Mark Koyama is an Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason. Mark researches comparative national state economic development and the rise of religious tolerance. He is interested in how historical institutions functioned and in the relationship between culture and economic performance.  His 2019 co-authored book, with Noel Johnson, is Persecution and Toleration: the long road to religious freedom and his 2022 book, is on How the World Became Rich, co-authored a book with Jared Rubin. Book link here (Amazon).

I ask why it has taken economists and historians so long to form central views on how we have become rich?

Mark discusses what historic progress might tells us about economic development today.

One part on current policy ideas: 

”...We didn't talk about this in the book because we deal with things historically. But I think in a country like UK and many parts of US, planning and housing are the biggest constraints. So I've really subscribed to the housing theory [of everything] where the high price of housing which is constraint largely by planning restrictions is a big problem in terms of getting people to productive areas. So you need to get young workers and ambitious workers and innovative workers to cluster in places like San Francisco or indeed London. If they can't do so, if it's very costly to do so, that's a big drag on productivity.

I think allowing people to match, so allowing people to move to locations where their particular skills are in demand that is crucial. So that's critical. Housing wasn't a central issue in the pre-modern period because it was largely unregulated. So London became a monster. It became a ginormous city fairly early on; like in the 17th century already. There was no vocation whatsoever. People lived in horrific conditions and there was a lot of overcrowding, a lot of negative externalities, a lot of slum housing. That was obviously bad, but it was also good because it allowed productive, ambitious people to come together and work together. You see similar clusters in the industrial revolution in the north of England. I think actually in British economic history, the last major episode of housing building was in the 1930s. That was critical in getting Britain out of the Great Depression.

So that’s something often missed because our understanding of the Great Depression is totally biased by what happened in the United States. But in Britain, housing is crucial in getting people out of the Great Depression. So I think that's what I would emphasize in terms of most important thing that I can currently think of in the modern world. I would also say that in general, adapting our institutions for the new productive technologies is important. So it's in ways it would be intangible economy and having the right institutions which are appropriate for that. I kind of sometimes feel very copyright, and intellectual property right laws are not really best suited to fit the current technological environment we live in.”

I ask about the interaction between the main factors behind economic progress such as: institutions, culture, infrastructure, geography, energy.

I question the role of common law and ask about living constitutions and Mark discusses his reading of the literature and how the UK is relatively unique in its living constitutions.

I query the role of intangibles and the patent system and briefly lay out the case (after Brad De Long) for importance of industrial labs and the corporate form. Mark discusses these factors and their importance from the 1870s but also what was important pre-1870.

We chat about culture (using Joe Henrich’s terms) as a set of heuristics. Mark discusses the literature on the importance and role of slavery (probably not the most major factor in the UK’s industrialization, but still heavily argued), and the role and roots of social progress such as women’s rights. 

We cover impacts of war and also the black death from an economic history view and we discuss the challenge on climate.

We play over/underrated on : GDP, carbon tax, representative democracy governance mechanisms, universal basic income.

Mark ends with current projects and advice.

….So podcasts; everything is online basically. The young person who's ambitious and interested can actually get to speed quickly. So you can teach yourself econometrics by watching tons of YouTube videos. Most people won't because there's other stuff to watch on YouTube, there's other stuff to do. I could be teaching myself foreign languages on YouTube and I'm not doing it because my opportunity costs I guess is maybe high. But if you're young and wanted to study this stuff, you can get a huge head start just by use of the internet cleverly. Tyler Cowen’s advice is find the right mentors. Find some people and learn from them. But you get a huge amount early on to give yourself a head start before you go to university because to be honest, the university experience isn't necessarily going to be all that… 

Podcast available wherever you get podcasts, or below. Video with captions on YouTube, or above.

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Transcript (only lightly edited) Mark Koyama: How the World became Rich

Ben

Hey, everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Mark Koyama. Mark researches comparative national state economic development and also the rise of religious tolerance. His 2019 co-authored book with Noel Johnson is "Persecution and Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom," and his 2022 book is on "How the World Became Rich," co-authored with Jared Rubin. Mark, welcome.

Mark (00:30):

Thanks Ben. Great to be here.

Ben (00:33):

So first up, why do you think it has taken economists and historians so long to form central views on how we have become rich? Is it simply that historic data has been hard to reconstruct or is it to do with the complexity of the interactions between these main various factors? We seem to have been slightly slow to really understand the causes of progress. In fact, some of them are still a little bit contested.

Mark (01:01):

So I think there are two elements to this. One element is for one you mentioned briefly, which is the quality of the historical data. So even as recently as late 1980s/1990s, there are great books on the origins of economic growth historically. These are books I've learned a lot from. Eric Jones, "The European Miracle." Birdzell and Rosenberg have a book on origins of economic growth. They were great books but those were not really informed by very anchor estimates of per capital GDP in the past and not informed by real wage data, not informed by kind of the data on heights. So there has been a revolution pioneered by other historians in terms of how much we know; like in terms of quantifying economic history. So to give one concrete example, Angus Maddison was a pioneer of historical GDP data and you'll see a lot of books quote Maddison's numbers. But actually, Maddison's original numbers were quite vague and really guesstimate.

It's really in the last 10 years where people have created I think much more credible estimates. Others call it building on Angus Maddison. So that's part of it. There's another part of it which is... Sometimes the way I think science and even social science progresses is that early on we might have quite a good understanding of the topic, but using methods which are quite ad hoc or subject to criticism. Over time, what scientists and social scientists try to do is refine our methods. But as we refine our methods, we have to throw out a lot of what we previously knew. Paul Goodman has a famous essay on development economics about this where he compares it to a map of Africa.

