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The Technology Trap

Page 6

by Carl Benedikt Frey


  What is beyond dispute is that there was little cultural and political interest in driving industrial development. As the economic historian Abbott Usher has argued, classical civilizations were “oppressed by tradition” and therefore showed little interest in new technology.27 While classical civilizations were clearly technologically creative, there were few incentives for them to invent anything for industrial purposes in general and labor-replacing technologies in particular. However, the absence of such innovation does not imply economic backwardness. Growth derived from things for which the Greeks and Romans are famous, including organization, trade, order, and law. Such institutions can take an economy a long way, and they surely did. As the economist Peter Temin has documented, the Roman Empire had a market economy. Pax Romana stimulated Mediterranean trade, and living conditions were certainly better than in most places before the Industrial Revolution.28 But this was primarily growth based on trade. And when the political foundations upon which this growth was built were undermined, as was the case after the collapse of the Roman Empire, living standards rapidly deteriorated.29

  Light in the Dark Ages

  Ironically, technological progress increasingly came to serve an economic purpose during the Middle Ages, when government control of it diminished and technological efforts shifted from the public to the private sector. To many historians the fall of the Roman Empire marks the end of the ancient world and the onset of the Middle Ages, the early part of which is sometimes still referred to as the Dark Ages. During the early Middle Ages (A.D. 500–1100), the economic and cultural environment in Europe was more primitive than it had been in classical civilizations: literacy declined, law enforcement diminished, violence became more frequent, commerce deteriorated, and the roads and aqueducts of Rome fell into disrepair. The collapse of the Roman Empire was accompanied by the rise of the feudal order, with the crown at the top, the nobility beneath, and the peasantry at the bottom. Relative to the Roman Empire, the crown was weak, as the feudal order meant that political power was split among highly decentralized lords, who maintained their own armies. The lords allocated their land to peasants, often referred to as serfs, who had to perform extensive unpaid labor but, unlike slaves, were allowed to retain some of the product of their labor. Like slaves, however, serfs were subject to many restrictions, including being unable to leave the estate without the permission of the lord and being unable to litigate in courts presided over by nobles. Under this system, incentives to work hard and innovate were probably very low. Yet this period “managed to break through a number of technological barriers that had held the Romans back.”30 To be sure, medieval Europe did not have anything like the extravagant structures of the Roman Empire, but there was no need for expensive roads and bridges, as there were no great armies to maintain and use.31 Instead, medieval technological efforts increasingly targeted economic problems, although these were mostly modest by modern standards. Unlike “the amusing toys of Alexandria’s engineers or the war engines of Archimedes,” medieval technology reduced daily toil.32

  In particular, the increased willingness to imitate and adopt technologies from foreign lands was an early sign of a more technologically progressive society. Europe in early medieval times was by no means at the forefront of technology, but it was gradually catching up.33 In the Middle Ages, improvements in agricultural technology were particularly important. Because most workers were still engaged in farming, agricultural inventions had the greatest impact on aggregate productivity, although the prevalence of serfdom held back technological development. The transformation of agriculture was a gradual process that would continue for many centuries, but eventually it shaped the world of work in Europe.

  The drivers of this transformation were the introduction of the heavy plow and the establishment of the three-field system.34 The heavy plow was an enabling technology: with it, huge tracts of land that could not be cultivated in Roman times could now be used for farming. But besides expanding the pool of farmland, the heavy plow also boosted productivity. As the medieval historian Lynn White writes, it constituted an “agricultural engine which substituted animal power for human energy and time.”35 But like most inventions, it came with new challenges—in this case, because several oxen were required to pull it.36 The growing dependency on animate power in farming meant that peasants needed to find better and cheaper ways of feeding their animals. Part of the solution was found in the new three-field system that gradually spread across Europe, allowing the animals to graze on the land while fertilizing the soil. The productivity gains from this system were substantial. Compared to the two-field rotation system, it is estimated to have increased productivity by up to 50 percent, though it did so mainly by saving capital.37 Furthermore, it greatly stepped up the production of certain crops, such as oats, that were particularly suitable for feeding horses, thereby increasing the quantity and quality of surplus food needed for horse technology. By the end of the Middle Ages, there appears to be a tight correlation between the adoption of the three-field system and the use of horses in agriculture.38

  Following a series of ancillary inventions, horse technology greatly improved throughout the Middle Ages. The invention of the nailed horseshoe, for example, enabled the more widespread use of horses for commercial transportation, and the shoe’s protection of the hooves from moist soil allowed for greater adoption of horsepower in agriculture. Another important improvement was the invention of the stirrup. Although its purpose was largely military, making it possible for a knight to fight on horseback, it equally benefited civilian riders in terms of stability and comfort. But in terms of economic impact, it was probably the arrival of the modern horse collar that made the largest contribution—though its true significance was not recognized until the beginning of the twentieth century, when it was documented by Richard Lefebvre des Noëttes, a retired French cavalry officer. Comparing the use of horses in antiquity and the Middle Ages, he found that the throat-girth harness used by the Greeks and the Romans, with two straps around the belly and neck of the horse, meant that the horse lost about 80 percent of its efficiency.39

