuum and an atmosphere stimulated the emergence of atmospheric engines. In turn, steam engines inspired scientists to investigate the physics of the conversion of heat into motion. More than a century after Newcomen’s first pump (the famous Dudley Castle engine of 1712), thermodynamics was developed.

In 18th-century Europe, the interplay between pure science and the work of engineers and mechanics became progressively stronger. This interaction of propositional knowledge (knowledge of ‘what’) and prescriptive knowledge (knowledge of ‘how’) constituted a positive feedback or autocatalytic model. In such systems, once the process gets underway, it can become self-propelled. In that sense, knowledge-based growth is one of the most persistent of all historical phenomena – though the conditions of its persistence are complex and require above all a competitive and open market for ideas.

We must recognise that Europe’s (and the world’s) Great Enrichment was in no way inevitable. With fairly minor changes in initial conditions, or even accidents along the way, it might never have happened. Had political and military developments taken different turns in Europe, conservative forces might have prevailed and taken a more hostile attitude toward the new and more progressive interpretation of the world. There was nothing predetermined or inexorable in the ultimate triumph of scientific progress and sustained economic growth, any more than, say, in the eventual evolution of Homo sapiens (or any other specific species) as dominant on the planet.

One outcome of the activities in the market for ideas after 1600 was the European Enlightenment, in which the belief in scientific and intellectual progress was translated into an ambitious political programme, a programme that, despite its many flaws and misfires, still dominates European polities and economies. Notwithstanding the backlash it has recently encountered, the forces of technological and scientific progress, once set in motion, might have become irresistible. The world today, after all, still consists of competing entities, and seems not much closer to unification than in 1600. Its market for ideas is more active than ever, and innovations are occurring at an ever faster pace. Far from all the low-hanging technological fruits having been picked, the best is still to come.

A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy - Joel Mokyr

Published by EH.Net (November 2017)

Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. xiv + 403 pp. $35 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-691-16888-3.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Claude Diebolt, Department of Economics, University of Strasbourg.

 I enjoyed this new book by Joel Mokyr, which is praiseworthy for its elegance and erudition. It tells the story of economic growth with “culture” — a mushy word for most of us — as the invisible hand. However, I regret the lack of in-depth consideration of the German language literature. Significantly more attention could also have been given to economic cycles. Werner Sombart, for example (Der moderne Kapitalismus and Der Bourgeois. Zur Geistesgeschichte des modernen Wirtschaftsmenschen), was the first to come to mind while reading this fantastic book. It also reminds me of George Akerlof and Robert Schiller’s Animal Spirits, where confidence, fear, a propensity to gamble, and follow-the-leader effect stories are presented as central to explain the decision making process. The Bourgeois Trilogy by Deirdre McCloskey is another seminal work in that spirit: ideas, not capital or institutions enriched the world. A growth theorist would probably also see strong connections between Mokyr’s latest effort and the unified growth theory initiated by Oded Galor.

The book is about the roots of the Industrial Revolution, the Great Enrichment, and radical changes in values, beliefs, and preferences. It is not about a mass movement. It is a phenomenon related to an elite: philosophers and scientists of course, but also engineers, instrument makers, and even industrialists who spawned the process. In any case, it is a minority of the population. Mokyr’s ambition is to understand and to explain how these beliefs and values emerged — why some people developed new ideas and why these ideas replaced the ones in place.

According to Mokyr, we know pretty much what happened, how it happened and where it happened, but we still do not know why it happened. Why, after thousands of years of stagnation, have a number of countries and regions of the world experienced an unprecedented increase in both the scale and speed of their economic growth? Why Europe and not China? Why England? Is it the result of happenstance? The Black Death perhaps? What about the influence of religion (Max Weber and the Protestant ethic?), of major intellectual and scientific personalities who changed the game (Martin Luther, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, Adam Smith, Charles Darwin)? What role should be given to natural resource saturation, innovation (the compass, gunpowder, printing) and capital accumulation, trade networks, market institutions and organizations, ideas, violence (battles, dynastic arrangements, power struggles…), women, etc.? For Mokyr, the Gordian knot is a Culture of Growth — a \”Useful knowledge,\” scientific and technological knowledge, the meeting of motivations and incentives, of attitudes and aptitudes toward Nature and the ability to persuade others. These are the key elements of the puzzle.

“No theory-no history! Theory is the pre-requisite to any scientific writing of history,” wrote Werner Sombart (1929) in the Economic History Review. I urge you to carefully read Joel Mokyr’s evolutionary approach to culture in the spirit of Schumpeter’s theory on Unternehmergeist. It will give you a fresh insight into one of the most fascinating questions in our field: the origins of the Great Enrichment. It will invite everyone to visit economic history with an optimistic vision for the future of the World!

