Do Machines Make History? A Lecture on the basis of Heilbroner's classic paper

 

This was for my class on the history of technology, in particular discussing Heilbroner's soft technological determinism. More entries here, and here.

Economic and technological determinism

Mind blowing stuff

A while ago now I discussed technological determinism, and the existence of economic laws, even if not in the same sense that in the so-called hard sciences. This semester I'm teaching a class for first year students (non Econ majors, to clarify for those outside the US) titled somewhat facetiously 'From Fire to Uber.' In fact, the first reading is Heilbroner's 1967 paper discussed in the first link provided above, on whether machines make history.

Bob was on the side of technological determinism. The epigraph was Marx's famous dictum according to which: "the hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist." And he essentially argued that the computer (he also discussed atomic energy technology, but not biotechnology. The computer, the bomb, and DNA were all part of the immediate techno-scientific developments of the post-war period) would essentially gives us the society with the technician. In fact, reading recently David Graeber's new book (original discussion here), on bullshit jobs, I was reminded of Bob's prediction. Bullshit jobs are essentially the result of the 'computer mill,' that gives society with the bureaucrat.*

Heilbroner and almost anybody else that uses that particular citation of Marx seems to suggest that historical materialism, or Marx's conception of history, requires technological determinism. While it is clear that the idea that the economic structure determines the cultural, political and social superstructure of society is a type of economic determinism, it is less clear to me that Marx accepted technological determinism. And as I noted in a previous post, Marx's conception of history, even if permeated by some economicism (I seem to recall that John Kenneth Galbraith suggested that he agreed on that point with Marx, the prominence of economics, but cannot find the quote anywhere), does not imply historical determinism. Not only he has very little to say about the future of society (including communism), but also all his laws of tendency allowed for countervailing forces that could reverse the original course of events.

In that sense, Marx's economic determinism is a sort of soft determinism, which allows for sociopolitical factors to affect economic developments. Here I'm echoing Nathan Rosenberg (pp. 61-62) who suggested long ago that "Marx's position... cannot be reduced to a crude technological determinism." So one may very well ask why I think that Marx's (or Heilbroner's) soft economic determinism does not imply technological determinism. Ultimately the reply hinges on what drives technology, which is a component of the supply side of the economy, and what drives the economy, supply side forces or demand side factors.

In my view, as stated too many times in this blog, the process of growth is demand driven. The adoption of machines (investment) in general results from the needs to adapt productive capacity to demand. In that sense, the computer and the society with the bureaucrat that it created are the result of growing economy and for the most part, as much as in the case of the society with the steam-mill, the one with the computer has been heavily dependent on the role of the state. In fact, there are few sectors in which the role of the state in the development of a technology are more evident than in the case of the computer (see here, for example), the internet and the derived technologies. Sure, I'm probably, like Bob a soft determinist, but with reverse causality.

Probably population growth (which was the main, or only, source of growing demand in pre-modern societies) and the State, and more importantly inter-State warfare, have been the driving forces for socioeconomic change, and technological developments have been the result. Of course, if the Military-Industrial Complex gives you the computer, then the computer may require the bureaucrat. So there are feedback mechanisms. It's the proverbial chicken and egg story. But in my view, demand driven stories of growth break with the technological determinism of the mainstream (neoclassical) and certain Marxist interpretations of history.

* In Graeber's view is not really information technology though. Bullshitization is a development of financialized or neoliberal capitalism (I'll discuss my views on that in another post). I should add that Graeber thinks that the computer has led to a new economic mode of production that he refers to as Managerial Feudalism.

Technological determinism and economic growth

Technological determinism is widespread. The Solow model basically suggests that it is technological progress, measured incorrectly as Total Factor Productivity (TFP), that drives growth. The same is true of Schumpeterian models with a demiurgic role for the innovating entrepreneur.

