 Joe Mo Kier is the Robert H. Strott's Professor of Economic History at Northwestern University. He has a PhD from Yale, he has taught and studied all over the world, and has supervised many dozens of doctoral students in pursuit of the past. He joins us today to talk about his latest book, A Culture of Growth and the Creeping Revolution that Enriched the World. Welcome to Liberty Chronicles, a project of libertarianism.org. I'm Anthony Komegna. Can you explain to us what exactly was the great enrichment? Yes, the great enrichment basically reflects the fact that in our time we are richer and living at a higher standard of living than anyone who's ever come before us, and that even the poor of today in many dimensions have a material quality of life that exceeds those of the very rich and the most powerful people who are living in Europe, even at the time of the Renaissance. And when I say in Europe, the same would be true for China, for India, even more so I suppose more poorer areas than that, like Russia, Africa, places like that. We are living at a living standard that is just unprecedented in human history, and it's not just that we have more stuff and that we're eating better, but it shows up in all kinds of unexpected dimensions, not only that we live much longer, life expectancy has doubled essentially in the last 150 years. It used to be somewhere around 40, and now it is 80 in industrialized countries. But there are lots of other things that people should be aware of. We are taller than people used to be. All kinds of other biological changes have occurred as a result of better nutrition, better environmental conditions. We are better able to warm ourselves in the winter and cool ourselves in the summer and protect ourselves from all kinds of nasty bugs in the water and in the air. So there's this vast improvement across a very, very broad front in the material standard of living that has taken place essentially in the last 200 years. And until then, I would say whatever changes were taking place were extremely slow, readily reversible, and that's no longer the case. And if you quantify these changes and you put them on a graph, it looks like a hockey stick shoot well. It looks like a hockey stick. It just shoots up in the 19th century especially. And then there's very little change for most of history, and then all of a sudden, it just jumps up. But now the hockey stick analogy, of course, comes from climate change and from the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is of course a byproduct of industrialization as well. So the good stuff and the bad stuff come together, and the hockey stick can be taken as both an indication of our success and of the hazards that that success entails. Why did this enrichment, this steep, sharp climb upward in wealth, why did it happen where and when it did? Well, you know, that's the $64,000 questions. And libraries have been written about this, and I couldn't possibly start to summarize it in a way. We probably have more explanations than we know what to do with. People have pointed to all kind of differences, starting off with, you know, religion and, you know, ending up is, you know, having to do with, you know, relative factor prices like high wages in spirit, technological changes and on and on and on. Probably be useful to separate this into two questions. First, why did it happen in Europe and not anywhere else? And the second is why does it happen, say, in the late 18th century, in the period we call the Industrial Revolution, and not, say, at the time of Charlemagne or Julius Caesar or something like that? And I think that is also treating these two questions separately is probably wise. Otherwise, it just gets too, you know, you're biting off more than you can chew. And so the question why Europe itself is already a vast issue because, you know, the fact of the matter is that if you looked at the world in, say, 1500, suppose you were alive in 1500 and somebody told you, well, you know, in half a millennium, some part of the world is going to get extremely rich and industrialized and some part of the world is going to be trying desperately to catch up. My money would be that people say, well, obviously it's going to be China that will be leading the world and Europe that's catching up. And that's not what happened, of course. And so there was something about Europe that made it look very different from the rest of the world, because it's not just China that did not experience what Europe experienced. It was India, it was Africa, it was, you know, Eastern Europe and so on. And so Middle East, if you want. And so there's something about Europe. And what that exactly is, of course, has been the subject of a great deal of dispute amongst scholars. I tend to be very skeptical of the view that some people have put forward that points to religion and basically says, well, you know, Judeo-Christianity had in it the roots of economic success. I find it sort of hard to believe for a variety of reasons I don't want to get into right now. But I think that there is something to this view in the sense that they point to the fact that what people really believed and the sort of mentality and culture, if you want, is actually of greater importance than economists have typically assumed. In the last 15 years, I think economics has rediscovered culture and is trying to see how they can fit it into the overall scheme of things. But I don't think it's religion per se. There's nothing about Christianity as such, even if we abstract it from the fact that Christianity, of course, contains a great deal of variation within itself. Not only yet you get a big split between Protestantism and Catholicism, more or less at the beginning of the period in which things start to happen at the end of the Middle Ages, but also that within Catholicism and within Protestantism, there's a fair amount of variation, some of which are more friendly to economic growth and technological progress than others. Where I think