Claude Diebolt is CNRS Research Professor of Economics at the University of Strasbourg and editor of the journal Cliometrica.

Copyright (c) 2017 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net Administrator (administrator@eh.net). Published by EH.Net (November 2017). All EH.Net reviews are archived at http://www.eh.net/BookReview.

Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not - Book review

Seria a religião islâmica um fracasso completo, em termos de progressos sociais, prosperidade material, liberdade intelectual, avanços científicos, prosperidade material?
Assim é, se nos parece, atualmente. E, no entanto, sociedades islâmicas, num tempo em que a Europa ainda se debatia com as invasões de bárbaros, e vivia reduzida a uma medíocre economia camponesa, com gente morrendo de fome um pouco em todos os lugares, eram as mais avançadas do planeta, junto com a civilização chinesa, com a preservação, a manutenção e a ampliação das culturas clássicas da antiguidade e novos progressos conseguidos isoladamente ou no contato com outras culturas (como a hindu, por exemplo, forte em matemática).
Atualmente o julgamento parece ser globalmente negativo, como acredita o autor deste livro bastante crítico.
O autor da resenha, Joel Mokyr, é um dos mais distinguidos historiadores da ciência da atualidade. Não se pode acusá-lo de viés pró-ocidental, pois ele já reconheceu os avanços dos chineses e dos muçulmanos em outros trabalhos seus.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Published by EH.Net (April 2017)

Jared Rubin:

Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not. 

New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. xxi + 273 pp. $30 (paperback), ISBN: 978-1-108-40005-3.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Joel Mokyr, Departments of Economics and History, Northwestern University.

The Middle East, it has been said, is not just a collection of failed states. It is a failed region. It generates a disproportional number of the world’s orphans and refugees, its GDP per capita is intolerably low despite oil riches, and there are few signs that there is light at the end of tunnel. Democracy seems to have been put on the back burner indefinitely, and human rights are a lost cause in most countries and in retreat elsewhere. Intellectually, too, things look rather dismal: In 2005 Harvard University alone produced more scientific papers than 17 Arabic-speaking countries combined. Muslim countries contribute just 2.5 percent of more than 11.5 million papers published worldwide each year (Muslims constituted 23 percent of the world’s population in 2010). A 1997 Scientometrics paper estimated that 46 Muslim countries (which of course contain much more than the Middle East) contributed 1.17 percent to world science literature as opposed to Spain (1.48 percent).

Is the Islamic religion to blame? Jared Rubin, in this stimulating and highly original study, would deny that emphatically. Although this is a book about religion and its implication for institutional and economic change, Rubin is little interested in the actual doctrinal content of religion. He points out, as many others have, that the essence of Islam could not possibly be as rigid and opposed to commerce and economic change as it may seem, because for the first centuries of its existence, the nations that adopted Islam flourished not just commercially but also in terms of technology, architecture, poetry, agriculture, medicine, and engineering, while western Europe was an ignorant, violent and poverty-stricken backwater. What we have witnessed since 1200 is more than a “divergence”: it is a Great Reversal, of momentous importance till the present day.

Rubin’s book presents us with an explanation for this great reversal, which will have to be taken into account from now on in all future discussions on the economic history of the Islamic world. He does not oversell his argument as the reason for the great reversal, he makes a plausible argument for it as a complementary argument to the ones other serious scholars have made. The book is divided into a few chapters that outline the theory and logic of the argument and then applies these insights to a number of historical case studies. It is a tale that combines economic history, political economy, and religion in a unique and novel way.

Here is the basic argument: any kind of ruler has power because his or her subjects accept their rule and their main concern is what Rubin calls “propagating their rule.”  How do you get people to accept you as their ruler and let you keep your job? Political power is supported by a combination of coercion (that is, violence) and legitimacy (people willingly accept a ruler because they believe that this person has the right to rule them). Through most of history, rulers depended on a combination of the two, though the weights of each differed greatly depending on their costs and benefits. Rubin is exclusively interested in the legitimacy part. Legitimacy is provided by what he calls “legitimizing agents” — groups or entities that have enough influence to make the subjects of the ruler follow instructions and pay taxes. An obvious legitimizing agent is the religious establishment — for example, European rulers once ruled ex dei gratia and called themselves the most Catholic King. Some modern royalty still include the line in their title, although in most places such relics are empty.