So before the explorations of the 19th century, people didn't really know what was going on in the interior of Africa. But we had a vague idea where rivers were and where Vietnam's mountain ranges were. The VSA thought there were monsters in places and unknown regions. But as we refined our knowledge of maps, we got rid of the stuff we didn't know for certain and actually we lost knowledge. We forgot about certain rivers and where certain places were because we only wanted to rely on scientific evidence. So I think in economics and economic history of just something of the same development. So Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill actually understood quite a lot about economic progress and economic development relatively, and actually with the formalization of economics in the post-World War II period, we actually got rid of a lot of insight to that institutions about culture and so on because we wanted a more rigorous framework. We wanted a solo model. Now, what the research in the past 20 years has done is relearn some of those lessons.

Ben (03:52):

So it really does seem that we've had a little bit of step change in the kind of history and the science here. I was wondering maybe stepping forward before moving back, if we think of becoming wealthy as a form of progress, what do you think this history teaches us on where we might go next? You lay out in the book strong arguments for the intersection of several prerequisites such as infrastructure, institutions, culture, geography, represented democracy of sorts, energy. Do you think these same factors will broadly apply to, for example, poor parts of Africa or developing nations, even a country specifics will vary, or do you think it's so complex and nuanced that those individual factors will always vary depending on the locale and where we're thinking about?

Mark (04:39):

The lesson of Alexander Gerschenkron was the path followed by later industrialized is different from the path followed by the early industrialize so we can definitely see that. Even in the poorest parts of the world people today have access to cell phones and the internet, which obviously, equivalently, poor countries didn't have in the past. So you can think about jumping over what were previously important steps along the road to getting rich. I'm not a prognosticator. I don't think like a super forecaster. But what I would say is one of the main routes to getting rich in the last 150 years roughly has been manufacturing. So that's a route pioneered by Britain, by the United States, by countries like Japan, by China.

Often you move through the value chain from lower value to a value added manufacturing goods like textiles, and up the value chain more sophisticated products. One of the issues in the past 13 years has been that China had such a cost advantage, but other countries saying Sub-Saharan Africa, whatever parts of world struggle to get onto the ladder even. So that factoring route is difficult. Now, China have started to increase so it's a possibility for other hubs to emerge below cost manufacturing. Perhaps you could say Bangladesh is already doing that. But the broad principles still seem to apply. We're trying to articulate some principles about institutions and culture. So when we talk about infrastructure we're talking about infrastructure which supports markets and trades. I think broad lessons still apply, but as you suggest, it's nuanced in a sense that how it applies is different in each case. That's why development economics is rich. That's why development economics is complicated. It's why people can make flaws of themselves with two strong predictions.

Ben (06:57):

Great. Maybe again just before skipping backwards, I'd be interested if you had a view on the richer nations themselves. So there's a lot of talk in the UK or the US or many other richer nations about how productivity may be more diminished recently and how we should be aiming for more growth or more productivity. I'd be interested if you had a view whether some of those same factors; so new institutions, a building culture or innovation culture, anything to do with infrastructure, do those lessons of history still apply to potentially getting some of this better-- because there's debates on supply side progressiveness or whether we've got too managed regulations or whether like you say, once you've industrialized, you're kind of into uncharted territory and the lessons of history may not hold.

Mark (07:50):

So when it comes to calling of current policy advice-- We didn't talk about this in the book because we deal with things historically. But I think in a country like UK and many parts of US, planning and housing are the biggest constraints. So I've really subscribed to the housing theory [of everything] where the high price of housing which is constraint largely by planning restrictions is a big problem in terms of getting people to productive areas. So you need to get young workers and ambitious workers and innovative workers to cluster in places like San Francisco or indeed London. If they can't do so, if it's very costly to do so, that's a big drag on productivity.

I think allowing people to match, so allowing people to move to locations where their particular skills are in demand that is crucial. So that's critical. Housing wasn't a central issue in the pre-modern period because it was largely unregulated. So London became a monster. It became a ginormous city fairly early on; like in the 17th century already. There was no vocation whatsoever. People lived in horrific conditions and there was a lot of overcrowding, a lot of negative externalities, a lot of slum housing. That was obviously bad, but it was also good because it allowed productive, ambitious people to come together and work together. You see similar clusters in the industrial revolution in the north of England. I think actually in British economic history, the last major episode of housing building was in the 1930s. That was critical in getting Britain out of the Great Depression.

So that’s something often missed because our understanding of the Great Depression is totally biased by what happened in the United States. But in Britain, housing is crucial in getting people out of the Great Depression. So I think that's what I would emphasize in terms of most important thing that I can currently think of in the modern world. I would also say that in general, adapting our institutions for the new productive technologies is important. So it's in ways it would be intangible economy and having the right institutions which are appropriate for that. I kind of sometimes feel very copyright, and intellectual property right laws are not really best suited to fit the current technological environment we live in.

Ben (10:18):

Very good. That's exactly what Anton Howes said. He was on the podcast a few months ago, on the institution side on copyright on patents. And actually Stian Westlake who was also on the podcast recently has said a lot about new institutions, particularly for the intangible economy but for other things or new bits of old institutions. But I think the housing point is really interesting.

Mark (10:43):

I didn't know either of them had been on the podcast. I know both of them. We share similar ideas I think.

Ben (10:50):

So it's good. You have not as yet contradicted either of them, at least on the forward looking part. That housing point is really interesting because it's so contested. I would say there's probably a broad consensus in the UK amongst economic or even economic planning people that if you could build a lot on the green belt, which they don't think is very valuable land, it would be enormously beneficial in economic terms. But the political economy, at least people reading of the political economy hasn't seemed to have made it happen, which seems to be a little microcosm for a lot of these things. So we'll see where that goes. Although there's some signs actually just today in September, the UK is going to try and do something about that with the new government.

