I work at Open Philanthropy, doing research for the biosecurity and pandemic preparedness team. Before that I was a research scholar at FHI, and before that did a PhD in physics.
djbinder
Karma: 327
There seems to be a major disconnect between the Hyperbolic Growth Hypothesis and the great divergence literature. If we take the Hyperbolic Growth Hypothesis seriously, it seems that there is really little to explain about the industrial revolution. It is just an inevitable consequence of hyperbolic growth and is not qualitatively distinct from what occured before. Although I’m not an economic historian, I have read a number of books on the great divergence and none of them seem to agree with that analysis. They may be disagreement about the causes and the precise timeline, but not about the existence of a question to be answered.
As to why they believe this, I think it essentially boils down to the fact that if we look at the historical record, it seems that the industrial revolution occuring c1800 was highly contingent. It seems unlikely that an observer in 500AD, even with excellent data about the past and detailed knowledge of future possible technologies, could have simply extrapolated growth trends to predict the industrial revolution. We know of a number of economically advanced societies which didn’t industrialize, and indeed didn’t appear to be on the path to industrialization. Examples include early modern China, Japan, or the Ottoman empire, or more tenously Song China or Early Imperial Rome. If northwestern Europe was more like China in the year 1600, industrialization may have taken much longer, even though in that conterfactual universe economic growth up to that point may have been similar to our own universe. Ditto for a conterfactual where the Americas didn’t exist. So it seems that the Hyperbolic Growth Hypothesis proves too much, and isn’t compatible with what we actually know about the industrial revolution.
I’m curious what numbers you are using for Europe’s growth between 1000-1700; I didn’t think European growth over that period was particularly unusual. It is worth remembering that Europe in 1000 (particularly northern Europe) was a backwater and so benefitted from catchup growth relative to (say) China. I also don’t know how much of European growth was driven by extensive growth in eastern Europe, which doesn’t seem to be relevant that to the great divergence.
Arguments against the idea that Europe c1700 was technologically ahead of the rest of Eurasia (r at least, China) are common in the great divergence literature. A good recent discussion is Chapter 16 of A Culture of Growth by Mokyr; he discusses various similarities and differences between the two regions around 1700. For detailed discussion focussed on military questions, see The Gunpowder Age by Andrade and Why did Europe conquer the world? by Hoffman, both of which argue that the gap between European and Chinese military technology was not very large during the 1600s.
For what it’s worth I think Europe development was distinct from previous economic efflorescences in so far as it took place in the context of a fractured political landscape. Most other examples (Rome, Abbasid caliphate, many Chinese dynasties) seem to be driven by political unification allowing the growth and diversification of markets; a discussion focussed on the roman example can be found in The Roman Market Economy by Temin. This seems different to the situation in Europe c1700.
For what it’s worth it seems to me that the most plausible explanations for the great divergence are rooted in European fragmentation. This allowed a number of different economic, political, and cultural arrangements to be explored while competitive pressure encouraged more efficient institutions to be adopted. A recent discussion of this can be found in Escape from Rome by Schiedel, but the argument is made in many other places and underpins a number of other more proximate explanations of the great divergence (including Mokyr’s cultural/institutional explanation).