Tag Archives: review

The Industrial Revolution: causes, consequences

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I’m a sucker for any book about the Industrial Revolution, having grown up in its heartland in Lancashire cotton country, and have just read two. One was a re-read, of Joel Mokyr’s classic The Lever of Riches, as I wanted to refer to some aspects as I draft my new book. In particular, the many examples of time saving – for instance, “Although the paper industry is not often thought of as a typical industry of the Industrial Revolution, the Fourdrinier machine was in fact a revolutionary device. It reduced the time involved in making a given piece of paper from three weeks to three minutes.” The book focuses on the relationship between technological progress and economic growth to explore the perennial questions: why Britain? Why then?

The other is Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson’s new book Slavery, Capitalism and The Industrial Revolution. It’s a synthesis of a lot of recent research on Britain’s role in the slave trade and the economies of the Caribbean, and the interaction between slavery and empire and the way the Industrial Revolution in Britain took shape. I’ve read enough about the Industrial Revolution that I’d come across quite a lot of the material before – such as the links between compensation paid to slave-owners after abolition and the growth of financial services and funding of investment and consumption in Britain. The Bank of England has a fascinating working paper on compensation payments, and the UCL project is magisterial. The authors repeat the claim that the debt the government issued to pay compensation wasn’t paid off until 2015 – understandably, as the Treasury tweeted to that effect – although it’s more accurate to say that low interest rates then enabled the  redemption of some consols.

But in any case the book does a terrific job of presenting a synoptic view of the role of slavery in answering the Why Britain? Why then? questions. History is over-determined, in retrospect. Searching for ‘a’ cause is doomed to fail. This book does not make that claim, acknowledging other explanations in the mix. It offers, though, an important perspective on an aspect of the Industrial Revolution that has only relatively recently come into focus.

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Preoccupations

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I enjoyed a little book of essays by Amartya Sen, The Country of First Boys. This is a collection of reprints from articles in The Little Magazine in the early 2010s. Collections of this kind tend to be slightly repetitive because columnists have certain preoccupations they circle back to (certainly including me!). In this case, it is democracy and freedom, the importance of free speech in enabling public reasoning, identity, gender inequalities, and of course development, education and poverty. On the other hand, it is a highly accessible and enjoyable summary of some of Sen’s work.

Some points leapt out at me (reflecting my own current preoccupations). One was the example of Kerala, which has become one of the highest per capita income states in India, having been one of the poorest. Universal and good education and healthcare were a key part of its development. “Central to this understanding is the critical importance of social infrastructre in facilitating economic growth,” Sen writes (pxlix). “The role of infrastructure – physical and social – in economic performance has been a neglected subject in policymaking.” Another point was the role of ‘countervailing powers’ in ownership – a multiplicity of private owners (aka competition) but also other models – co-operatives, public ownership, independent bodies. Diversity of organisation rather than just diversity of views. This in the context of media, but – having been business model agnostic – I now think it makes for healthier competition in any market to get away from monocultures.

Anyway, a nice book for summer evenings reading in the late sunshine.

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De-gilding the age

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I’ve been reading Mordecai Kurz’s The Market Power of Technology: Understanding the Second Gilded Age, in between more summer-holiday type books (half way through Paul Murray’s excellent The Bee Sting now). Kurz’s underlying argument is one I find plausible: Technical innovation by corporations (on a platform of publicly-funded basic scientific research) drivers growth, but corporations translate innovation into monopoly power and rents. Policy alternates between lax and tough competition enforcement, the latter limiting the period of monopoly power. In between, there have been gilded ages.

The book distinguishes the return to capital productively employed from wealth, the accumulation of those rents. It argues that “all intangible assets are just different forms of monopoly wealth” – clearest for IP assets that explicitly guarantee firms’ monoplies. The book argues for prevention of tech mergers, break-up of vertically integrated parts of big corporations, and limitations on the granting of patents and copyright. Tech-based market power cannot be avoided but it should be contained.

The book combines economic and business history with an extended formal model of Kurz’s approach (and this means it is probably not a book for the general reader). The formal modelling is actually the part I found least compelling – particularly in Chapter 5, which for example assumes the monopoly producer has a constant returns to scale production function. This chapter estimates that monopoly power led to delays of 12-15 years in the diffusion of electricity in the US, but – unless I missed a key step –  the calculation seems not to take account of the impact of scale effects, which would shorten those estimates.

The previous chapter has an intriguing chart (4.9): the 50s-late 70s are reported as a period of high monopoly profits – like the 20s and the 2000s on – yet were obviously a period of strong productivity growth and rising living standards. Kurz explains these decades as not being designated a gilded age because policy ensured rising real wages and high employment. But actually if monopoly wealth brings about rapid growth through self-reinforcing technological innovation, it would be nice to have more of that. The policy lesson seems to be more about redistribution and labour market policies than about competition enforcement to limit the monopoly rents. The periods of low welath and low market power in this historical chart were periods of weak growth or worse.

I’d also like to have had more about countries other than the US, and indeed some other examples – is Walmart a tech monopoly? Or Nike? Few other countries span as much of the technology frontier as the US, so diffusion becomes the more important issue, and market power protected by IP and other tactics can be deployed anywhere. But wealth inequality is high in many countries – are all characterised by companies garnering monopoly rents and if so how?

