More on the "Consumer Revolution"

I have noted before (and here and here) the neglect of the role of demand in more recent historical accounts of the Industrial Revolution. The typical view used to emphasize demand, like in Landes' Unbound Prometheus, but more recent accounts like Allen or Mokyr emphasize technological change and supply side forces.

Thankfully, there is a whole new literature that puts an emphasis on the so-called Consumer Revolution, in particular the work of Maxine Berg. T. H. Breen in The Marketplace of Revolution goes further and suggests that the economic reasons behind the American Revolution were also associated to the transformation in consumer culture. In his words:

"What gave the American Revolution distinctive shape was an earlier transformation of the Anglo-American consumer marketplace. This event, which some historians have called a 'consumer revolution,' commenced sometime during the middle of the eighteenth century, and as modestly wealthy families acquired ever larger quantities of British manufactures— for the most part everyday goods that made life warmer, more comfortable, more sanitary, or perhaps simply more enjoyable—the face of material culture changed dramatically. Suddenly, buyers voiced concerns about color and texture, about fashion and etiquette, and about making the right choices from among an expanding number of possibilities."

In this view, the demand for new goods (and not so new too), tea, coffee, tobacco, chocolate, china, calicos, silks, etc. was central for the technological revolution of the 18th century. What Breen seems to suggest is that the same Consumer Revolution that was taking place in England was taking place in America, and that the subordinated role in the colonial pact, and the trade restrictions imposed by the many Parliamentary Acts, are at the heart of the movement for independence. In other words, not only demand might be relevant to explain economic growth, but economic growth might be central for political developments.

Institutions, what institutions?

There are many explanations for why some nations are rich while others are poor. The dominant view, in mainstream (neoclassical) economic circles is that institutions are the central cause of the divide between developed (center) and underdeveloped (periphery). I discussed before (here and here) the role of institutions vis-à-vis geography and culture. I have also noted how the New Institutionalist argument concentrates on the institutions (fundamentally property rights) that act on the supply side of the economy. That is growth arises because property rights provide incentives for productive investment. I also noted (here) that the historical evidence for patents, copyright and other forms of property protection for explaining growth is limited at best. Note that mainstream authors and heterodox authors, at least the majority, tend to agree that institutions rather than geography or culture are central for development.

Also, the table above suggests that cultural and geographical explanations tend to put an emphasis on the supply side, but that is not necessarily the case, and it would be difficult to speculate about what Jared Diamond, for example, thinks about the relative role of supply and demand. Also, it’s worth noticing that while in his early work economic historian David Landes favored a demand-led view (which I tentatively put in the institutional box) he clearly moved to a cultural supply-side interpretation in his later work.

So if you believe most heterodox economists institutions are relevant, but not primarily those associated to the supply side; the ones linked to the demand side, in Keynesian fashion are more important than the mainstream admits. Poor countries that arrive late to the process of capitalist development cannot expand demand without limits since the imports of intermediary and capital goods cause recurrent balance of payments crises. The institutions that allow for the expansion of demand, including those that allow for higher wages to expand consumption and to avoid the external constraints, are and have been central to growth and development. The role of the State in creating and promoting the expansion of domestic markets, in the funding of research and development, and in reducing the barriers to balance of payments constraints, both by guarantying access to external markets (sometimes militarily, like in the Opium Wars) and reducing foreign access to domestic ones was crucial in the process of capitalist development.

In this view, for example, what China did not have that England did, was not lack of secure property rights and the rule of law, but a rising bourgeoisie (capitalists) that had to compete to provide for a growing domestic market that had acquired a new taste (and hence explained expanding demand) for a set of new goods, like cotton goods from India, or china (porcelain) from… well China, as emphasized by economic historian Maxine Berg among others (for the role of consumption in the Industrial Revolution go here). Or simply put, China did not have a capitalist mode of production (for the concept of mode of production and capitalism go here). Again, I argued that Robert Allen’s view according to which high wages and cheap energy forced British producers to innovate to save labor, leading to technological innovation and growth, and the absence of those conditions in China led to stagnation is limited since it presupposes that firms adopt more productive technologies even without growing demand.

The same is true of Latin American economies, which several authors like Engerman Sokoloff suggest fell behind as a result of absence of secure property rights. Latin American economies entered the world economy to produce silver (mining-economy/Amerindian population), sugar (plantation-economy/African-American population) and other commodities, for external markets. They were exploitation colonies, less reliant on the development of domestic markets, typical of settlement colonies in the Northeast United States or of the central countries in Western Europe.

The economies that depend on the production of commodities for world markets and import everything else are more vulnerable to the fluctuations of the price of commodities. Booms in commodity prices lead to growth, albeit very concentrated in the hands of the owners of capital, but they leave very little in terms of infrastructure for future growth. Further, since the economy must import everything to satisfy domestic demand, the economy is dependent on external sources of production, and when the export of commodities does not allow for enough imports, then either demand must be curtailed or the economy must become indebted to be able to continue to consume. A thriving domestic market is central for economic development, and the ability to diversify production to provide for the market is the key to catching up.

Finally, since the economy was based on the mono-production of commodities (and the size of the domestic markets is relatively limited) there were little if any incentives for technological innovation and higher productivity. Note also, that once a country falls behind, and almost all countries were essentially at the same level of income per capita around 1800 (or at least differences were considerably smaller than now), it is very hard to catch up, since the distance to the technological frontier is increasingly steep. It is not the same to copy a textile mill that uses a steam engine than to emulate the development of the Silicon Valley. In this sense, the institutions associated to the colonization period are central, rather than property rights, to explain underdevelopment in Latin America. Capitalism and its institutions both caused growth in the center, and stagnation in the periphery.*

* I discussed here how the industrialization of Britain meant the deindustrialization of India and China.

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.

Manufacturing matters

It does for sure. But the graph below just shows the varying share of manufacturing since the mid-18th century (source is Robert Allen, 2011). And I don't intend to say much on whay it matters per se, but note that global economic dominance goes hand in hand with manufacturing.

Note that the West, narrowly defined as England the rest of Western Europe, what was to become the US and Russia (called for the whole period USSR) had a share of less than 20% in 1750, it had expanded to more than 80% on the eve of WW-I. If you add Australia, Canada and Latin America (which are all in Rest of the World, but are what Maddison would call Western offshoots), the numbers are even larger. Most of the changes were associated to the squeeze of China. And most of the recent changes are associated with expansion of China and East Asia (which includes Japan). We have not gone full circle, by the way.

In other words, the process of development (or indutrialization in the center) went hand in hand with the process of underdevelopment (deindustrialization) in the periphery, and old lesson from a little book by Osvaldo Sunkel which is still worth reading.

Why economists fail

The new book (and the accompanying blog) by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson Why Nations Fails is a popular version of their academic papers (several with Simon Johnson, the ex IMF chief economist) on the topic [brief summary here]. The main idea is that institutions and not geography or culture are the key to economic development. That is for the most part true.

They use South and North Korea (and Nogales, México and Arizona) as an example of countries that share the same culture and geography, but have very different institutions, and, as a result, a huge disparity in income per capita. Jared Diamond is correct to point out that, in part, technology is geographically determined. No plants and animals to domesticate, and provide for a large surplus (Diamond uses the old classical notion of surplus), and higher population density (with the diseases and immunities associated to those Germs) and no advantages associated to a more developed division of labor (Diamond is also Smithian in that sense), with the consequent development of technology (Guns and Steel). But the problem is that this won’t help you understand why England and not China industrialized (the opposite extremes of the Eurasian continent).

Read the rest here.