So maybe then skipping back to your book, why I really liked it or if I got the reading of it right, is you seem to be arguing with your co-author that it was the intersection of so many of these prerequisites which was really important. So it's not just institutions and infrastructure. It's not just coal in Newcastle. It was not just a parliamentary representative democracy or your geography. It's the fact that you had brought all of those components together. Am I right in reading that as a central argument of your book? Then I would add on top of that, you are quite careful to lay out the median theories about where all of this literature is and make the intersectionality of it all. Would you yourself wait any one or two of those factors or maybe some of that intersectionality perhaps different from where the median literature is?

Mark (12:33):

Complicated question. So from a scientific perspective like an actual science perspective, in some sense what we do you could say is not fully satisfying because if you want to propose a theory of economic growth, you want it to be parsimonious and you want it to focus on a few factors. So that's what some people tend to do, because I think it's a habit we have from if we've studied the harder sciences. But what we feel is important here is that we're not articulating theory of growth. We're documenting how the industrial revolution, how modern economic growth began. So then it's important to be broad minded about the causes and it's important to give a full coverage and give equal weight to certain views.

My positions on this are open to debate and change. I think there's a lot of room allowing for multiple channels of causations. To be clear, for example there's some scholars who really emphasize the role of the energy transition. So they move from an organic economy to a mineral based economy, particularly the coal. So they'll say coal is central to the British industrial revolution. Those who push back will say, "Look, Britain didn't have to have a coal. It could have important energy. And even if there hadn't been coal, there were enough incentives to utilize other energy sources and maybe growth would've been different or slower, but they still would've been something that we would recognize as industrial revolution without coal.” My own reading of it is not to overestimate the role of coal or other product technologies, but I'm aware of ongoing research.

There's a paper by Kevin Oakes on culture I think, which is showing a correlation between coal and city growth. So coal might play 5%, 6, 7% contribution. That's not trivial but it's not all of the story. Another example is the role of slavery in the Caribbean in the British economy in the 18th century. In our book we review this hypothesis which is associated with Eric Williams, but we kind of come down on the side of the skeptics because we didn't see evidence at the time we were writing of strong linkages between the sugar nexus. So the British economies in the Caribbean based on slavery basically enriching a lot of plantation holders and they're making some people rich, but we didn't think there was a lot of evidence for links between what they were doing and then industrialization later. So we downplayed it.

Now there's a new NBER working paper by Hans-Joachim Voth and Stephen Redding arguing that there is evidence for this link. But it turns out if you read that paper-- and they say this is support for the Williams hypothesis, but you find even in this paper they find this statistical link between slave wealth basically and local levels of manufacturing. But even on this paper, the effects are actually small. So I think that we wanted to present an account which we thought was fair to other literature, is up to date as we could possibly make it given when we were writing, and that which we'd be happy with in 10 or 15 years as people do more papers and more studies. So we're waiting to adjust things on the margin and we do think it's a multi causal process.

There's no single factor that was critical. You could imagine industrial revolution happening a little bit later or a little bit slower or a little bit faster minus or added some of these factors. So none of these factors to me is super decisive. If England had missed several of the factors that we identify as important, you could imagine industrialization not happening. You could imagine 1700s, 1800s Britain as a comparatively rich commercial trading society, but one which doesn't produce an industrial revolution.

Ben (16:56):

Great. That brings up so many thoughts. I would reiterate that means you think there's no one factor for instance, which would make even 20 or 30% the routes of getting rich because it's unlikely to be one of the slightest factor that's still a multifactorial thing. Maybe we'll go through some of them about how you potentially waited.

Mark (17:20):

Yeah. If anything's critical it's the science, in terms of preventing the industrial revolution from petering out. So if any one thing is critical, you take away the scientific revolution and the connection between scientists and engineers, then you start to think that maybe even the first industrial revolution still could have happened because many of the inventions type of things didn't depend on science, but then you get stuck there basically.

Ben (17:47):

Okay. That makes a lot of sense. Maybe skipping back-- Actually, this is kind of a question from Anton Howes which is, so why do you think then some older civilizations like the Romans or the Greeks or the Chinese-- Was it that science part or was there something else which meant that they couldn't sustain their industrial revolution? Maybe you can go one step further if you think about between Britain and Holland which you cover in the book, that you kind of think that Britain really did sustain it and the Dutch didn't quite make it in the half mini age before that. At least that's what I get of your reading of the literature.

Mark (18:30):

Yeah. Certainly. This is a longstanding puzzle which I don't think we have a great answer to. The Romans and the Greeks had amazing [technology] in many respects. But many of the things they used it for seemed to just be for toys. So early steam engines in the era of Alexandria they use basically to move things in temples. They're gimmicks. Why are they not using it for industrial purposes or profit making purposes? You can tell a cultural story for why that is. You can tell a story where slave labor is sufficiently cheap, the mechanization is not appealing. You could tell a story where the engineer-- I think that the tool making was there. So if you look at the Antikythera Mechanism, this proto computer calculating device which was discovered in a shipwreck off a Greek island; Antikythera Mechanism. They had the engineering tools to do it.

I used to think they didn't have the engineering capabilities; like the ability to make reliable clocks and so on. They had it undoubtedly now. So that makes the puzzle starker and I don't have a great answer to it. But I think culture is plausible and I think the slavery factor is also plausible. Then when it comes to the Dutch, they are participants in the scientific revolution. I would mostly say it's a scale thing. I think part of it is a political economy story in where the Dutch is just too affected by their war with France; too devastated by their war with France, but it was huge tax burden, huge debt burden. They have to pay off revenue 18th century and it leads to bit of... They have relatively stagnant high levels of income 18th century. But you could also say that Amsterdam's a trade and finance capital. It doesn't seem to have quite the population of skilled mechanics and manufacturers that you see in British cities, particularly obviously Birmingham and then later Manchester and Liverpool. So that could be another factor, but there's not this tight a link as we've see in England between the scientists and the people actually improving things on the ground and making machines.

