Can the industrial revolution be attributed to economic freedom?

Before reading Eric Jones book, ‘Locating the Industrial Revolution’, I had thought that the reasons why the industrial revolution began when and where it did would have a lot to do with relative levels of economic freedom in England in the 18th and 19th centuries. The book seems to me to reinforce that view, even though it does not argue strongly in favour of it. The message I get from the book is that the political forces favouring greater economic freedom prevailed over opposing forces in those areas of economic policy that were most critical to economic growth at that time.

My prior view that the industrial revolution would have had a lot to do with relative levels of economic freedom was associated to some extent with dissatisfaction with alternative explanations such as that offered by Gregory Clark (discussed here). I admit, however, that my prior views were most strongly influenced by contemporary econometric evidence that greater economic freedom tends to promote higher economic growth. I would not be surprised if Eric Jones considers that such reasoning displays ‘too great a willingness to accept dubious data as proxies for the real thing, and too much of a preference for neat solutions’ (p. 6). He uses those words as a general criticism of economists.

The main question that Jones considers in this book is why the location of manufacturing industry shifted from the south to the north of England prior to the industrial revolution. This is an important question because the clustering of industry in the north provided an economic environment conducive to subsequent innovations, including use of coal-fired steam engines as an energy source.

Jones suggests that the economic history of England does not provide neat solutions to the problem of locating the industrial revolution. He claims:

‘There is no determinate solution to the puzzle of why the industrial revolution took place, and when and where it did so. All that can be achieved is a narrowing of the range of possible mixes’ (p. 245).

Jones sees problems with a simple explanation in terms of levels of economic freedom:

‘Ordinarily we might expect that economic growth would be spurred by market freedoms but there are problems with this line of argument. A number of the outcomes do not seem to have been stable. Free-market preferences within the judicial system were inconsistent, since the judges reverted to precedent when it suited them – not that every law was enforced. Protective duties were raised precisely when “a modest flow of works” was starting to extol the virtues of free trade. Nor was corruption decisively reduced until some way into the 19th century’ (p. 243).

However, similar objections have been raised against attempts to explain China’s economic growth in recent decades as a consequence of market freedoms. A point that is often overlooked is that in considering the potential for economic growth offered in a particular economy by a particular level of economic freedom the most relevant comparison is with levels of economic freedom generally prevailing in other economies with similar income levels. An improvement in economic freedom in a low income country can provide an impetus to more rapid growth even though economic freedom remains heavily restricted.

Jones suggests that the main factor responsible for the redistribution of manufacturing activity to northern England was market integration associated with improvements in transportation. The merging of markets led to greater competition and specialization on the basis of comparative advantage – with a greater focus on agriculture in the south and manufacturing in the north. He points out, however, that these improvements in transportation often had to overcome substantial political obstacles from wealthy land-owners, whose concern to protect the social status that land ownership offered (linked to landscapes, recreation and privacy) often outweighed their interest in increasing the rental value of their land. He suggests that privatising of rights of way – described as ‘judicial theft of the subjects rights’ – was an ‘astonishingly common’ adverse effect of the enclosure of the commons (p. 153). The merging of markets was only possible because the judges and parliament together increasingly embraced market ideology and overlooked, rejected or struck down local protectionist measures (p. 185).

It seems to me that Eric Jones has provided strong evidence that the industrial revolution occurred when and where it did because market ideology prevailed sufficiently to enable market integration, specialization on the basis of comparative advantage and the clustering of manufacturing industry. I am conscious, however, that he might suggest that in offering that summary my preference for neat solutions has gotten the better of me.

Is progress history?

Over the past year I have read five or six books about progress. Matt Ridley’s book, ‘The Rational Optimist’ (discussed here and here) was the most optimistic. Ronald Wright’s book, ‘A short history of progress’, is probably the most pessimistic.

Wright’s book has the virtue of being short and easy to read. His message is that past civilizations have generally failed and that we are making the same mistakes. He notes that we have the advantage of knowing where those past societies went wrong. As you might guess, however, he suggests that we haven’t got much time to mend our ways. He says that if we don’t act now, ‘this new century will not grow very old before we enter an age of chaos and collapse that will dwarf all the dark ages in the past’ (p.132). Wright’s book was published six years ago, so if his analysis is correct the age of chaos and collapse will soon be upon us.

Cartoon by Nicholson from "The Australian" newspaper: http://www.nicholsoncartoons.com.au/

Anyone interested in a summary of Wright's book will not find it too difficult to find one elsewhere. What I want to do here is to attempt to identify what makes Wright so pessimistic about the future of civilization.