we should be looking is at the critical fact that Europe is politically highly fragmented, which creates a competitive environment in which these sort of nation states or sometimes much smaller areas like independent city-states are continuously competing with one another for political advantage and military advantage. But at the same time, Europe has an intellectual unity that makes it possible for intellectuals to produce for a large market. And so they get, in some sense, the best of all possible worlds. And that's the situation that you see nowhere occurring. In China, we do have, of course, a great deal of intellectual unity because the country shares written language and shares a Mandarin culture, but there is no competition between China and other states that were threatening it in the way it was in Europe. And I think that makes a very large difference. In other parts of the world, you get a great deal of fragmentation but no intellectual unity like in India and in Africa. Europe, in that sense, has the best of all possible worlds. And this is something that, by the way, if you read the Enlightenment writers, and I cite some of them in my book, Kant and Gibbons and David Hume, they all make this point. They all say, oh, one of the reasons that Europe is so advanced and the 18th century term, they use polite, which they use in a different way than we do. But what they mean by polite is sort of progressive, if you want. And the reason why this is so is because nations are competing with each other and nobody wants to fall behind. And they point at two things that we all learn in high school, for instance, how nations that felt that they were in some way behind, Russia is the prime example, make a deliberate effort to catch up with the others. But even if the competition between, say, England and France, which dominates political history in the 18th and 19th century, spurs both of these societies to put a lot of effort in economic and technological progress. And so they were doing, if you want, the right thing for the wrong reasons. But the net result, and maybe the unintended consequence to some extent, is economic progress. And that, I think, is what sets Europe apart. The question of timing is much more difficult. But I think my argument that what you needed to overcome in Europe is sort of, I think of it as a medieval mentality, in which people basically view history as a set of cycles in which things go up and things go down. This is an ancient view that you see strongly incorporated in classical civilization. The most famous example of that, of course, is in the book of Ecclesiastes, in which this sort of sense that the generation comes and generation goes and there's nothing new under the sun. And so sometimes things go up, sometimes things go down. And this was still a widely held belief in medieval and even in early modern Europe. But what you see happening, and that for me, this is the essence of the Enlightenment, is a belief in progress. And that history really is not a set of ups and downs, but that there is a trend. And what people start realizing in the 17th and 18th centuries that the reason this is so is because knowledge is cumulative. So that in the 17th century, people like Pascal and Newton and Galileo would without necessarily dissing the ancient scientists that they were all reading and quoting, above all, of course, Aristotle. And they basically make the point that we know what Aristotle knew because we can read Aristotle, but not the reverse. So we know more because we have learned things since Aristotle. And we're learning more and more every day. And these things are piling up on top of one another. And I think that insight, that gave Europe a set of confidence in the possibility of progress that for me is the core of the Enlightenment. That said, I should add immediately that the possibility of progress is not enough. You also have to believe in the desirability of progress. And there are a lot of people who say, oh, yeah, well, progress possible. We don't want any of that because industrialization is bad. There's alienation, immiseration, blah, blah, blah. There's a whole strand of thought that really goes in that direction. And what you see happening in the 18th century, with some exceptions, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, people think not only that progress is possible, but that it's desirable, that it will raise mankind to a new living standard. I don't think that they could imagine how big that increase would be, but they all felt it was possible. There's different variations on that. But if you read somebody like Condorcet or Turgot in France, or even for that matter, Adam Smith in England, they all believe, in Scotland, I should say, they all believe that progress was possible and desirable. And without that belief, I think the whole thing would have essentially run out of steam. Central to that narrative of knowledge makers accumulating knowledge over time, in your telling of it at least, is the search for power over nature, and that we can improve the human condition by exercising greater and greater power over nature. And I suppose my question for you is, you say this group of scientists and tinkerers and specialists is always very, very small, a couple thousand at the most, and that they are teasing out masses of new information, useful knowledge that can be put to human betterment. And I suppose my question is useful for whom exactly? And is this the sort of thing that we should be skeptical of and worry about because elites like Bacon, for example, sometimes want specifically to use their power over nature to extend to power over other human beings as well? That is to some extent what people are trying to do. The power over nature always involves, to a large extent, interpersonal games in which I'm going to try to use whatever power I have over nature to jockey into a better position. But that said, I think it's very important to realize that what you see happening is that