Good review. I was in the middle of reading the book itself when it came out, so I finished that first and just circled back to read your comments.
I appreciated the discussion of culture but thought it could have gone a bit deeper. They discuss the Republic of Letters, but the name Bacon does not appear anywhere in the book. And there are citations to Mokyr but not to Margaret Jacob (I guess because she’s a historian and not an economic historian).
On the question of human capital in the 2nd IR, you say “most people weren’t doing jobs that required more than rudimentary literacy and numeracy.” That’s true, but couldn’t the crucial difference have been made by a small minority of jobs that required advanced education? IR2 depended on electromagnetism (for both electrical power/lighting and electronic communications) and applied chemistry (Bessemer, Haber-Bosch, Bakelite, oil refining, synthetic dyes, pharmaceuticals, etc.) In fact, if you consider the public health improvements that were going on at the same time to be part of it (they were certainly a part of the overall increase in living standards), then it also depended on microbiology. So it seems hard to imagine how it could have happened without a number of researchers/engineers in all of these fields.
Good review. I was in the middle of reading the book itself when it came out, so I finished that first and just circled back to read your comments.
I appreciated the discussion of culture but thought it could have gone a bit deeper. They discuss the Republic of Letters, but the name Bacon does not appear anywhere in the book. And there are citations to Mokyr but not to Margaret Jacob (I guess because she’s a historian and not an economic historian).
On the question of human capital in the 2nd IR, you say “most people weren’t doing jobs that required more than rudimentary literacy and numeracy.” That’s true, but couldn’t the crucial difference have been made by a small minority of jobs that required advanced education? IR2 depended on electromagnetism (for both electrical power/lighting and electronic communications) and applied chemistry (Bessemer, Haber-Bosch, Bakelite, oil refining, synthetic dyes, pharmaceuticals, etc.) In fact, if you consider the public health improvements that were going on at the same time to be part of it (they were certainly a part of the overall increase in living standards), then it also depended on microbiology. So it seems hard to imagine how it could have happened without a number of researchers/engineers in all of these fields.