An obvious starting point is his view of human nature. Wright doesn’t believe in the innate goodness of humanity. He suggests that ‘prehistory, like history tells us that we are at best the heirs of many ruthless victories and at worst the heirs of genocide. We may well be descended from humans who repeatedly exterminated rival humans – culminating in the suspicious death of our Neanderthal cousins some 30,000 years ago’ (p. 31). Furthermore, an inability to foresee – or to watch out for – long range consequences of our actions may be inherent in our kind (p. 108). We are doomed by hope. Hope drives us to invent new fixes for old messes, which in turn create ever more dangerous messes (p. 123). Homo sapiens is still ‘an Ice Age hunter only half-evolved towards intelligence; clever but seldom wise’ (p. 132).

Wright acknowledges that humans have been influenced by culture. In fact, he suggests that culture is a key to our success: we are ‘experimental creatures of our own making’. Yet culture also poses risks to us: ‘As cultures grow more elaborate, and technologies more powerful, they themselves may become ponderous specializations – vulnerable and, in extreme cases, deadly’ (p. 30). He describes this as a ‘progress trap’. The wreckage of past civilizations litters the earth because their populations grow until they hit the bounds of food supply, while the concentration of wealth and power at the top of large scale societies gives the elite a vested interest in the status quo.

According to Wright’s view, all large-scale societies are locked into some kind of path dependency – leading them to outrun natural limits and collapse. How then does he explain the success of modern civilization despite all the failures that have occurred in the past? His explanation seems to be that nature has been forgiving. When societies failed there was natural regeneration and human migration to lightly settled areas. Civilization has been exceptionally long-lived in Egypt and China as a result of ‘generous ecologies’ - extra topsoil brought in from elsewhere by water and wind.

I think Wright’s pessimism stems from his views on both human nature and culture. His model doesn’t seem to recognize that humans have biological instincts that encourage cooperation and that this enables rules of conduct to evolve to meet changing circumstances. His model fails to take account of cultural evolution. Our ancestors may have helped destroy mega-fauna through their hunting practices, but hunting and gathering rules evolved in the more successful societies to avoid wanton destruction of valuable resources. Further rules followed including those relating to ownership of animals, grazing rights, land ownership etc. – all serving to encourage more efficient use of scarce resources.

Whether societies collapse or survive and prosper depends largely on the rules they live by. People in advanced western societies live by rules that have evolved to encourage mutually beneficial exchange, specialization and innovation, to ensure valuable resources are not wasted and to avoid environmental degradation.

Is modern civilization locked in to a path that will lead to chaos and collapse if we don’t immediately mend our ways? I don’t think so. Once the hyperbole about running out of resources is cleared away, the only real concern that remains in my view relates to environmental pollution that cannot be controlled by any one government acting alone. Even here there are grounds for optimism. Despite their many failings, the governments of major countries show enormous goodwill toward the future of humanity. We can be reasonably confident that concerted international action will be taken if a major environmental catastrophe ever actually threatens the future of humanity.

Did the ratchet effect apply to post-war government spending in Australia?

The ratchet theory suggests that government spending tends to ratchet up in times of crisis (wars, social upheavals, recessions) and then to remain at the new higher level. It has been put forward as an alternative to Wagner’s law (discussed in an earlier post).


In terms of the ratchet mechanism, the explanation for upward movement in government spending may appear straight forward, reflecting public demands for the government to ‘do something’ to help solve a problem. The process is not entirely mechanistic, however, because public demands for government action can vary depending on ideological factors e.g. changing perceptions about the role of government in helping people who are adversely affected by a recession and about the effectiveness of deficit spending. It is also possible for the upward movement to occur for opportunistic reasons e.g. politicians with an ideological leaning toward big government ‘never want a serious crisis to go to waste’.

A variety of reasons have been put forward to explain why public spending might remain at the new higher level after the end of the crisis. The most mechanistic explanation is status quo bias – the tendency of people to choose to maintain the status quo rather than to change a policy. For example, once tax rates have been increased to fund war time spending, status quo bias may favour retention of higher tax rates.

In addition, new programs created during a crisis may tend to develop a life of their own by creating interest groups with a vested interest in their continuation - including newly created bureaucracies that will fight to prevent themselves from being eliminated.

However, the ratchet theory does not provide a complete explanation of the growth of government. In his review of Robert Higgs’ book, ‘Crisis and Leviathan’, Gary Anderson notes that while most historians argue that the Civil War was the pre-eminent crisis in American history, ‘following this particular crisis, government sank like a stone relative to the growth of the private economy’.

Dick Durevall and Magnus Henrekson did not find strong support for the ratchet theory in their recent study of trends in size of government in the UK and Sweden from the beginning of industrialization until the present:

‘There is no consistent evidence of a ratchet effect in either country. There is some evidence of an asymmetric effect in both countries in the post-war period, but this is reversed in subsequent periods. Hence there is no clear evidence that government exploits recessions and crises to permanently shift the government spending ratio upwards’ (p. 22).

In New Zealand, government spending as a percentage of GDP seems to have fallen during WW2 as well as in the latter half of the 1950s and the 1990s. At the same time, as noted by Bryce Wilkinson, ‘the timing of the increases in the state’s share looks opportunistic’. Wilkinson suggests that growth in government spending reflects ‘changing ideas about the role of the state and the increasing power of vested spending interests’ (‘Restraining Leviathan’, 2004: Figure 5, p.41).