Ben (21:00):

That makes a lot of sense. I wanted to touch on two things which don't appear so much in the book, maybe because it's slightly later. But I was reading what Brad DeLong has written. Two things that he mentions quite strongly in his more grand narrative-- So you've kind of put a lot of things together, is the rise of the corporate form and also the rise of the industrial lab. Although I guess the industrial lab is putting science into action. So in that way it's just perhaps slightly later on view. Do you think that perhaps from-- Well, he dates it from 1870. So maybe from 1870 onwards, did play this kind of role in the sustaining part of the industrial revolution and do you think maybe there's a little bit more weight on those?

Mark (21:48):

It's part of what people call a second industrial revolution. So it is a core part of that. In the second industrial revolution we're seeing some of the most decisive technological innovations. So in some sense, the industrial revolution traditionally gets weighted very heavily because it's the first and it is a breakthrough. But it's true that the decisive improvement in living standards and additionally the period where something in the modern world is created is the second industrial revolution. As DeLong and others have mentioned, that's when you get electricity, that's when you get your automobile. So the really core technologies for the modern world come about in the second industrial revolution.

I'm reading Brad DeLong's latest book right now. He emphasizes the corporate form more than we do. We do mention it at some point [we] think it’s very important. I think it is important. He emphasizes it because it allows a division of labor. So now you could be a Tesla in a corporation and you don't have to worry about the management side effects. So I can buy into that as important. It doesn't strike me as being as critical as DeLong maybe suggests. The research lab is definitely important. Technology was already being brought for market before the research lab. So whether or not that's decisive or just a part of this overall process of making innovation profitable is debatable. I don't have a problem with emphasizing. It's just a manner of emphasis.

Ben (23:41):

Sure. That makes a lot of sense. Maybe we can argue a tiny bit or delve into this corporate form thing because I guess some people put a lot of weight on that. The British East India or maybe the Dutch East India and this corporate form. I think it is interesting that the world now is very much this kind of corporate form that you have. The other observation I have is really on what some cultures or country-- and we can be slightly careful about how we talk about culture because we don't mean it in any sort of dismissive way. But I think of this as the kind of view of credit or the corporate form within some Islamic way of thinking because actually even today, the securitization of assets and how they deal with credit is a little bit difficult in terms of that kind of securitization. So I do wonder whether maybe there is something more to that corporate form or whether that may be just kind of as an emergence from this idea that you had saying in the first one about institutions. So you simply needed some sets of institutions to carry forward these ideas and actually the corporate form was that. But really it's just a kind of extension of institutional thinking.

Mark (24:53):

Yeah. Certainly, some scholars have emphasized it more than we have it.  [ ]  this development of the corporate form. It is a decisive thing in the 19th century. It's important for risk sharing and it's important for innovation and [ ] emphasize the idea that you have long lived organizations which is separate from the states. I think that is important. I think because we focus a bit more on the industrial revolution than on the second industrial revolution and we focus a little bit more on developments in Britain and Europe and on America, that we're a little bit less kind of, “This is the key innovation.” But yeah, I definitely think it's important. Credit is important. Banks are important. I just don't think they're the decisive thing. I think by the time you get the modern corporate form, the genie of economic growth is in my view already out of the bottle. So that's why I'm not emphasizing it as much as perhaps obviously.

Ben (26:05):

Yeah, well that's good to know. Well, I think you might be right and DeLong might be wrong. But obviously, there's still not necessary a settled debate. I guess this is one of the other things you mentioned in passing, but don't put as much weight on. Actually, I haven't seen too many, but I do wonder about the role of the creation of markets for intangibles at the time. You particularly see this in patents and you see this strangely because actually where you have certain companies formed today seem to depend on patents and patent laws. In some ways I do view this as an extension of institutions and you always had trade secrets and those sort of things. You mentioned it as a factor, but again, not a decisive factor. But I wonder because there's so much inferences on intangibles today, whether it adds actually one of those foundational aspects which actually if we didn't have, we might have been very hard for us to sustain. Very hard to know about the counterfactual. But I was interested in whether you thought more about the role of the patents or the institutions around intangible ideas and copyright and the like.

Mark (27:12):

The literature in economic history has tended to be a bit down on the role of patents in industrial revolution per se. That's what we follow. A lot of important innovations and industrial revolution were not patented. There's debate-- I don't take a strong view on this. But there's a debate about James Watts patent on the steam engine. Did it block subsequent intervention or did it not block it? People have made strong claims they blocked it. Others like [inaudible 27:44] it didn't necessarily block it. So there's a debate on patents in the industrial revolution itself, which I think even if it's not fully settle doesn't point towards patents playing a particularly decisive role. Nonetheless, patents could still have mattered later as we go into the 19th century.

So people are innovating for a bunch of reasons in the 18th century and 19th century and obtaining a patent of innovation is only one and potentially a minor reason for it. Now going to the 19th century and adding 20th century, you need some monopoly rent to reward innovation. Can trade secrets do as well as patents? For some things. Coca Cola still have kept their recipe a secret. So I think patents are not decisive or that important in the industrial revolution. Did they make a positive contribution towards innovation in the late 19th century, early 20th century? I believe the case could be made for it, but I'm not more expert than that.

Ben (28:55):

Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. So the median literature downplays it certainly in the first industrial revolution, but 1870 onwards and sustaining might have had a bigger role. Another thing I picked up in your book and I hadn't really seen the literature on it so I was really interested, which was this idea-- I'm going to put it in my language. This kind of idea of nation states which had come through perhaps a common law route or a sort of living constitution route which you see in the UK, versus those nations which had more of a fixed constitution and fixed laws and how they might relate to progress. In fact, I see this debate a little bit in the US today-- actually everywhere, but in the US today between a kind of more literal reading of old constitution law and more of a kind of progressive reading and more of a living constitution. But it seems to me that some literature which is maybe suggestive that if you represented a democracy, had a little bit more of this flex, it made it a little bit easier to sustain their initial catalyst. Have I read that right? Is it maybe just a little factor or is it potentially more important and how does this extend to other nation states?