as people acquire more power, more and more of that is used for the creation rather than the redistribution of wealth. And so you may want to achieve power over other people to redistribute wealth and to gain a better bargaining position in society. But in fact, what people end up doing is creating a great deal of power over nature that is used primarily as, again, against one's environment. How can I pump water out of coal mines? I mean, a very mundane, practical question, but that is a problem that they were trying to solve. And of course, the steam engine turned out to be the answer to that, and then the steam engine found all kinds of other uses. Motivations may, in fact, have been to some extent gaining power over other people. So military considerations were clearly a driving force. But that's in the end turned out to be largely incidental. What has really mattered more than anything else that we have been able to harness the forces of nature to our needs and solve all kinds of problems that basically just improved people's lives? I mean, for me, one of the most radical inventions of the industrial revolution had actually nothing to do with the cotton industry and the iron industry and coal mining and steam power. It's actually the vaccination process against smallpox, which happened since 1796, smack in the middle of the industrial revolution. But it has nothing to do with gaining power over other people. It has everything to do with solving a problem that kept people incredibly busy in the 18th century. Smallpox was a great fear, and for good reason. It's a terrible, terrible disease, and it got worse in the 18th century. But basically people were, doctors were struggling all over Europe, not just in England, to find a solution to that, and bang, the guy figured it out. That, for me, is much more significant than the kind of technology that gives you power over other people. That said, it is absolutely true. That once Europeans were able to create this useful knowledge, that they used it to take control of other parts of the world. Sometimes it's more success, sometimes it's less success. But essentially, the age of imperialism is a byproduct of these technological revolutions. And everybody who studied imperialism grasped that right away. The reason Europeans were able to take over essentially redistributed Africa and large chunks of Asia as well, for that matter, was because they had a superior technology. But those things seem to be temporary, even so they may have lasted many decades. Because Europeans couldn't keep the technology for themselves. They couldn't stop the Japanese and then the Chinese and eventually everybody else from acquiring these technologies and saying, well, if you guys are using this technology to dominate us, we can get a hold of that technology and use it to defend ourselves. And in some sense, we're still living with these sort of final outcomes of that because the whole sort of debate about nuclear proliferation can be seen in that light. So I'm not going to get into that. But you see what I'm saying. I mean, the domination of other people is in some sense a byproduct. And what's true for international relations is equally true for what's happening within a country. It's true that for at least a little while. And there's some good reason to believe that what Karl Marx was talking about was not a bad description of what was going on. So you have capitalists who own the means of production, and they're using those create a huge amount of profit at, as Marx and Engels believed, at the expense of workers. We could debate that, but that's what I certainly believe. But this is obviously not going to last and eventually the fruits of technological progress filter down to very wide layers of the population. So that certainly now in Europe, the classical problem of poverty as it existed still in the 18th century has essentially disappeared. I always am really struck when I travel to Europe. And the United States is somewhat different story. But when you go to Europe, you actually have to work very hard to find poor people. I mean, I spent I think I've been to almost every major town in Europe. And certainly in the West, you go to places like Stockholm and Zurich and Amsterdam. You see people who are richer, people who are less rich, but really poor people, people who are starving, who are wearing rags or living in hovels. It's gone. It's no longer there. The New Testament says the poor will always be with you. But they're not. They're gone. And good riddance, I would say. This is an absolutely unbelievable achievement that people don't fully recognize. This is a vast success. Now, that said, on a global level, unfortunately, of course, poverty is still a problem, but everything points to the fact that in the last 15 or 20 years, the number of people who by any definition should be seen as poor is coming down and coming down rapidly. And if we have famines, if we have starvation, it's typically the result of stupidity and bad policies, not of the fact that we cannot provide for these people if we if we had the political means and will to do so. Now, I want to pick up on a theme that you mentioned earlier, and that is that ideological change, intellectual change, scientific advancement is basically a trans-political phenomenon. It's not something that's limited to some arbitrarily established geographic boundary. And it's not necessarily something that can be contained either, no matter how much some governments at some times may want to. And ideas, as you mentioned in the section on cultural evolution, ideas kind of travel as an infectious agent from society to society. And I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about the Republic of Letters that stretched across many different countries across Europe throughout the Enlightenment. And tell us exactly what was this phenomenon? What sort of people were part of it? And was it an institution that people recognized in any sense? Or was it far more