Rubin observes that in the early medieval period, both Christian and Muslim rulers used religious authorities as legitimizing agents, but that at some point in the later Middle Ages, Muslim and western European society diverged. Whereas in the Ottoman Empire the sultans continued to rely on religious authorities for their legitimacy, in many western societies the Church’s political leverage was diminished irreversibly. From the beginning, Rubin points out, Christian doctrine envisaged separate spheres for secular and religious power. The schisms and exiles to which the late medieval papacy was subject weakened it greatly in the face of ambitious rulers, and the reformation administered to religious legitimization the coup de grace. Apart from a few corners of Europe such as Spain, religion lost the power it had exercised since even before the prophet Samuel anointed Kings Saul and David.

Why and how did this matter to economic history? Rubin argues that religious authorities were in general conservative, and that the institutions they established are less aligned with commerce and finance than when an economically important elite such as rich urban merchants and artisans are more powerful. As a result of their political influence, religious authorities in the Middle East were successful in blocking critical breakthroughs, most notably the printing press and more sophisticated financial institutions. The printing press facilitated the success of the Reformation, and the Reformation had further favorable economic effects, as has recently been shown by a pair of important papers (Cantoni, Dittmar and Yuchtman, 2016; Dittmar and Meisenzahl, 2016). One might add that even in France, in which the reformation was suppressed, the power of religious authorities to legitimize the king disappeared. Napoleon famously took the crown out of the hands of Pope Pius VII during his 1804 coronation and crowned himself, symbolizing that his legitimization came from military power, not God.

In summary, Rubin argues that the leaders of organized religion tended to be conservative across the board. Their influence, he thinks, depended on their monopoly of eternal truths, and updating those truths threatened to erode their credibility.  The Islamic world was unable to curtail the influence of Islamic scholars until the Islamic world had fallen hopelessly behind Europe. Even within Christian Europe, the power of religious authorities, he feels, helped determine the difference between successful regions such as the Netherlands and Britain and economic laggards such as Spain. When discussing the past three centuries, the influence of religious authorities is somewhat diminished, but what counts in Rubin’s view is that in all poor and backward states, the institutional structure and the capability of key players to “sit at the bargaining table” as he calls it was little affected by the urban-commercial classes whose demands for free and open markets, constraints on the executive, and a rule of law led to rapid economic progress in the north-west corners of Europe.

By combining an institutional argument with religion through the effect that religion had on institutions and politics (rather than on cultural beliefs), Rubin’s argument is reminiscent of an important recent book by Karel Davids, which has not thus far received sufficient attention (Davids, 2013). Both books, in a different way, stress how religious institutions mattered regardless of the precise content of religion. Davids, however, emphasizes another aspect, namely the role of religion in the generation and dissemination of technology. Rubin is primarily interested in institutions that support markets. Yet an explanation of modern economic growth cannot possibly avoid the primum movens of economic growth, which was the rapid expansion and dissemination of useful knowledge. In early medieval Islam, engineers, doctors, and chemists were at the forefront of pushing the envelope. By 1600 the Islamic world had become a follower, by 1800 they were a laggard. A natural extension of Rubin’s idea is that a government dominated by religious authorities will also be less than accommodating to out-of-the-box ideas from natural philosophers, astronomers, mathematicians, and medical doctors. The tradeoff between religiosity and scientific and technological progress has become a serious topic of investigation in recent years (Benabou, Ticchi, and Vindigni, 2014; Squicciarini, 2016). Their findings support the notion that devoutness affects innovativeness negatively and that political institutions could be used by powerful religious leaders to suppress what they considered heretical views.

Rubin is correct in pointing out that in the most progressive countries in western Europe the ability of religious leaders to halt progress was limited.  A striking example of this phenomenon is provided by Amir Alexander (2014), who documents the fierce resistance to infinitesimal mathematics by the Jesuits in the seventeenth century, which seriously slowed down the development of mathematics in Italy. The reason the reactionary powers such as the Jesuits were not able to slow down the development of radical new ideas in Europe materially is primarily the high level of political fragmentation in Europe. If a particular ruler tried to crack down on his most creative subjects because they wrote things he felt to be subversive or heretical, they could always move across the border. Such outside options may have been much more limited in the Ottoman Empire and in China. Interstate competition is another factor that rulers worried about, beside Rubin’s legitimization story. After all, every ruler faced both internal and external threats. Without interstate competition, or “emulation” as eighteenth-century writers called it, Europe might never have had the Enlightenment, which opened the doors to so many of the institutional and technological changes that have helped create economic modernity.

Here and there one could nitpick some of Rubin’s historical interpretations. His account of Spain’s political economy would have greatly benefitted from a closer attention to Regina Grafe’s path-breaking work (Grafe, 2012). Rubin’s agnosticism as to the actual content of religion may be somewhat misplaced: the Sunni revival of the eleventh century did in time move the ruling orthodoxy into a more conservative direction, as Eric Chaney (2015) has shown. More generally, an argument that focuses on “the ruler” and the significance of the propagation of political power may exaggerate the ability of the state to control what the citizens did in pre-twentieth-century societies.