Mark (30:03):

I think it's a little bit of tension here between... So there's a literature about common law versus Roman civil law which we review. That's not so much about fixed constitutions versus variable constitutions because on that divide, US and UK both come down as being common law. So there's this literature arguing for benefits of common law over particularly French legal traditions. [ ] There’s this more recent 20, 30 year old econometric empirical literature arguing for some benefits. That literature is quite heavily criticized particularly by economic historians. So I don't want to put too much weight on it in a sense that there do seem to be some particular benefits to how financial markets might have developed better when you have common, or common just seems to protect shareholders better and things like that.

One weakness of that literature, I think, is they really emphasize legal origins. What's happened in the last 30 years is that there's actually been a lot of amalgamation of law. So Britain's a common law country but when it was part of the European Union, they actually imported in a lot of continental civil law. Similarly other countries-- So in Sub-Saharan Africa, you have countries with French civil law due to their county origins and countries with English common law due to their county origins. But over time they're just taking law from each other. So the difference is its shrinking. So there is literature on that. Now, how that relates to fixed constitutions versus living constitutions I actually haven't seen explored in the economic research. In general, my view is most countries follow the US. A lot of new countries or fresh democracies want to have a formal constitution. So I think Britain is almost on its own. It's quite rare in its living constitution. The power of the monarchy is far greater than anyone realizes. They didn't exercise any of those powers.

Ben (32:27):

Yeah. Okay. That's clear. So the common law arguments seem relatively weak although there is a literature on it. Property rights obviously important but not necessarily common law. The UK's a little bit odd in terms of its living constitution and actually still has ramifications now. So I know First Nations tribes and Aboriginal tribes in Australia and Canada are pulling out contracts that they made with the monarchy going back. There's some arguments around that which actually potentially have legal force so that is quite interesting. I guess that pivots me to another element you talk about and put some weight on, although it's a bit complicated around this kind of elements of culture and particularly interested in what you make of trust, because that comes up a lot; this ability to trust. I guess there's two or three things here.

One is, did you only have view on the kind of Quaker movement and this kind of handshake trust element and was that important or not? And then-- you touch on it briefly, the kind of so-called frontier culture in the US or perhaps that's like the building movement today. But I'm not sure whether that's just a nice story or if there is something more to it. But it does have something which actually Anton Howes has called about. This kind of innovation mindset or people who kind of tinkered or entrepreneurs around about particularly this first industrial revolution, but maybe the second as well. All of those kind of things together going making elements of cultural mindset. I was interested to know how much weight you put on that and what your view is. Some of the literature is obviously a bit mixed.

Mark (34:11):

So the way we view culture is through this language that Joseph Henrich  has pioneered, goes back to Hayek which is to see culture as a set of heuristics. So in a complex world we rely on heuristics, and these heuristics we've learned from others; even from our parents or from our peers. They're not fully rationalized, we can't fully rationalize. So who we trust is one of those things. Some people be more trusting than others. If you grew up in a more trusting society, you're probably going to trust more. So all else equal high levels of trust are going to be good for an economy because they just allow you to do things quicker. I'm going to assume you are going to go pay me for some service. 

We're not going to do everything as a spot exchange. We're not going to just assume that other people are going to play by rules. That actually lowers a lot of transaction costs. But of course, trust is endogenous. In an economy which is doing well, people are more likely to behave in a trustworthy manner. So there's a big econometric problem in disentangling causality. So trust is one example of a cultural trait and cultural traits we think of these have learned heuristics. So in a low trust environment, it could be in equilibrium. So if you're in a society where crime is rife, people are dishonest, you're going to be suspicious to people and your suspicion to people is going to make other people suspicious for you and it's going to be self-reinforcing.

That's a barrier to economic development and economic growth. In a British story, there does seem to be a role for religious minorities. So particularly Quakers in the industrial revolution. So people said, “Why was that? What gave them that advantage?” There's a story where trust gives them an edge in terms of expanding their businesses. So there are a lot of Quaker businesses in industrial revolution Britain. But I think it's plausible. It's hard to find... There's no econometric paper which nails this, but John McNair has written about it so I think it's plausible. Whether it's decisive is another matter as we've already mentioned. That's quite different to frontier culture that Americans are said to have, which is all about individualism, about going it alone and actually might have some plenty negative correlate.

So I think for scholars who did the frontier paper in these counties with more frontier people, there's lower take up of vaccines, for example. Cultural traits persist for long periods of time and they shape economic outcomes. So mindsets matter. Anton's stuff on innovation-- There does seem to be a cultural element to innovation for sure. If a lot of your peers are innovating, you're more likely to innovate. If everyone you know thinks very low risk jobs and doesn't push the boundary out then that's your incentive as well. So I do think a culture matters for innovation, for sure. It's not something you can pull a policy lever and just fix by lowering interest rate. It's something which is hard to see on the ground, but it matters.

Ben (37:51):

Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. So like you say, if trust is that foundational element, maybe you could argue in the frontier culture. If you're going under alone, you maybe have less trust as less of a community. Arguably, we could see what you say about Quakers. Then the heuristics, you kind of do what everyone else is doing. So people are innovating in that mindset. I think the Quaker piece is interesting because some of the stuff I've read suggest that they were kind of foundational an element such as the end of slavery within that. I was interested in some of your views about where social and moral progress may or may not fit in here. Maybe we can reiterate it again. Your reading of the literature is that slavery was actually quite small and probably didn't have such a huge role in terms of industrial revolution.