fluid? Economics has, in the last few decades, rediscovered this idea of institutions, mostly thanks to the work of my my late friend and Nobel Prize winner Douglas North, but many others have played a role in it. When I was a graduate student in the 1970s, institutions were something that sociologists talked about. Now, we in economics, we don't deal with institutions. But that's changed. We now are very interested in institutions. And then, of course, we have all kind of minor issues. Like, what exactly do we mean by institutions? Where do they come from? What do they do? And so Doug and other people have been writing about this at great lengths. And that literature has tended to focus largely, if not exclusively, on the state, on national institutions. So if you read, for instance, the book by Assamoglu and Robinson, Why Nations Fail, which was a huge amount of publicity, they basically see institutions as something that's happening on a national level. They have to do with governance, it has to do with adjudication, it has to do with conflict resolution, but it's all happening at the national level. So some countries have good institutions and some countries have bad institutions, and the one with good institutions get rich, and the one with bad institutions don't. And what you're pointing to in your question is that some institutions were actually transnational. They did not respect national boundaries. And the Republic of Letters and its heirs today, which is essentially the world scientific community, if you want, are part of that. And they are institutions, in the sense that North talked about these, they have rules, and people are aware of the fact that they are members of it, and they by and large play by the rules. Now, you know, like if you don't play by the rules, then you're likely to be in some way penalized if you get caught, and so on. And the Republic of Letters, as far as I can see, is under the first example, not quite the first, I could come up with others, but under the first example of a transnational institution. And it was recognized as such at the time. What it really is. And I think in our age, we can really understand this better than in any other age, because we actually have similar things going on today. It's a set of communication links between individuals who are exchanging information. So in some sense, it's very much like the Internet, only of course, much slower. And what it was based on essentially was based on two things, correspondence, people exchanged letters through an ever better postal system, and publications, which is the printing press. And both of these things experience a great deal of improvement. Of course, the printing presses only appears in the middle of the 15th century, and postal service were getting better in the 16th century. And it allows people to communicate. And so who are the people who are communicating? Well, so you have obviously people talking about religion, philosophy, metaphysics, occult, all kinds of things that we don't think of being particularly important to modern economic growth. But among those people, there is a group they would call themselves natural philosophers, and we would call them scientists. They wouldn't call themselves scientists. That's a much more recent term. But this is what they did. And so when somebody like a Galileo or a Newton or a Leibniz just to point to the superstars, there are hundreds and hundreds of these people, when they think that they have a new idea. They don't keep it to themselves, nor do they keep it within the city which they're living. This is placed in the public realm. This is, you know, either published in a book as, of course, Galileo and Newton did. But even before that, they correspond and they say, oh, I have this idea. What do you think of it? And people go back and forth. And that creates a community. And I would say, you know, it made me a few tens of thousands of people at its peak. But what happens is that somebody has a new idea, say, William Harvey about the circulation of blood to give you one famous example. That is being discussed. Even if the idea is proposed somewhere in England, within a few years, people are talking about it in Krakow, in Madrid, in Paris, in Vienna, you know, in Copenhagen. These ideas spread out and people go back and forth. And that created a scientific community that plays an incredibly important role in the generation of useful knowledge. Now, you asked me, useful to whom? My answer would be, who knows? What I mean by useful knowledge is knowledge that is potentially useful in the generation of technology. So that would include, of course, advances in physics and chemistry in botany, in mathematics, in astronomy, in all kind of areas which are potentially useful. Now, when I say potentially useful, that doesn't mean that they're going to be useful tomorrow or maybe ever. But I think they are different from, say, insights in religion, in other areas of metaphysics. Medicine would be another case in which useful knowledge is growing very rapidly. And so those ideas circulate within Europe. And what that, of course, means is that when I have an idea, you know, most ideas that people have are bad. Most ideas that I have are terrible. But, you know, it's sometimes hard to judge. So I, you know, I write a letter or a paper. I send it around. And other people read it. And they say, oh, my God, this is complete nonsense. And they tell me nonsense. And, you know, there's a back and forth. And out of that argument arises something that will eventually become workable. And that, I think, is the kind of community that emerges. And I tracked it in my book a little bit. And it's quite clear that we can actually, you know, its history is fairly well known. You know, the embryonic forms are there already at the time of Martin Luther, say, at the beginning of the 16th century, that it really comes to its full flourishing in the late 17th century in the age of Isaac Newton. And by that time, Europe really has