It is also difficult to see a consistent ratchet effect in the following chart for Australia showing estimates of government spending as a percentage of GDP over the period from 1939 to the present. The increase that occurred in the 1970s has not been reversed, but during the 1950s the Menzies government seems to have managed to defy the ratchet effect by reducing government spending to levels close to those in 1939.

I have never previously thought that I might one day have reason to praise the economic achievements of the Menzies government. It seemed to me that the Menzies government’s greatest claim to support free enterprise was to have removed war-time price control, rationing and import controls (more or less and belatedly). However, the efforts of this government in reducing the size of government during the 1950s deserve high praise.

Summing up, it seems to me, to be important not to downplay the role of ideology in influencing trends in government spending. During some periods there may be a tendency for government spending to ratchet up in response to crises. Changes in government spending may also be influenced by changes in the power of interest groups (for example as changes occur in the age structure of populations). In the end, however, ideas about the role of government matter a great deal.

How important is the 'size of government' component of economic freedom indexes?

A few months ago a guest blogger on ‘The Baseline Scenario’ blog, StatsGuy, wrote a post entitled ‘Good Government Versus Less Government’. It was described as a ‘must-read’ in a post by Tyler Cowen on ‘Marginal Revolution’ and received a great deal of attention on a range of other blogs including Scott Sumner’s (here).


StatsGuy draws attention to the fact that the size of government component of the Heritage Foundation index of economic freedom is negatively correlated with the other components of this index. He concludes that the Heritage Freedom index is really a composite of measures that get at two different things: good government, and less government. His bottom line:

‘Overall, the Good Government factors tend to dominate, and drive a lot of the correlation with good economic and quality of life outcomes. When one splits out the factors, the case for Less/Weaker Government weakens substantially, and the case for Clean/Non-Corrupt/Efficient government strengthens considerably’.

Some other researchers have similarly objected to the inclusion of size of government in economic freedom indexes. For example, Peter Lindert describes this as ‘guilt by definition’ on the grounds that it tends to make big government and the welfare state look bad merely by describing this national attribute as contributing to lower economic freedom (‘Welfare states, markets and efficiency: the free lunch puzzle continues’, 2007: 6).

At least one contributor to the discussion of StatsGuy’s post made the point that if economic freedom has two different dimensions, a lack of correlation between those dimensions does not necessarily mean that one of them is irrelevant. For example, it is possible for both size of government and quality of government to be important to economic growth.

I recently had an opportunity to test whether this is so in preparing a background paper for the 2025 Taskforce, which was established by the New Zealand government to advise how average incomes in that country could be raised to equate those in Australia by 2025. The analysis provides some support for the view that size of government is an important component of economic freedom indexes.

The analysis uses the Fraser Institute’s index of economic freedom because this provides a consistent measure of institutional quality over a longer time period than the alternatives. The data set relates to ‘advanced economies’ as defined by the IMF – this data set includes high income jurisdictions with small governments, such as Hong Kong and Singapore, as well as OECD countries. The regression, based on panel data, explains average per capita GDP growth in each decade in terms of several variables including two components of economic freedom at the beginning of each decade, the size of government index and ‘other economic freedom’. The relevant regression results are presented in Table A 2.3, p 43 (the right hand column).

The coefficients on both the size of government and ‘other’ economic freedom variables were significantly greater than zero - suggesting that smaller size of government has a positive effect on economic growth. The magnitude of the estimated coefficient on size of government is about half that on ‘other’ economic freedom, but that is about twice as large as I had expected it to be on the basis of the weight of size of government in the economic freedom index (20%).

One fairly obvious question that might be asked is that if size of government is so important, how is it that some countries with big governments, an obvious example is Sweden, have managed to maintain relatively strong economic performance. I have attempted to answer this question in the chart below which compares per capita incomes in Sweden and Australia (Penn World Tables, rgdpch with some extrapolation using IMF growth estimates). The results of the simple analysis presented in the chart suggest that if Sweden had not undertaken substantial economic reforms (including some improvement in the size of government component of economic freedom as well as other components) it would have performed poorly. The chart also suggests that Sweden’s economic growth performance could have been much better if it had a smaller government.

This analysis doesn’t tell us that every country could become a paradise if only it had a small government, or that countries with big governments are dreadful places to live. It just suggests that big government is not a free lunch . The lack of correlation between the size of government and other aspects of economic freedom is interesting, but it doesn’t mean that size of government doesn’t matter.

Postscript:

A colleague has suggested that I should have mentioned that the size of government of most of the countries included in this ‘advanced’ country data base used in the regression analysis reported above is now much larger than it was prior to the 1960s.

It might also be worth noting that recent World Bank research suggests that in low income countries government spending on infrastructure, education etc. can have a positive effect on economic growth if (a big if) the countries concerned have favourable institutional characteristics.