But I'm thinking if you've got slavery, if you think about maybe women's votes or women entering the work world more, maybe more modern day times you've got minority rights and things. So if we think about where we have a moral and social progress, does it run separately or does it interact? It obviously kind of helps some way and it probably has this complicated interaction. I'm not sure you can necessarily say which one comes first or they influence one another, but has anyone tried to look at this and has come up with anything which can actually be reasonably substantiated? Or I find it's probably quite a hard thing to know either counter contractual or have the data.

Mark (39:19):

It's very hard. No one's been able to do it yet. It's an interesting question. So I think in my book on religious toleration, most economists will tend to push more materialistic views of these things than non-economists. The very materialistic view about this is that when you're starving you're poor. The circle of people you can really care about is also pretty small. So if you're poor in medieval Europe, you're going to care about your immediate family and your neighbors and people in your village. You're not going to really care about people being enslaved in other parts of the world or other areas.

In England in the early modern period, people's moral circle was smaller. So the fact that slavery was atrocious and abominable, but it was happening in the Americas, it was happening in the Caribbean Islands and we're not seeing it, made it seem less bad to the British at least. The materialist view would be to say like, “It's only when you get rich enough, you get some surplus income and you're no longer thinking about where your next meal is coming from, then you have the resources to think about wider moral issues.” So that's a very materialistic view. It's to say, first you need to some economic growth to get going. Then as you get richer, you're going to care more about people who are not in your immediate circle.

That materialistic view I think to a large degree is quite true, but it's also missing a lot of things as well. It is missing a cultural story. The cultural story would say that probably something like Christianity is at the root of this because Christianity does teach a particular moral code, but then it had to be implemented by groups who were fairly radical and willing to go against a conventional wisdom. So because Christianity emerged in a world where slavery was just ubiquitous and inevitable, early church fathers reconciled themselves to the existence of slavery even though it goes against the idea that people are equal and they all have a soul. So it took a group like the Quakers to really think that this was abominable. They were far out from mainstream Protestants and Catholics in all their views.

They're pacifists, they believe in religious freedom, they're willing to be ostracized and punished for this. So the Quakers are important in this moral revolution that happens in the 18th and 19th centuries, and then they may manage to convey their revolutionary further to other people; both religious and secular in a way that generates the abolition movement. It's fascinating. So clearly the materialistic story I gave you isn't sufficient. It’s part of the story, but it doesn't quite capture what's going on with abolitionism.

Ben (42:25):

That makes a lot of sense.

Mark (42:30):

I think it helps that the people in the south can't become abolitionist in some... It's harder for them to be abolitionist in the following sense. They grow up with slavery. Say the south of the US; the Confederate states, they grow up with slavery. They even know about all the crimes of it and all the horrific things. They can't judge their friends and family who are slave owners too harshly. It's hard for them to do so. Morally, if your dad and mom own slaves and so does your cousin, even if you don't think slavery is a good idea, it's a bad institution, it's hard for you to accept the world view which says that your parents are criminals. So it's easier for the northerners and for the British who live in Britain to think of slave owners in the Caribbean, of slave owners in Virginia and to develop that set of views against slavery. And then they can convince other people. So I think it's a fascinating topic, but it's not one that economists are best place to solve. It's going to be difficult to track the change in cultural values. Maybe there's a way to do it looking at abolitionist newspapers or looking at using text search. Maybe someone could scan thousands of documents and see how abolitionist sentiment arises over time and where it arises.

Ben (43:55):

That's one for the puzzle PhD or postdoc students out there. Yeah, I can see that. So these cultural qualities are hard to measure, hard to get a sense of and therefore falls out of a lot of economics today. But I do hear you on your narrative of saying, "Well, you need to have a certain level of richness maybe as a prerequisite, but then you also need some cultural change story maybe by a minority or wherever it comes from." So like you had richer nations before that haven't maybe had a prerequisite, but you need that narrative as well. 

That has made me to reflect if you fast forward to today and I think particularly around climate and those externalities and maybe around about inequality as well. If those lessons still hold, it seems to me that you would then need nations to become extremely rich, everyone to be as rich as possible, and then also need a narrative about how important that might be. Actually, that maybe sort of fits today. You got some people with that narrative, but you also have innovation and the techno optimist or realist saying like, "No, we need to be wealthier or we will be wealthier to handle this." So it kind of even fits today. I don't know what you had any thoughts about the climate piece or maybe the inequality piece about fast forwarding that, because obviously it wasn't such an issue a few hundred years ago.

Mark (45:23):

Yeah. I think it works with climate change. You need some level of moral universalism. People in rich countries care about climate change and they are willing to pay a price. People don't want to pay a price if they think they're the only ones paying it. So that's why it's hard to cut down your own emissions without too much if you think everyone is also sacrificing. But people in rich countries are willing to pay through taxes, they're willing to accept that. That reflects moral universalism. In fact, they're rich, but it's much harder to sway people in poor countries to sacrifice economic growth to reduce their emissions. So that's certainly the case. I think inequality is a little bit of a different story so I'll leave it there. It's got different motivations I think in a quite bit moral universalism which motivates concern about the slave trade, concern about genocide in other countries, or concern about climatic catastrophes.

Ben (46:29):

Sure. Okay. That makes sense. Maybe skipping back or one thing on going back to the history part, I read your book is kind of suggesting that the role of war was maybe via second order impacts on technology and the like, rather than war in and itself in terms of its contribution to economic growth and technology and things. Do I read that right and what is your thoughts about all of the wars that we used to have?

