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To explain the Industrial Revolution, Mokyr emphasizes “supply” factors (culture, science); Allen emphasizes demand (high wages, cheap energy). Clearly both are needed. Which you emphasize says something about what you think is the limiting factor, vs. what is always available…
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Robert Allen's explanation for the Industrial Revolution is that Britain had high wages and cheap energy, which made it profitable for them to industrialize. This doesn’t sit right with me. Here are some thoughts on why rootsofprogress.org/reflections-on
By emphasizing demand, Allen implies that demand is the limiting factor, and that supply is always ready. If steam engines or spinning jennies would be profitable to invent and use, then someone will invent them. Wherever there is demand, the supply will come.
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Emphasizing supply implies that supply is the limiting factor. In this view, there is always demand for *something*. With high wages and cheap energy, maybe there is demand for steam engines. If not, maybe there is demand for improvements to agriculture, navigation, or printing.
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In this view, what is often lacking is supply: people who are ready, willing and able to invent; the capital to fund R&D; a society that encourages or at least allows innovation. If the supply of innovation is there, then it will go out and discover the demand.
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This echoes a broader debate in economics over supply and demand in the economy. Allen takes a sort of Keynesian approach, focused on demand; Mokyr’s explanation implies a more Hayekian approach: create freedom for the innovators and let them find the best problems to solve.
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Allen aims to explain why a few specific inventions were created, and he finds the demand factors that created the specific problems and opportunities they addressed. But this is over-focusing on one narrow phase of overall technological and economic progress.
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It can’t be that progress was slow in the ancient and medieval world because there weren’t many important economic problems to solve. On the contrary, there was low-hanging fruit everywhere!
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If the mere availability of problems was the limiting factor on progress, then progress should have been fastest in the hunter-gatherer days, when *everything* needed to be solved, and it should have been slowing down ever since then.
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