Growth Recurring

"This book has some similarities to Landes’s—particularly its sense of excitement and passion about this epic undertaking of industrialisation and self-sustained growth—but with 20 years more research. Those 20 years were the 1970s and 80s, which were a key period during which economic history in general, and Industrial Revolution research in particular, experienced a quantum leap. So this book contains a lot of findings that Landes’s book didn’t. It’s also very different from Landes because—and this is something I really like about it—it adopts a global perspective. It argues very forcefully that you can’t explain growth with just one case, i.e. England, or even Europe. It argues that we need a universal, non-local—i.e. not purely European or Western—explanation for growth. Jones is particularly interested in comparisons between Europe and Asia, which we’re particularly interested in now, of course, because of the rise of China . That’s a real selling point of the book. The other thing that is very striking about it, and in which it differs from Landes, is that Jones explicitly takes what he calls a ‘universalist’ view of human nature. Jones doesn’t think that there are any innate, unobserved differences between groups of any race or colour or gender or caste of mind, i.e. cultures, which would explain why some societies have achieved growth and others haven’t. Instead, he takes a very long view and argues that the historical evidence we have shows that there are always some people in every large society that have worked to invest and innovate and improve their material circumstances, and that this is a common behaviour in human populations. We find it down the millennia and in every continent. I think that’s where the word ‘recurring’ in the title comes from. Jones sees recurring moves towards economic growth, of which the Industrial Revolution is maybe the most striking. But it had happened before. And it was going to happen again. Yes. In the 1980s Europeans and North Americans thought that it was going to be Japan that would take over from the West. You can see that in Jones’s book. He talks about Tokugawa Japan and the way in which Japan accelerated its technological progress and its economic growth from the later 19th century onwards. But he also talks about Song China between the 10th and the 13th centuries. He talks about episodes of growth, particularly in Asia, down the millennia. He argues that there are two countervailing things going on in every society. One of them is this recurring urge toward investing, inventing and innovating, and trying to improve our material circumstances. But there’s also a countervailing urge towards what economists call rent-seeking, which chokes off growth. Rent-seeking is economics jargon for seeking profits by manipulating the social and political framework, trying to tilt the playing field so that it favours particular economic agents over others—by lobbying, corrupting governments, building barriers to entry and obstacles to trade, occupational licenses, and cartels and tax privileges and so on. Jones is very astute in identifying the colourful and variegated forms that rent-seeking took in many world economies down the centuries. He looks at serfdom and slavery and caste systems and occupational associations like guilds. He thinks good states are incredibly important for growth, but he also analyses the horrible things that the ramshackle states of the past did. He’s very perceptive about the ways in which powerful people try to redistribute more good things to themselves, even if it deprives the weak and makes the whole economy stagnate. Jones shows how those two forces—the rent-seeking and the growth-seeking—work against one another. That’s why, in the longer term, you see these episodes of growth, and then episodes of stagnation. I think the rise of Asia over the past 30 years totally fits into that framework."

"My research interest is in comparative economic growth and development over the long term, from Christ to the present time. There have been two big puzzles in the research field that I have been involved in. The first issue is related to the British Industrial Revolution in the late 18th century in terms of why and how it ever occurred let alone overtook the world as a growth/development model. The second puzzle is related to Premodern China, a country which used to lead the world in so many areas – science, technology, output levels, living standards and governance, to name but a few. It never became industrialised until very recently. My five books tackle these two puzzles from different angles. Also, they are easy to read without off-putting quantitative contents that are associated with economics. Professor Eric L Jones is one of the leading scholars to tackle the aforementioned twin puzzles simultaneously. This book, first published in 1988, was a follow-up of his earlier book, The European Miracle . In this one, Professor Jones established two parallel worlds, one of Europe and the other of Asia. He argued that intensive growth of the modern type, i.e., growth with better technology and high per capita income, occurred in both worlds. The first recorded such growth was China under the Sung (Song) Period of the 10th to 13th centuries. Then there was a similar growth in Tokugawa Japan of the 17th to 19th centuries. These were the forerunners of the British Industrial Revolution. This work was revolutionary in providing a powerful antithesis to the normative stereotype of European exceptionalism in growth and development. The conclusion was that there is no ground for Eurocentricism in explaining the world history of economic growth prior to the 19th century. The best part of Jones’s book is his take on the universal growth type called ‘intensive growth’. It is a simple and elegant concept, easy to apply and measure. It is close to our common sense. One does not need any training in economics to understand it."