Still, the book does set in a coherent theoretical framework the many recent books that have addressed the issue of market concentration and particularly big tech. It’s an interesting framing of current growth challenges, and one I broadly agree with. And Kurz’s call for tougher competition policy echoes many others. We will see whether it will translate into tougher enforcement and an ened to this second gilded age.

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Financial geopolitics & economic statecraft

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Sovereign Funds: How the Communist Party of China Finances Its Global Ambitions by Zongyuan Zoe Liu is a rather detailed book but a fascinating insight into the evolution of China’s financial policy and its strategic investments using leveraged foreign exchange reserves. The book argues that China has created a new type of fund, Sovereign Leverage Funds, created through the use of complicated debt instruments. Unlike Sovreeign Wealth Funds, they do not require a stream of profits from an activity such as the export of commodities. “SLFs are a political-economic innovation because they are the product of the state leveraging its political and financial resources to make it possible to capitalize a fund,” which can then be invested overseas for startegic geopolitical purposes – the BRI. The SLFs can influence their portfolio investments through the use of voting rights – or a threat of disinvestment.

The first part of the book traces the origins of the arrangements in CHina’s historic opening up and accumulation of massice foreign exchange reserves. The Asian Financial crisis of 1997 was a key moment in determining the leadership to ensure China built up massive reserves: “Awakened by the severity of the crisis, CPC leaders realised dor the first time that national security could not be narrowly defined only by military competences … but must also include financial security.” (I was in Hong Kong as a journalist for the IMF/World Bank meetings held there in September 1997 – an amazing experience.) The 2008 crisis was another key moment. The existence of the SLFs has allso given China’s state owned enterprises a ready source of finance for overseas acquisitions and infrastructure investment, putting them at an advantage compared to their competitors.

The book then sets out a detailed account of the SLFs and their evolution through to the post-Covid period. It argues that liberal market economies should follow China’s example and set up their own SLFs to “act as white knight investors to defend strategic industries from unwanted foreign takeovers.” Challenges like investing in the green transition will require leverage, it argues. Such funds are institutions between state and market and “can be powerful tools for the practice of financial statecraft.”

There are loads of interesting details. For instance I had never realised that many of the cities authorised to be new economic zones after April 1990 were former treaty ports: “From the perspective of the Party, its revivial of China’s former treaty ports conveyed a message to the Chineses people: only the Party was capable of leading China’s broader economic revivial and redeeming the country from its prior century of humiliation.”

I know far too little about either international finance or Chinese politics to evaluate the book’s argument, but it seems reasonable. It also seems to be a rosy perspective, given what one reads about over-leverage domestically and problems with some BRI investments. As ever, the capacity of the CPC to take a strategic view is striking  – especially in a country that sometimes seems governed from tweet to tweet. I’ve argued in a recent article for the use of long-term vehicles like soveriegn funds or investment banks to institutionalise learning in economic policy. I found the book fascinating and will look forward to reading some reviews by readers who do have the right expertise.

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Communicating economics

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Somehow, things haven’t slowed down since the end of term but I’ve been anticipating the holidays with some lighter than normal reading. Along with some detective novels, I read Hernan Diaz’ excellent Trust – apparently being made into a Netflix series which will be interesting as it has an Instance of the Fingerpost structure – about the making of gilded age money and what it does to people; and Georgi Gospodinov’s intriguing Time Shelter. They were both supposed to be saved for holiday reading but needs must.

Still, alongside this fare, I also read Making Economics Public: The Hows and Whys of Communicating Markets and Models, edited by two science communication experts, Vicki Macknight and Fabian Medvecky. Their introduction opens with the paradox that economics is very influential – often dominating the news and policy decisions – and yet there is a chasm in understanding and language between professional economists and the public. Concepts familiar and fundamental in economics (such as tax incidence, or the difference between household and government budgets, or why a central bank sees raising interest rates as key to bringing down the rate at which food prices are increasing) are not widely understood. Often not even by the expert journalists supposedly communicating the technicalities to the public.

I’ve long believed this chasm is ultimately an existential risk to economics: nobody gets to retain such influence without public legitimacy. It’s also a concern that some economists see the problem as a need to explain what ‘we’ think more clearly so the slow-of-understanding finally get what ‘we’ mean. As all good science communicators know, communication is a two-way process, done with the ears as well as the mouth. So this slim volume of essays is very welcome.

The book has three sections – why, how, and what are the challenges – and a final essay on economic rhetoric and freedom by Deirdre McCloskey. I needed no persuading on the first of these. The ‘how’ section has some nice chapters, including one on teaching by Chris Colvin (don’t swamp the students with maths) and one on media and communication by Romesh Vaitilingam. There’s a nice chapter by Carlo Martini in the challenges section about teaching students to recognise ‘pseudo-expertise’ of which there is plenty in economic discussions – only look at Twitter any day. (It isn’t always easy.)  All the essays are worthwhile, though, and it’s a slender book. Pricy, per page, though: one to get from the library.

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