All the same, Rubin has written an important and timely book. His methodology is very much that of the historically informed economist: certain choices are made at some point because they make sense, that is, the benefits to those that make the decision exceed the costs. But once made, these initial conditions can have cascading unintended and unanticipated consequences, and those historically contingent causal chains may well be what drove much of the great and little divergences that our profession is so interested in. Equally important, this well-argued and sensible book about Islam provides a much-needed antidote to the toxic rubbish masquerading as scholarship produced by some of the Islamophobes in the current American administration (e.g., Gorka, 2016). The Middle East’s problem is not Islam; it is History.

References:

Alexander, Amir. 2014. Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Benabou, Roland, Davide Ticchi, and Andrea Vindigni. 2014. “Forbidden Fruits: The Political Economy of Science, Religion and Growth.” Unpublished working paper, Princeton University.

Cantoni, Davide, Jeremiah Dittmar and Noam Yuchtman. 2016.  “Reformation and Reallocation: Religious and Secular Economic Activity in Early Modern Germany.” Unpublished.

Chaney, Eric. 2015. “Religion and the Rise and Fall of Islamic Science.” Unpublished working paper, Harvard University.

Davids, Karel. 2013. Religion, Technology and the Great and Little Divergences. Leiden: Brill.

Dittmar, Jeremiah E. and Ralf Meisenzahl. 2016. “Origins of Growth: Health Shocks, Institutions, and Human Capital in the Protestant Reformation.” Unpublished.

Gorka, Sebastian. 2016. Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing.

Grafe, Regina. 2012. Distant Tyranny: Markets, Power, and Backwardness in Spain, 1650–1800. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Squicciarini, Mara. 2017. “Devotion and Development: Religiosity, Education, and Economic Progress in 19th-century France.” Unpublished working paper, Northwestern University.

Joel Mokyr is the author of Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy (Princeton University Press, 2016).

Copyright (c) 2017 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net Administrator (administrator@eh.net). Published by EH.Net (April 2017). All EH.Net reviews are archived at http://eh.net/book-reviews/

Nathan Rosenberg, um grande historiador economico - obituario por Joel Mokyr

Eu tinha justo acabado de comprar o livro de Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (num sebo de Amherst, MA), e estava admirando seu trabalho de pesquisa extremamente erudito, que me lembrava justamente o de Birdzell e Rosenberg, How the West Grew Rich, que havia lido primeiro na tradução brasileira, antes de retirá-lo novamente na biblioteca de West Hartford, para citar em um livro que estou preparando.
Os dois, Rosenberg e Mokyr, são os melhores historiadores do progresso tecnológico que conheço, junto com David Landes, mas eu não sabia que Mokyr era sobrinho de Rosenberg, e ele assina aqui um denso e simpático obituário que transcrevo da lista de história econômica.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Nathan Rosenberg, 1927-2015
Joel Mokyr
Society for the History of Economics, September 2015

The economic history profession has lost one of its most original, creative, and wide-ranging minds in the passing of Nathan Rosenberg on Aug. 24, 2015. Rosenberg was one of the founding fathers of Cliometrics, a member of the first group of Cliometricians that with coining the term “congregated at Purdue University in the late 1960s, and which included other luminaries among them Lance Davis, Jonathan Hughes, and Stanley Reiter (who is widely credited Cliometrics”). By 1970, this group had moved away from West Lafayette and dispersed to institutions such as Northwestern and CalTech. Rosenberg was hired by the University of Wisconsin, and was a member of a different group of influential and distinguished economic historians in Madison, including at one time or another Jeffrey Williamson, Peter Lindert, Morton Rothstein, Rondo Cameron, and Claudia Goldin. While at Wisconsin, Rosenberg was the editor of the Journal of Economic History and instrumental in its growing focus on the new economic history that was theoretically informed by economics and quantitatively more sophisticated — the very essence of the Cliometric Revolution.
In 1974, Rosenberg moved to Stanford, where he taught for more than a quarter century until his retirement in 2002. As department chair at Stanford between 1983and 1986 he helped build the department and maintain its position as one of the top economics departments in the country. Moreover, his leadership guaranteed that economic history remained an integral part of the undergraduate and Ph.D. programs and includes some of its most distinguished practitioners such as Gavin Wright and Avner Greif, as well as younger and promising scholars. Today, thanks to Rosenberg’s initiative and entrepreneurship, the Stanford department is housed in a gorgeous building named after Ralph Landau, whose support for research and teaching in economics was first stimulated by a fortuitous meeting with Rosenberg. The partnership with Landau, a chemical engineer and entrepreneur fascinated by economics, led to a fruitful scholarly collaboration between him and Rosenberg, especially in two well-regarded collections they edited together. Thanks in large part to Rosenberg’s resourcefulness, the graduate program at Stanford has thrived and produced many distinguished members of the economic history profession and applied economists working on innovation. While not all of them worked with him directly, his influence on the flourishing of economic history at Stanford was undeniable. Many of the former graduate students he trained and inspired co-authored and co-edited papers and books with him, such as David Mowery with whom he wrote Technology and the Pursuit of Economic Growth (Cambridge University Press, 1989). Without exception these young economists admired and adored him; two of them, Scott Stern and Shane Greenstein, were my former colleagues, and the three of us were instrumental in Northwestern awarding him an honorary doctorate in 2006, in the same class of honorary degrees as the then little-known junior senator from Illinois. If ever there was an academic conspiracy that can be called a true labor of love, this was it.

