Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

...Yet I always find myself in the peculiar position of loving his work like a fan-girl and disagreeing with so much of it. In particular, I’m sceptical of his theory of the Industrial Revolution... that England in the 18th century possessed a “high wage economy”.... England’s high wages relative to its cheap energy and low capital costs biased technical innovation in favour of labour-saving equipment, and that is why it was cost-effective to industrialise in England first.... The theory is appealing, in part, because the technological innovations of the early Industrial Revolution were not exactly rocket science (a phrase used by Allen himself), so one wonders why they weren’t invented earlier and elsewhere. (Mokyr paraphrasing Cardwell said something like nothing invented in the early IR period would have puzzled Archimedes.)

But I’ve always had reasons to doubt it. As Mokyr has tirelessly argued, inventions were too widespread across British society to be a matter of just the right incentives and expanding markets--and this is a point now being massively amplified by Anton Howes.... Nonetheless, I had mentally reconciled Allen and Mokyr à la Crafts by considering Mokyr = supply of inventions, Allen = demand...