a scientific community of sorts. Now, how many people were there in this? I said a few tens of thousands. To get be in it, you had to be at the very least, of course, by definition, almost literate, which is, you know, a relatively small proportion of European, certainly much less than half. But more than literate, you had to be highly educated. You had to be, for most of this period, at least bilingual, in the sense that you had to be able to read and write in your vernacular, as well as in Latin. This is clearly an elite phenomenon. It is not an elite necessarily of people of high birth, nor necessarily of people of great means. It's an intellectual elite. It's an elite of people who are educated, who are intelligent, who are open-minded, and who are considering themselves part of this sort of joint effort of making the world a better place by better understanding the forces of nature. And, you know, that is something that you don't see anywhere else in the world. I mean, and it isn't there in, say, 1450 and by 1700, not only that it's there, but everybody knows that it's there. In fact, there is, you know, by that time, and there is actually a Frenchman called Pierre Bile, who actually publishes a newsletter which is called, you know, the News from the Republic of Letters. And they talk of themselves as if they're citizens of this republic, which of course doesn't really exist. It's a virtual concept. But it's a sense of identity that these people have acquired, which is only sort of semi, they're only sort of semi-conscious of it. But clearly this is there, and it makes a vast difference to the outcome, as I think I try to stress in that book. Was there anything like an enlightenment from below, from people who were not very highly educated, but who made a contribution to the growing numbers of sciences, nonetheless? The majority of people living in Europe at the time, which is some possible exception of England and the Netherlands, are still farmers. I mean, or I say they're better to call them peasants. And these people spend their lives working on the land and they were typically uneducated. Most of them would be illiterate and it's very hard to expect from them to contribute anything. Once you go beyond that majority, there is a large group of people, you know, maybe more than certainly larger than the intellectuals, whom I have referred to as tweakers and tinkerers. And these are essentially mechanics, engineers, technicians, highly skilled artisans who may not necessarily be intellectuals. They're probably most of them would be illiterate, but not certainly not intellectuals. These aren't the people who go to universities. And these may be not even members of the Republic of Letters, but they were people who were, as they call us in England, good with their hands, dexterous, skilled craftsmen. It's not enough to have good ideas and say, oh, you know, my God, we could build this and that, and without having the people who can carry these ideas out. So, you know, to give you one very well-known example, the thing of Leonardo. So, Leonardo da Vinci was a genius and certainly one would think of him as a member of a Republic of Letters, also in the very early stages of it. And he wrote all, maybe he created all these fantastic ideas that we know from his sketches, but none of the things that he ever dreamed about could be built at the time, because the workmanship and the materials just weren't there. 200 years later, you have people like James Watt coming up with an idea. And James Watt said, oh, well, we could build a steam engine that would be much more efficient, would be useful, blah, blah, blah. He needed somebody to build this for him to drill the cylinders in which, you know, the actual compression took place. And lo and behold, they were there in England. And so those skilled artisans play a very important role. And without them, I think nothing would have happened. I wouldn't call these people enlightened. That's not what the enlightenment was all about. But they are an, I would say, an indispensable compliment to the intellectuals of the Republic of Letters. And so what we really think of is Europe has had, you know, was lucky twice. It was lucky because it had a Republic of Letters in which men like Galileo and Hook and Boyle and so on and so forth could be active and exchange ideas. But it also was lucky because it had a class of artisans who had been well trained. I used to work trained, not educated, and that's quite different. They never, these may not have gone, people who may not have gone to school, some of them did, some of them didn't, but they were people who could actually build the models that these, that these, you know, the intellectuals dreamed up and then scale them up and turn them into something that was economically significant. That's very important. And without those people, we're still not talking about the masses, we're talking maybe the top perhaps five percent, and this is just a guess, five percent of the, of the, of the, you know, working class. But these people were clearly critical. We, it's harder to pinpoint them. We know this are really exceptional members of this class. But many of these people will remain anonymous because they didn't leave much of a record. But we know they're there. Mokir argues that an elite upper tail stood on the shoulders of dexterous craftsmen. But nonetheless, those relative few had to drag along the many. On the whole, the places history has dragged us may be pleasing, at least from our point of view. But as Mokir also argues, part of history's value is that it suggests alternative paths to progress, not taken. Discovering those submerged stories is what history from below and Liberty Chronicles is all about. Liberty Chronicles is a project of Libertarianism.org. It is produced by Test Terrible. If you've enjoyed this episode of Liberty Chronicles, please rate, review and subscribe to us on iTunes. For more information on Liberty Chronicles, visit Libertarianism.org.