  The importance of these technological advances cannot be overstated, as 70 percent of all energy in Britain still came from animals in the eleventh century, with the remainder coming from water mills. But even though horses were increasingly employed in agriculture, the effects of horse technology on productivity are not entirely clear, as oxen were often used as well. What seems clear is that the switch to horse technology, when it occurred, was associated with substantial gains in productivity.40 Modern experiments show that although the horse and ox perform similarly in terms of pull, the horse moves much faster, allowing it to produce 50 percent more foot-pounds per second, while being able to work up to two hours more per day. The impact on productivity in transportation is likely to have been just as significant, as horse technology helped facilitate Smithian growth by giving a boost to land transport and trade. With the new harness and nailed shoes for the horse, the cost of grain is estimated to have increased only 30 percent for each hundred miles of overland carriage in the thirteenth century, which is more than three times better than in Roman times.41

  Much progress was also made using power from wind and water to replace animate power. During the Middle Ages—especially between the seventh and the tenth centuries—larger and better waterwheels spread throughout Europe and found applications in a growing number of industries. The Domesday Book of 1086, completed by order of William the Conqueror, lists 5,624 water mills for some three thousand British communities, or roughly two mills for every one hundred households.42 These were used to drive fulling mills, breweries, sawmills, bellows, hemp treatment mills, cutlery grinders, and so on. Though The Domesday Book does not allow us to estimate average horsepower for these mills, their long and widespread use underlines their economic importance: water mills would remain a prime source of energy in Britain even throughout the Industrial Revolution.43 Their arrival thus meant lasting progress
relative to its predecessor civilizations. The late Middle Ages has indeed been described as a “medieval industrial revolution based on water and wind.”44

  While wind power had previously been used in sailing, windmills had been unknown to classical civilizations and were not invented until the time of the Norman Conquest (1066): the first windmills with credible documentation date back to 1185. The economic significance of these windmills is suggested by the associated disputes that emerged. A wealthy cleric named Burchard complained directly to Pope Celestine III that one knight had refused to pay tithes (one tenth of a person’s annual earnings, taken as a tax to support the church and clergy) on the income from his windmill. Even though windmill owners argued that they were dealing with new circumstances that were not covered by the existing regulations, it took the pope only until 1195 to impose tithes on them.45

  Overall, medieval Europe was clearly capable of achieving higher levels of productivity than predecessor civilizations, both in manufacturing and agriculture. Yet some of its most revolutionary technologies—like the mechanical clock and the printing press—had little impact on economic activity at the time. The weight-driven clock, which had emerged by the end of the thirteenth century, became of economic importance only after 1500. In the Middle Ages, domestic clocks were rare. They were nice toys for the rich and helpful instruments to scientists. Usher writes: “By 1500, few towns were without some tower clock, but domestic clocks, though widely diffused among the wealthy, were not common in Europe as a whole until a later period. Later writers imply that clockmaking was so highly developed in Nuremberg in the fifteenth century that domestic clocks came into more general use in central and southern Germany than elsewhere in Europe. These German clocks of the fifteenth century were among the first made to indicate minutes and seconds, and some use was made of them by astronomers.”46

  Public clocks, however, are a different story. The tower clocks of late medieval towns were built mainly for status and reputation rather than for economic reasons. They were financed by wealthy noblemen who wanted to showcase the progressiveness of their towns. But they had unintended economic consequences. The economic historians Lars Boerner and Battista Severgnini have shown that early adopters—cities that had a tower clock before 1450—grew faster between 1500 and 1700 than those that didn’t.47 Over the long run, the clocks’ contribution to economic growth was significant, but their impact was delayed:

  Building a clock in a town was motivated by prestige and not by economic needs—towns did not forecast any of the benefits clocks would bring in the long run, or what can be seen ex post as an economically efficient application. Consequently, the economic use of clocks was a slow process of adoption. Whereas the use of clocks for coordination activities, such as market times or administrative town meetings, can already be observed during the 14th and 15th centuries, the use of clocks to monitor and coordinate labour processes evolved only slowly, in particular during the 16th century. Finally, a cultural adoption reflected in the daily cultural and philosophical thinking of the time can be observed from the middle of the 16th century, for instance with the Protestant movement (in particular with John Calvin’s propagation of the concept of “scarce time”). The 17th century also brought forth scientists and philosophers such as Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes, who used the clock as a metaphor for the functioning of the world and to explain how institutions such as the state should work. Looking at this slow process it is not surprising that it took some time before the complementary organisational, procedural, and cultural behavioural innovations transformed into economic growth.48