As a scholar, much of Rosenberg’s most important and influential work is captured by the title of his Inside the Black Box, a collection of essays on the nature of technology (Cambridge University Press, 1982). In it, he stated from the onset that “economists have long treated technological phenomena as events transpiring inside a black box...the economics profession has adhered rather strictly to a self-imposed ordinance not to inquire too seriously into what transpires inside that box. The purpose of this book is to break open and to examine the contents of the black box” (p. vii). That metaphor captures the central theme of Rosenberg’s career.

What, then did Rosenberg find inside that black box? In his typical self-deprecating way, he once remarked to me that once you open the big black box of technology, you find inside a smaller black box, and so on, much like Russian matryoshkadolls. Maybe, he reflected, in the end this is what scientific progress really consists of? But of course, opening the black box led Rosenberg to considerably more important insights on the nature of technological change. I will list only a few that I find the most insightful — others can have other preferences. One is his emphasis on the subtle and complex interplay between science and technology stressed in his magnificent essay “How Exogenous is Science?”. In it he points out the many feedback effects that run from technology to science, and debunked the “linear model” that draws the main arrow of causality from Science to Applied Science to Technology. Since Rosenberg’s work, historians of technology have heaped scorn on the linear model. Technology in his view is not the mechanical “application of science” to production; it is a field of knowledge by itself, quite different in its incentives, its modes of transmission, and its culture. It is affected by science, but in turn provides “pure research” with its instruments and much of its agenda. In many cases, he noted, scientists were confronted by the fact that things they had previously declared to be impossible were actually carried out by engineers and mechanics and had to admit somewhat sheepishly that were possible after all. More than a decade later, in his later book Exploring the Black Box, he returned to the important but often-neglected link between technology and scientific progress, provided by scientific instrumentation.

A second item Rosenberg found inside his black box early on was the importance of the machine industry in the generation of technological change and economic growth, a topic he explored early in his career in his influential 1963 Journal of Economic History paper, “Technological Change in the Machine Tool Industry” reprinted in his Perspectives on Technology (Cambridge University Press, 1976). The paper stressed the crucial importance of machine tools in creating the mechanization that was at the heart of the Industrial Revolution in the United States and Britain, and showed that without the improvements in lathes, planers, milling machines and precision grinders, much of the growth of modern manufacturing could not have happened. In his later book Technology and American Economic growth (Harper & Row, 1972) he explained how the ever-growing specialization, and not just the quality improvement and lower prices of these precision metal-cutting and shaping devices, stimulated and supported the rise of modern industry. In his citation for the Leonardo Da Vinci medal that the Society for the History of Technology awarded Rosenberg in 1995, David Hounshell wrote that “His 1963 article remains to this day perhaps the single most influential essay ever written in our discipline. In it, Rosenberg grasped the essential nature of the technical knowledge embedded in the machine tool industry and recognized how that knowledge would not fit easily into existing economic models.”

A third item that many historians of technology, whether economists or not, have found extremely insightful in Rosenberg’s black box is his concept of “focusing devices,” first enunciated in his 1969 Economic Development and Cultural Changepaper “The Direction of Technological Change,” (reprinted in Perspectives on Technology). It is an intuitively powerful concept that essentially proposes that much of technological progress occurs because a firm, a group, or the government realizes that there is an urgent need for a clear solution to a pressing and well-defined social issue or bottleneck in production. The solution is not always forthcoming of course — Rosenberg cited with great glee Hotspur’s decisive riposte to Glendower’s claim that he could call the spirits from the vastly deep: “why, so can I, so can any man; but will they come when you call for them?” (see his Technology and American Growth, p.51). But when the solution is arrived at, it often solves far more than it was intended for and overshoots its target, and thus it creates a new bottleneck. This leapfrogging or “compulsive sequences” phenomenon was used to describe the eighteenth century cotton manufacturing, but in fact it applies to much of the rest of the technological revolutions of the eighteenth century. At the start of the century, British society knew well that it faced a number of hard but well-defined problems: finding longitude at sea, pumping water out of deep-shaft coal mines, ridding society of smallpox, and turning pig iron into wrought iron cheaply and rapidly. By 1800 these problems had all been solved. Rosenberg’s essay deals with firms and their recognition of an opportunity for profit, but one can easily add other motives, from the altruism of Jonas Salk, the driving ambition of James Watson to the political ideology of the men and women working on Project Manhattan.

