In Praise of Elite Individuals, Rebels, Crisis-Induced Change
Joel Mokyr on the day of 17 May 2022
Mokyr spoke:
I would say by 1700, most people in the world, at least the world that's documented, which would be Asia and Europe, probably were living at a higher living standard than people did during the Roman empire, but not by a huge amount. And so, something happened in the 18th century that changed all that, and the real question is, what was it? I'll give you my take on it, and people can debate it. You said the question was controversial, so will my answer be, but I don't care. Here is the point. Economic growth and economic progress is not driven by the masses. It is not driven by the population at large. It is driven by a small minority of people who economists refer to in their funny language as upper-tail people, meaning if you think of the world following some kind of bell-shaped or normal distribution, it's the elite, it's the people who are educated—not necessarily intellectuals. They could be engineers, they could be mechanics, they could be applied mathematicians.
They don't have to be philosophers, but they have to be people who are really good in what they're doing, and I think those are the people who are driving economic progress. I'm not just thinking James Watt and five people. It's not that simple. But I would say, if you look at the top 2 percent or 3 percent of the population anywhere, those are the people that are driving economic growth. And that's still the case. I mean, in the United States, much of the technological progress they've been experiencing has been driven by a fairly small number of people. Some of them are Caltech geeks, and some of them are just really good people who are coming up with novel ideas, but basically that's what it is about.
And so, what changed is our ability to generate better technology. And in doing so, we owe a lot to a fairly small elite who underwent major cultural and social changes in the previous centuries. And that's what I try to outline in my book, A Culture of Growth. And A Culture of Growth isn't really about culture as we generally define it. I don't particularly spend a lot of time worrying about things like religion or popular culture, or things like that. I look at the people who are driving the economic growth, and that's all way down from Newton and Galileo to a bunch of engineers that very few people have ever heard of. But these are the people who built the machinery and came up with the fundamental ideas that made economic growth possible. And you can see that starting to happen in the late 17th, early 18th century, and it's closely associated with what we typically call the Enlightenment.
But it's important to realize that the Enlightenment was about many things. It was about the state, it was about philosophy, it was about human freedom, and justice, and all kind of things. And I'm just cutting out a small slice of that huge pie, which is about economics. And I call that the industrial enlightenment, and it really is about how to achieve material progress. And material progress isn't all progress, and people were also interested in establishing more human rights and a civil society and the social contract, and I'm all for that, but that's not what economics are about. They are about economic growth, and when you say economic growth, in this period you're talking first and foremost about technology. You're talking about machinery, you're talking about ideas, you're talking about all kind of contraptions that make life in some way better.
And it's not just about the steam engine or the mule or anything like that, it's about ideas that try to manipulate nature in a way that benefits humans. And so, I'll give you one example—it's not machinery, but it is very critical. It's vaccination against smallpox, which is very much on people's minds these days, right? But this is an 18th-century idea. This English country doctor, Edward Jenner, basically came up with this idea. It's not a machine in any way, but it is a pathbreaking, I would say a radical idea, of how to use what we know about nature to improve human life. And that's what economic growth in the end is all about. Now, it's not all human life, it's material things. It's how not to get sick, how to get more to eat, how to have better clothing, better housing, to heat your place, to be warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer.
It's about all these things that define our material comfort and our material wellbeing. It doesn't necessarily create a better society, and I would have never argued that. I'm not even sure what a better society really is, but even if I knew that, I would say it's not obvious that society in the 20th century, which after all produced Stalin and Hitler, is necessarily a better place than it was in the 18th century. I mean, that would be an absolutely absurd statement, but what is clear is that life in the 20th century anywhere on this globe is better than it was in the 18th century, in the narrow and somewhat limited material sense that economists are interested in …
… I don't care if 95 percent of people are not willing to question traditional knowledge, or anything like that. I care about the other 5 percent. And it's never been the case that rebels and nonconformists were a majority. And they don't have to be, and it probably would be total chaos if they were. What I want is a world in which if you are a rebel … Basically, every invention is an act of rebellion, right? I mean, it is an act of disrespect toward earlier generations. It's basically telling your forefathers, "Hey, you guys were making steel or headache medication or anything one way, and I can do better than you". Which is in some ways a kind of disrespectful. And what you want is a society in which such people are encouraged, even though they are a small minority, so you don't want a society in which you can find yourself burned at the stake because you said something that other people consider to be sacrilege or heresy. You don't want that.
As long as basically you take a somewhat live-and-let-live kind of attitude in which ideas are judged on their own merit and do they work, rather than what do they say about our previous generations, I'm fine with that. And if that is done by 5 percent of the population, it wouldn't be different than anywhere else. As long as these 5 percent of the population are the people that go to MIT and start up firms and are allowed to have a chance, I'm fine with that. And what the other 95 percent of the population do is not particularly relevant, except that they don't form an organization that says, "Oh my God, don't make waves. We should respect what previous generations knew."
And that happened a lot, unfortunately in history, and it's still happening of people objecting to innovation for one reason or another. And so much of the progress that we have achieved in the last say, three centuries, has been achieved through a struggle between people who were thinking outside the box, to people who said don't make waves and don't destabilize society with these radical ideas like nuclear power and vaccination and anything in between …
… I don't think we live in a repressive culture. I see new ideas around me all the time. Even better yet, what I see is society responding to crisis by directing its innovative efforts and juices toward solving problems that are on everybody's mind …
… And we've seen societies that didn't change. My famous favorite example is Tokugawa, Japan. Tokugawa, Japan, in about 1600, basically decided they did not want to change. They wanted stability above all, and for two centuries or more, they basically had that, more or less. And then one day the Americans showed up, Admiral Perry showed up with his ships in Tokyo Bay, and people said, "Oh my God, look at what these Westerners have". And then the Japanese changed their ways. But for 250 years they had a stable society, which was almost completely stagnant economically, and it was not a good outcome. And if it was a bad outcome for Japan, it was a worse outcome for Qing China, which was basically the dynasty that ruled China from 1644 until 1912.
And they were above all about stability, and don't make waves, and don't cause trouble, and so on and so forth, and that didn't work out for them either. The truth is that dynamic change is the only way of getting life to be better than it used to be. And one of the things that economic historians do is they tell people how the good old days weren't good at all. They were miserable, they were terrible …
… the bad old days would be the 19th century, the 17th century, the Middle Ages, Roman Empire. I mean, I'm taking a broad view here. Life in the 1960s in some ways was vastly better than it was in the 1860s, and life in the 1860s was much better than it was in the 1760s. But life in the 1760s wasn't maybe all that much different than it was at the time of Julius Caesar. You can see how the hockey stick starts bending upward, and that started happening at around 1750, 1800, and we're still on it. And life in 2200 will be vastly better than it was today, unless we blow the world up in a nuclear disaster, which seems somewhat more likely today than it did last month, but let's hope for the best …
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