Technological Progress After 1870
Discussion
Dylan Matthews:
"To DeLong, who beyond his academic work is known for his widely read blog on economics, something incredible happened in that sliver of time that eluded our species for the other 99.95 percent of our history. Whereas before 1870, technological progress proceeded slowly, if at all, after 1870 it accelerated dramatically. And especially for residents of rich countries, this technological progress brought a world of unprecedented plenty.
DeLong reports that in 1870, an average unskilled male worker living in London could afford 5,000 calories for himself and his family on his daily wages. That was more than the 3,000 calories he could’ve afforded in 1600, a 66 percent increase — progress, to be sure. But by 2010, the same worker could afford 2.4 million calories a day, a nearly five hundred fold increase."
(https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/9/7/23332699/economic-growth-brad-delong-slouching-utopia)
Interview
* Dylan Matthews: You argue that 1870 through 2010 were “the most consequential years of all humanity’s centuries.” What’s your case?
Brad DeLong
"It really looks that we had as much technological change and progress between 1870 and today as we had between 6000 BC and 1870 AD. We packed what had previously been nearly eight millennia of changes in the underlying technological hardware of society, which required changes in the running sociological code on top of that hardware. To try to pack what had been eight millennia worth of changes before in 150 years is going to produce an awful lot of history.
Before 1870, most of history is how elites run their force-and-fraud, domination-and-extraction mechanism against a poor peasantry so that they, at least, can have enough, and so that their children are only two inches shorter than we are, rather than five or six as the peasants are. It’s about how the elites elbow each other out of the way as they eat from the trough. And it’s about the use they make of their wealth for purposes good and ill, of civilization and destruction.
But if you’re enough of a Marxist, like me, to say that the real motor of history is the forces of production, their changes, and how society reacts for good or ill to changing forces of production, then yes, [1870 to 2010] has to be as consequential because there’s as much technological change-driven history as there is in entire millennia before.
* Dylan Matthews: You seem on solid ground in arguing that something radical changed that enabled humans to become dramatically richer over the last 300 years; almost every economic historian would agree with that. But many people start the story in the 18th century, with the development of the steam engine and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. You start it in 1870, well after that process was underway. Why does the story start later for you?
Brad DeLong
When do we start? Let’s start 300 million years ago in the Permian period, when plants die and they get pushed underground and turn into coal. And then we flash forward to 25,000 years ago, when the last glacier episode scrapes all the rock on top of the coal deposits off of the British Isles and then retreats, leaving Britain with an ungodly amount of surface coal at sea level. Since it’s a wet island, it’s thereupon very easy to move by water.
You need a steam engine if you want to dig even 10 feet down in order to get out the coal, and then around 1770, the steam engine and textile machinery attained critical mass and the Industrial Revolution begins, which is usually taken as the hinge of economic history, although some people push it back further.
However, you look worldwide and you take my index of technological progress, and it [grows by] less than half a percent per year from 1770 to 1870. That’s based on exploitation of really cheap coal and also on the productivity benefits of falling transport costs that gather all of the manufacturing in the world into the place [the United Kingdom] where it’s most productive and most efficient, because it’s the place where coal is cheapest.
I was struck by a line I came across from the 1871 version of John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy: “Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toll of any human being.”
Say you have some slowdown in global technological progress after 1870 because the cheapest coal has already been mined and the deeper coal is hard to find, and say that you have some other slowdown because you don’t get the boost from gathering manufacturing in places where it’s productive. We might well have wound up right with a steampunk world after 1870: a world with about the population of today, but the living standards of 1870 on average.
That’s what the pace of progress was, except that we got the industrial research lab, the modern corporation, and then full globalization around 1870. The industrial research lab rationalized and routinized the discovery and development of technologies; the corporation rationalized and routinized the development and deployment of technologies; and globalization diffused them everywhere."
(https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/9/7/23332699/economic-growth-brad-delong-slouching-utopia)
More information
* Book: Brad DeLong. Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century.