Mark (47:03):

Well, there's a view where war is good for economic growth and I think that's wrong mostly because war is probably destructive. We're seeing that in the Ukraine right now. Some of that comes to this misplaced Keynesian notion that war gets the economy product revved up which is just bad Keynesianism. Then it also comes from the fact during the 20th century, there have been important spillovers from particularly American military innovation is spilled over to the domestic sector. So that's true, there have been spillovers. But I'm not aware of such spillovers for the pre-industrial period. So net war is probably bad, but then there's this argument the war is weeding out weaker states or war is encouraging urbanization or war is prompting in some sense, certain change which is good for growth. The destructive effects of war are probably the more important ones, but of course without the pressure of war, you wouldn't get a lot of institutional changes that we talk about.

So that's where war comes in. You're weeding out weaker policies and that is a proving ground for certain institutions. That's what happens in Britain like the Glorious Revolution. All these institutions are really driven by competition with other powers particularly France.

Ben (48:36):

Yeah. And maybe helps drive representative democracy and all of these other impacts. I could see that. So if you had another mechanism which could achieve the same ends, you'd definitely want to choose that over war. And maybe is that also going back to some of your earlier work on the Black Death, because obviously that's simply like a bad thing happens and maybe you get these short run impacts, but maybe the second order on institutions. What do you find was most misunderstood or you find most surprising on your work on the Black Death? I guess you made the Black Death able to be one of these kind of discontinuity type of semi causal type of experiments. What did you find there?

Mark (49:21):

Well, the main story of the Black Death is obviously 40% of the population die so you massively change the labor capital land ratios. I don't know if we're revolutionizing our understanding of Black Death. More is clarifying. You could take what I would call crude Malthusian view where the Black Death is just great. This is kind of the view Gregory Clark promotes in his book, “A Farewell to Alms.”  It’s great, real wages soar, peasants get tweet and it’s all great which is kind of strange given that. If you care about living standards in general, you care about your life expectancy, you care about life expectancy of your friends and families. So this elevation of a death rate was probably pretty horrible for overall living quality even if your income and wages go up. The increase in wages actually took some time to take place.

It was to some partially offset by disintermediation over all economies; a decline in trade and so on. But it's still true. It's still true that wages did go up. It just took several decades to do so. So it wasn't like an instant adjustment. Wages did go up and it did eventually produce something of a golden age for those workers who survived. So I don't think there we're overturning the caricature of the Black Death. It's not just clarifying it. For example, it took until the 1370s for real wages to really start rising in England. So Black Death a watershed moment? I have to admit I'm still unsure about this after all this research on it. There are scholars who argue that the origins of both the great divergence between Europe and Asia and the little divergence within Europe can be trained through a Black Death. We discuss those arguments but I'm not sure if I really fully endorse them. We have a paper under review right now looking at the impact of city growth on the Black Death and we don't find evidence for a total reset of European economy. So that's a bit of a partial answer, but that's what I feel about it currently.

Ben (51:40):

Yeah. Okay. So not the feel and end all. I guess this refers to also some your stuff on geographies. It's definitely a factor, but it's certainly not the be all and end all and you can see this with various geographic things. Well, I thought we'd maybe do a short section on overrated and underrated if you’re game, and then end with a couple of questions. So you can do a quick answer or you can pass or make some comments. We just got three or four. So overrated or underrated, GDP as a measure?

Mark (52:13):

I think underrated now. The HDI (Human Development Index) of the other measures just correlate with GDP very well. We have a few exceptions like you have golf states which are very unequal and do badly on some of the other aspects. Basically GDP is good. Growth is good. All the criticisms and caveats that people have, they're not that important relative. The overall message with GDP is good, growth is good, and ordinarily people underrate how good it is.

Ben (52:46):

That seems fair. I guess that probably means you underweight maybe natural capital and happiness researchers then actually just correlates with GDP.

Mark (52:55):

Yeah, basically. 

Ben (52:58):

Great. Carbon tax or carbon pricing?

Mark (53:00):

I think it's underrated because it's seen as like a political economy, like no go error, especially in the US. It tends to say carbon tax failed. I tend to think that a lot of the policy mistakes over the last 20 years which goes to housing as well, have been maybe due to politicians failing to lead in a way that maybe they could have done. I'm not an expert on politics. I'm intentionally naive on this. But I kind of think that sometimes politicians are too differential to be electorate and they're too differential to the media. So they're too differential in the UK to the BBC and to the way BBC phrase things. So getting onto current politics I guess now, I think it's refreshing to have government policy where they're just like, "No, this is what we think. We could be wrong and it could be disastrous. This is what we think. You've elected us. This is what we're going to do in some sense."

So I think carbon taxes should just have been-- I think that you should have had politicians brave enough to campaign on them, run on them in their elections and say, "We're going to implement a carbon tax and we're going to make it revenue neutral. So we're going to cut income tax and charge carbon taxes." It just didn't pull well. People don't like the idea of paying more for energy or more for petrol gasoline so they don't get implemented. In the US they're seen as this neoliberal elitist policy. So both Republicans hate them and Bernie Sanders democrats hate them. So that's why there's a coalition against them. But I feel that politicians need to listen to experts more and they need to trust experts and risk political careers. This is a bit of a tangent away from the context specifically and away from history.

American politics is a little bit different so I won't comment on that. But if you look at British politicians, they have very short shelf lives. David Cameron and George Osborne are not old; they're young, relatively. They've been out of office now for like six, seven years and it doesn't look like either of them will ever get a political comeback. So we're not in the age of political comebacks. Tony Blair had an amazing opportunity and did a lot and reformed many things, but didn't reform maybe as much as he wanted to.

He was out of office when he was in his early fifties, I believe. No political comeback for him. Rishi Sunak, again, super young may not ever come back into headline politics. So if you have a current chancellor or Prime Minister, in some sense, if you really genuinely believe your policies are best for the country, you might as well implement them. If they don't work or if you get punished at the polls and you lose the election, in some sense so what? Your shelf life is short anyway if you look at all our recent political leaders. None of them have come back in frontline politics unlike in the age of  Gladstone or Disraeli or Churchill. 