Academic work was the center of Rosenberg’s life. After his retirement, he continued to write and publish. Together with Bronwyn Hall, he edited the massive two-volume Handbook of the Economics of Innovation (Elsevier, 2010), which contains wonderful survey essays by every serious scholar working in the area. He also published a sparklingly original and creative paper (jointly with Manuel Trajtenberg) in the Journal of Economic History (2004) on the economic significance of the Corliss steam engine and its effect on American industrialization. The brand new Handbook of Cliometrics (2015) contains an essay by Rosenberg jointly with Stanley Engerman on “Innovation in Historical Perspective.”

There was much more to Rosenberg’s intellectual persona than his interest in innovation and technical knowledge. He was fascinated by the “greats” of economics — especially Smith and Marx, on whom he wrote perceptive essays, as well as lesser but equally fascinating figures such as Charles Babbage. He published a collection of his essays on the History of Economics as he saw it (often from the point of view of technology), entitled The Emergence of Economic Ideas: Essays in the History of Economics — idiosyncratic, perhaps, but never dull. In the editors’ introduction to the first volume of the Economics of Innovationcompilation, Rosenberg and Hall cite a long passage from Schumpeter’s preface to the Japanese edition of his 1937 book The Theory of Economic Development.Schumpeter recounted a debate he had with Walras on whether economics should concern itself only with statics or should also be concerned with the rapid changes in the economy. These kinds of historical issues held endless fascination for Rosenberg. The first essay in his published Graz Lectures, Schumpeter and the Endogeneity of Technology: Some American Perspectives (Routledge, 2000), was entitled “Joseph Schumpeter and the Economic Interpretation of History.” He cited at length and with almost palpable delight Schumpeter’s statement that economic history was absolutely required for the scientific study of economics. Rosenberg was also interested in modern medical research and its place in the modern American research university. He surely was the only economic historian to have published a paper both in The New England Journal of Medicine and The Energy Journal (and probably the only one to have published in either).

Rosenberg was one of the broadest and most intellectually curious minds I ever met. He was, as Ken Arrow remarked in his eulogy, an enormous lover of books and owned many thousands of them — yet ironically his own preferred format was the short pointed essay or at most a short and summary book such as his briefTechnology and American Economic Growth. Having read papers on science and technology his entire life, he may have adopted the scientist’s preferred mode of communication over the long and heavily-detailed books written by the typical economic historian. He never wrote a single-authored magnum opus on economic history. The closest he ever came to a big-think ambitious “explanation of everything” was the set of Rosenberg’s lecture notes that L.E. Birdzell collected and then together published as a book How the West Grew Rich. It is a lovely and often insightful book, but it lacks the grandeur and sweep of a David Landes, Douglass North, or Eric Jones, who have written books with similar themes. Rosenberg’s comparative advantage was the brief essay, and the books he published were mostly collections of these essays. These essays were, without exception, beautifully written: he had the gift of expressing a complex and nuanced economic relation in a short and elegant phrase. They are still read by students and scholars all over the world.

As a person, Rosenberg was deeply loved and admired by those who knew him well. He was urbane and erudite even by the high standards of the great economic historians of his generation. He was witty to the point of being hilarious, and could be sarcastic and cutting when he wanted. He was also a deeply caring husband, father and grandfather, the emblematic Jewish father who knew that investment in human capital and family cohesion were the essence of Jewish culture. He was a great colleague and a warm and wonderful friend. Of all the many senior economic historians of that generation whom I knew and admired over the years, he was the only one whom I regarded as much as a relative as a colleague. I will never forget you, Uncle Nate.

O que ja se inventou de util no modo de producao inventivo do capitalismo?

Economists Debate: Has All the Important Stuff Already Been Invented?

Northwestern University Colleagues Have Opposing Views of 21st Century Economy

Timothy Aeppel

WALL STREET JOURNAL, June 15, 2014

Economic odd couple Robert Gordon, left, and Joel Mokyr encapsulate the debate on the future of innovation. Rob Hart for The Wall Street Journal

EVANSTON, Ill.— Robert Gordon, a curmudgeonly 73-year-old economist, believes our best days are over. After a century of life-changing innovations that spurred growth, he says, human progress is slowing to a crawl.