But technological determinism is not just typical of economics, historians too tend to accept that technology drives history. Leo Marx and Merritt Roe Smith tell us in the intro to their edited book titled Does Technology Drive History? that:

The collective memory of Western culture is well stocked with lore on this theme. The role of the mechanic arts as the initiating agent of change pervades the received popular version of modern history. It is embodied in a series of exemplary episodes, or mini-fables, with a simple yet highly plausible before-and-after narrative structure. Before the fifteenth century, for example, Europeans are said to have known little or nothing about the western hemisphere; after the compass and other navigational instruments became available, however, Columbus and his fellow explorers were able to cross the Atlantic, and the colonization of the New World quickly followed. Newly invented navigational equipment is thus made to seem a necessary precondition, or "cause," of as if it had made possible Europe's colonization of much of the world. 

Similarly, the printing press is depicted as a virtual cause of the Reformation. Before it was invented, few people other than the clergy owned copies of the Bible; after Gutenberg, however, many individual communicants were able to gain direct, personal access to the word of God, on which the Reformation thrived. As a final example, take the story, favored by writers of American history textbooks, about the alleged link between the cotton gin and the Civil War. In the late eighteenth century, slavery was becoming unprofitable in the American states; but after Eli Whitney's clever invention, the use of African slaves to harvest cotton became lucrative, the reinvigorated slavery system expanded, and the eventual result was a bloody civil war.

And when it comes to economics technological determinism is not only a trait of the mainstream of the profession. The editors argue that Heilbroner (who was very open, but more conventional in is economics than people think) is the closest in their book's collected essays to accept technological determinism. Heilbroner's classic paper "Do Machines Make History?" starts with Marx's (Karl not Leo) epigraph (from The Poverty of Philosophy) according to which: "the hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist." Mind you, I think that regarding Marx, the quote might be misleading. Marx clearly thought that there was a technological component to the mode of production, but social relations of production mattered too.

What is NOT discussed in most analyses of the technological determinism by conventional and more than a few heterodox authors is the role of demand in creating the conditions for technological change. In that case, technological change is not the cause of growth, but the result. As in Adam Smith's story, it is the extent of the market (demand) that limits the division of labor (productivity). In modern parlance the idea is known as the Kaldor-Verdoorn Law.*

Obviously there is a certain serendipity in the process of technological innovation, and, hence, it is not uniquely determined by the pressures of a growing market. The point is more that there is no reason for an invention to be pursued systematically if it does not somehow provide for an existing and pressing need. Think of steam engines (the ones that give you the industrial capitalist), which were known for millennia, way before Newcomen and Watt, but had no relevant productive use until they were employed for pumping water out of mines. Only then the potential of the machine was comprehended, and the real work of incremental improvements that made it really useful started.

The question is then one of causality (as it often is between heterodox and mainstream views). Do innovations cause growth or are caused by growth (even if there is some two-way causality the question is which one predominates)? Were the high wages in England that forced capitalists to economize on labor (Principle of Substitution) and led to the Industrial Revolution, as Robert Allen suggests, or did the high wage economy, and the extended domestic markets (let alone the external markets) that provided the stimulus for technological change? I still believe that the weight of the historical evidence suggests that demand rules the roost.

The notion that technology is demand driven is also the only alternative, even though that is not understood very well by historians (economic or otherwise) to technological determinism. In this case, the reasons behind innovations are associated to the more complex social forces that determine the expansion of demand. They involve issues related to income distribution (high or low wages), or the social patterns that determine tastes and consumption (the reasons why the British consumed Indian calicos and porcelain pottery), the access to foreign markets, and the geopolitical forces that explain why some won and others lost in the pursue of those markets, to name a few. Note that power and politics are central to technological innovation, since they involve issues like income distribution and global access to markets. How can you understand the US National Innovation System (NIS)** without the Military-Industrial Complex and its role in providing access to global markets?

Sure enough a demand driven story has space for the sort of external supply-side effects that allow technology and innovations to thrive. So the expansion of demand in a society like England that was going through a Scientific Revolution would have more chances to lead to technological innovation (there is a gap between science and technology, of course) and  provide certain advantages over their competitors for global hegemony, to say the least. In other words, a demand driven story does not imply that supply side factors are irrelevant, they are simply not the prime movers.

* Neo-Schumepterians often refer to this view as the demand-pull hypothesis, due to Jacob Schmookler's Invention and Economic Growth.

** Another Neo-Schumpeterian beloved concept.