  Many historians have pointed to the significance of accurate time measurement to economic progress. The French historian Jacques Le Goff has called the birth of the public clock a turning point in Western society.49 And the historian Lewis Mumford has gone so far as to suggest that not the steam engine but the mechanical clock was the machine that made the industrial age.50 While this might seem exaggerated, there can be no doubt that the clock changed Western life in general, and the pace of work in particular. New cultural attitudes about punctuality already began to emerge in the late Middle Ages. Of course, the practice of dividing the day into measurable time units existed before the clock, but the length of the hour was not fixed. It depended on the length of the day, meaning that it varied significantly between summer and winter. Thus, people still tended to follow the position of the sun for time guidance. And while medieval people had sun or water clocks, these did not play any meaningful role in business. Markets opened at sunrise and closed down at noon when the sun was at its zenith. It was only after the spread of public clocks that market times were set by the stroke of the hour. Public clocks thus greatly contributed to public life and work by providing a new concept of time that was easy for everyone to understand. This, in turn, helped facilitate trade and commerce. Interactions and transactions between consumers, retailers, and wholesalers, became less sporadic. Important town meetings began to follow the pace of the clock, allowing people to better plan their time and allocate resources in a more efficient manner.51

  In industry, clocks grew in importance much later with the birth of the factory system in the eighteenth century (see chapter 4). Though the role of clock makers in designing the textile machines that powered the early Industrial Revolution has probably been overstated, there can be no doubt that the mechanical clock was a key enabling technology for the factory system, with its fixed working hours. The coordination of factory work rested on regularity, routine, and accurate time measurement. And many later advances in steam engines and other machinery required the precision lathes and measuring tools that were developed during the Renaissance to produce scientific and navigational instruments. The close connection of clock and watch making with the instrument-making sector facilitated much of the progress that took place around 1800. Karl Marx and Max Weber were right in thinking that clocks had an enormous impact on the evolution of capitalism.52

  The first metal movable-type printing press, invented by Johannes Gutenberg in 1453, was another landmark achievement of late medieval times, whose main contributions to productivity came much later. Instead of creating one immensely complicated stamp for each page to be printed, Gutenberg made metal stamps for individual letters and symbols, which were set in the desired sequence. The virtue of Gutenberg’s invention is evident from changes in the price of books, which soon fell by two-thirds—making them accessible to a growing share of the populace.53 Yet what the historian of technology Donald Cardwell has called “the first revolution in information technology” cannot be attributed to Gutenberg alone.54 The printing press was made economically feasible by a number of enabling technologies, including paper (which was introduced from China), cheap printing ink, the press (most likely adopted from ancient winepresses), and the Roman alphabet (which had become universal in Europe and was particularly suitable for printing, with its twenty-six letters). It is nonetheless undisputable that Gutenberg’s invention was one of the most important in human history. Toward the end of the century, there were over 380 printing presses in Europe, producing a tsunami of books. More books were published in the fifty years following Gutenberg’s invention than in the millennia before.55

  Economic historians like Gregory Clark have concluded that the effects of the printing press on economic growth at the macroeconomic level were “unmeasurably small.”56 But even though the industry of printing did not appear in aggregate statistics, we know from recent work by the economist Jeremiah Dittmar that the printing press became a motor of urban growth in the sixteenth century.57 In cities where the printing press was adopted, the spread of business textbooks allowed people to better transmit commercial know-how, including how to make currency conversions, determine interest payments, and calculate profit shares—which in turn helped foster the spread of valuable commercial skills. In the words of Gaspar Nicolas, author of the first Portuguese arithmetic textbook, published in 1519: “I am printing this arithmetic becaus
e it is a thing so necessary in Portugal for transactions with the merchants of India, Persia, Ethiopia, and other places.”58

  We all know that the printing press also facilitated the spread of science. But as we shall see, science didn’t become a pillar of technological progress until the nineteenth century. In the 1500s, as Dittmar writes, “the role of print media in the diffusion of industrial innovations was probably more limited.”59 It was primarily a facilitator of trade. Where commerce was flourishing, the virtues of printing were the greatest. That the movable printing press was a force of Smithian growth is underlined by the fact that cities with access to waterborne transport were best positioned to profit from it. Indeed, the work of Dittmar shows that the printing press delivered special benefits to port cities, as they gained disproportionately from innovations in commercial practice. More broadly, early adopters of the printing press saw face-to-face interactions become more important, as printing for the first time brought mechanics, scholars, merchants, and craftsmen together in a commercial setting. Bookshops became meeting places for intellectuals. And cities that adopted the new printing technology also attracted paper mills, illuminators, and translators. Like the computer revolution, to which we shall return in chapter 10, the first revolution in information technology did not spell the death of distance. Just like computing, printing made the tyranny of geography all the more apparent, prompting people to cluster together and increasing urbanization. Thus, like the computer revolution, the revolution in printing, if anything, made the world less flat.

 

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