Joel Mokyr, a cheerful 67-year-old economist, imagines a coming age of new inventions, including gene therapies to prolong our life span and miracle seeds that can feed the world without fertilizers.

These big-name colleagues at Northwestern University represent opposite poles in the debate over the future of the 21st century economy: rapid innovation driven by robotic manufacturing, 3-D printing and cloud computing, versus years of job losses, stagnant wages and rising income inequality.

The divergent views are more than academic. For many Americans, the recession left behind the scars of lost jobs, lower wages and depressed home prices. The question is whether tough times are here for good. The answer depends on who you ask.

"I think the rate of innovation is just getting faster and faster," Mr. Mokyr said over noodles and spicy chicken at a Thai restaurant near the campus where he and Mr. Gordon have taught for four decades.

"What's the evidence of that?" snapped Mr. Gordon. "There isn't any."

The men get along fine when talk is limited to, say, faculty gossip. About the future, though, they bicker constantly. When Mr. Mokyr described life-prolonging medical advances, Mr. Gordon cut in: "Extending life without curing Alzheimer's means people who can walk but can't think."

Mr. Gordon landed at Northwestern from the University of Chicago in the fall of 1973, a year before Mr. Mokyr arrived there from Yale after finishing his Ph.D. Their tit-for-tat repartee makes them popular speakers—for economists, at least. Mr. Gordon recently began charging as much as $20,000 for U.S. appearances—a fee, he said, dictated by his new booking agent.

Even there, the men are at odds. "I am a rank-and-file academic, not a basketball star," Mr. Mokyr said. "I have neither a literary agent nor a speaker bureau. I charge what they pay me. If it's not enough I don't go."

The professors headlined a Bank of Korea event in Seoul earlier this month. "We always go mano-a-mano," Mr. Mokyr said. "But we often end up talking about different things. Bob's a macroeconomist, I'm an economic historian."

Mr. Mokyr has long studied how new tools have led to economic breakthroughs. For example, how the development of telescopes allowed for rapid advances in astronomy. History makes him certain his colleague is wrong.

Mr. Gordon's ideas, in fact, fly in the face of modern economic orthodoxy. Since Nobel economist Robert Solow first argued in the 1950s that growth was driven by new technology, most economists have embraced the idea. Progress may be uneven, according to this view, but there is no reason to expect the world to run out of ideas.

"Bob says the low-hanging fruit has been picked, because we won't invent indoor plumbing again," Mr. Mokyr said. In speeches, Mr. Gordon often displays images of a flush toilet and iPhone and asks: Which would you give up?

Mr. Mokyr said many economists before Mr. Gordon have proclaimed the end of progress, but these pessimists have always been proven wrong. It was a popular theme during the Depression, he said, but modern economists now recognize the 1930s as a period of rapid technological progress with such advances as the development of jet engines and radar.

Today, Mr. Mokyr said, fast computing is a new tool that will open the way to new inventions in the future.

The darkness of Mr. Mokyr's family history contrasts with his optimism for the future. His parents were Dutch Jews who survived the Holocaust. His father, a civil servant, died of cancer when Mr. Mokyr was a year old. He was raised by his mother in a small apartment in the port city of Haifa in Israel. "My mother was not an optimist," he said. "She had lived a very tough life."

Mr. Gordon, the more famous of the two men, has the credentials to buck conventional wisdom. His parents and a brother were Ph.D. economists. His father, an expert on business cycles, taught at the University of California, Berkeley, for decades. Business Week called them "The Flying Wallendas of Economics," after the acrobatics family. Mr. Gordon wrote a widely used macroeconomic textbook and has served for more than three decades on a committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research that determines when recessions begin and end.

If anything, his family should have made him an optimist. Mr. Gordon's father grew up grindingly poor, at one point supporting three younger brothers after his own father died; his eventual success mirrored the larger transformation of the U.S. into the world's richest country.

"His generation saw the move from crowded tenements in the 1920s to suburbia in the 1950s—with everyone having a yard and a car," Mr. Gordon said, a leap showing how much progress has since slowed.

Mr. Gordon sees a hobbled U.S. economy ahead. Americans are getting older, leaving too few workers to support the aging population. The problem is even worse in other Western economies.

An aging citizenry is among a list of troubles, including the declining share of working-age men with jobs; stagnant rates of Americans earning college degrees; jobs lost abroad and high government debt. The biggest obstacle, he said, is growing income inequality.

To compensate, Mr. Gordon said, economies need technological advances. The problem is that the biggest breakthroughs—like electrification or the discovery of antibiotics—are behind us. Electricity changed how people lived and worked, and it spawned hundreds of new industries. The technology that allowed people to communicate instantly or travel quickly over long distances were 19th- and 20th-century innovations.

More recent inventions—including the Internet—won't pack the same punch, he said: "The rapid progress made over the past 250 years could well turn out to be a unique episode in human history."

Cellphones, he said, are just a refinement of the telephone. "Look at what an ideal kitchen looked like in 1955—it's not that different than today," Mr. Gordon said. "It's nothing like moving from clothes lines to clothes dryers."

Cars also illustrate how rapid advances have petered out in recent decades. A century ago, the Ford Model T, with its 20-horse-power engine, reached a top speed of 45 miles an hour. By the mid-1950s, Mr. Gordon said, his father had a Chevrolet station wagon that was five times as powerful. More than 50 years later, Mr. Gordon said, he has a Subaru station wagon that is comparable with his father's Chevy in size, speed and cargo capacity.

Mr. Gordon said his ideas began taking shape between semesters at graduate school. He worked during the summer of 1965 for a team of economists analyzing the dazzling productivity growth that began around 1920 and ran through World War II and the postwar boom.

Except for an upturn in the 1990s, growth has been tepid ever since.

"Everyone has looked for a big overarching factor to explain this," he said. "But it occurred to me, it could be as simple as that we'd run out of the great inventions."

Mr. Gordon said his ideas evolved from there. In 2000, he published a paper saying that computer technology, hailed as the driver of the "new economy," was far less impressive than earlier big inventions. He generated more controversy with a 2012 academic paper titled "Is U.S. Economic Growth Over?"

The paper included a dire prediction: The economy will grow less than half as fast as the remarkable 2% average it notched between 1870 and 2007. "Americans got used to their standard of living doubling from that of their parents. No more," he told investment managers in Germany this year:

If he is right, the standard of living for the average American—measured in per capita income—will in the future take 78 years to double, compared with the 35 years it took between 1972 and 2007. The wealthiest 1%, on the other hand, could double their standard of living in as little as 23 years, he said.

Other economists have voiced worries about stagnating growth, but none quite as sweeping. Tyler Cowen of George Mason University in a 2011 book described a technological plateau that slowed U.S. growth. Mr. Cowen has softened his stance lately, noting that such developments as the shale gas boom have improved the long-term outlook.

Larry Summers, former chief economic adviser to President Obama, told a gathering of the International Monetary Fund last year that the U.S. and other advanced economies faced a prolonged period of extremely slow growth known as secular stagnation.

But in an interview, Mr. Summers said he didn't share Mr. Gordon's belief that innovation has stalled. He agreed, however, that the benefits of meager economic growth "will not be hugely felt by the middle class."

Other experts side with Mr. Mokyr. Timothy Taylor, an economist at Macalester College and editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, said, "People like Bob Gordon are making an argument that's been heard repeatedly for the last 150 years."

Former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, in a commencement speech last year, told graduates of Bard College at Simon's Rock, "Both humanity's capacity to innovate and the incentives to innovate are greater today than at any other time in history."

Criticism from Mr. Mokyr and others has prompted Mr. Gordon to focus more on economic headwinds. Even if the pace of innovation remains unchanged, he said, current obstacles are enough to support his projections.

Mr. Gordon is now writing "Beyond the Rainbow: The Rise and Fall of Growth in the American Standard of Living," one book in series on economic history being overseen by Mr. Mokyr as chief editor.

Much of Mr. Gordon's work focuses on an economy's output. Mr. Mokyr, meanwhile, is more interested in how new inventions improve the quality of life in ways that don't show up in traditional measures: new medicines that treat chronic pain or allow older people to stay active years longer. A hip replacement, he said, let him keep riding his bike to and from work.

"For Bob, it's all about the measure of input and output—especially output," said Mr. Mokyr. That is why the aging population is such a big problem for Mr. Gordon, since retired people stop producing.

Mr. Gordon countered that many of the innovations Mr. Mokyr anticipates—such as new technology to clean air and water pollution—will solve problems created by past economic growth. Those shouldn't be counted the same way as breakthroughs that add to output, he said.

"Maybe the problem is that we didn't measure growth in the past correctly," Mr. Mokyr retorted, "because we didn't account for the costs."

The two men agree on one point. "One of the main missions I have in life is to point out to my students how lucky they are to be born in the 20th century," Mr. Mokyr said. "Compared to what life was like 100 or 200 years ago, we're incredibly fortunate."

—Michael J. Casey contributed to this article