Ben (56:23):

Yeah. There's a part of me which agrees because particularly in the UK, we don't have midterms. So you have your four or five years, probably that's it. You might as well do it. My two big things would be carbon tax and actually building on the green belt. It shouldn't even be called the green belt. It's mostly brown belt. That's because there's relatively few things that actually you can get 80 to 90% of economists to agree upon. We talked a little bit about this in history. There's always balance and nuance. But in the UK, 80 to 90% of economists agree on a carbon tax and actually give the revenue back some way while they're dividend or tax cut so you can make it revenue neutral. And actually, most people agree on a lot of the green belt is really useless and you should build houses on it. So when your technocrats have that degree of consensus, you should probably listen to them. Other things obviously is a bit more 50/50, but that's kind of fine. Okay, a last couple on here then. Thinking about innovation then, do you like these innovation institutions like DARPA? Here in the UK we have ARIA. You got H-ARPA and things like that; overrated or underrated?

Mark (57:33):

I think I have to pass on that one because I don't know enough about them.

Ben (57:37):

Sure. That's fine. We'll pass. And then current governance mechanisms. So current mechanisms of representative democracy. Let's maybe just say UK or US. Do you think they're about right or overrated or underrated?

Mark (57:49):

Overrated. Something obviously is a bit broken in the system right now in both US and UK in different ways. I touched on it earlier. In both countries on different margins there have been major policy failures in the last two decades. I'm not saying I was smarter than anyone else. I'm not saying I would've made better decisions than anyone in office, but I suppose we can say there've been major governance failures. So I think we have to think about how these work. One example which is just obvious and I think everyone agrees with though we don't know what the solution is, is that it's really hard to be a politician, particularly it seems as a British MP in the age of social media.

You get a lot of hate mail. You get really hassled by crazy people. So if you're a British MP, you don't want to build on the green belt if your constituent is in the green belt. They can make your life hell if you do something they don't want you to do. So there does seem to be an issue with how our democracies are functioning in terms of delivering good policies. I don't have a solution for how to improve it, but I think people should be willing to think about it. People will differ a lot on what the proposals are. I know in the UK, for example, more than 10 years ago, there were discussions about proportional representation of the alternative vote which may or may not have been good. My views on that change. But I think we should be open to the idea that we don't have the best system. We could improve.

Ben (59:46):

That seems fair. But you don't have any intuition about what you might experiment with.

Mark (59:50):

Well, in the British case, the House of Lords is pointless right now because it's purely advisory and it's purely filled with ex politicians. On the face of it you have basically a parliamentary dictatorship because parliament gets whatever it wants. But on the other hand, there seems to be a struggle that you get policies through. I don't know exactly what to do there, but it seems not quite right. The thing I mentioned on social media, politicians are not experienced enough. They seem to leave office too quickly. There are plenty of effective cabinet ministers from the Cameron and Osborne era who basically left politics in 20 after Brexit. Then you replaced some with a bunch of people who were [Johnson , May]…  very few survivors. So I felt in the British case compared to even 1990s, you don't get longevity of cabinet ministers. People move around so much so they don't get expertise in their role. So there are a lot of small things I would consider.

Ben (01:01:04):

Yeah. My radical solutions would be something to do with the Upper House here in the UK. Something like give them a single 10 year term or a single 10 year term with a five year extension. So it's longer, but kind of limited. So they feel like, "Okay, 10 years we can get something done, but we're only going to get those things done." You have to be elected or some sort of thing. The second really controversial one is I would slim down the number of MPs but I would pay them a lot more. No one likes this. I would even pay them whatever it is. Whatever you think it is to be the equivalent CEO of your mini state. Maybe that's even a million pounds. People would probably really want to do it for a million pounds. But maybe like they do in Singapore, if there's any graph or any bribery, maybe you have to evoke the monarchy. That would be treason and you go to jail for a really long time. It's unacceptable to have this second job graph thing, but will pay you a lot of money. Therefore, if you are a poor person or have some other radical ideas, you could be, "Well, a million pounds would be life changing and means that more people could go for that." Hopefully you would get better talent. Maybe it's too materialistic, but I do think incentives matter and we don't pay them very well.

Mark (01:02:13):

I do think there's a huge, weird difference in the British system between your average local MP who stands up in PM queues and just says something stupid about their local constituents. They're like, "My local constituents really want to park basically." Sorry, we're going totally off topic. I'm in danger of ranting. So the locale MPs are really fixated on local issues and have no training or expertise in what's going on at a larger scale. They don't have access to high quality advisors or so on. So they really are quite trivial in terms of what their concerns are. Then being a cabinet minister-- Suddenly you get to be the cabinet minister and you're in charge of a national health service. How can one person be in charge of a national health service? It's like the science of a small country basically. It's got so many issues, so many complexities. So the idea that you can go just from being an MP to that position, it seems wrong. I think bigger constituencies, less localism might be a way forward. I'm just totally speculating.

Ben (01:03:18):

On the NHS as well, they generally have neither healthcare training nor economic training nor healthcare economics trainings which is a huge profession in itself. So last one on the overrated, underrated; universal basic income, UBI?

Mark (01:03:35):

So I think that's overrated right now at least by its proponents because de facto... Well, two things. Firstly, I think work is an important component of human existence. On the one hand I appreciate the idea of it. It could allow people to pursue work they're passionate about whether it's like podcasting or YouTubing or something like that. But I do worry it could just support indolence. I also think that its de facto will not replace... Milton Friedman’s idea of a negative income tax was to replace all over welfare and really to slim down all other programs and replace it with something like UBI. I think in principle that would be potentially an improvement. But in practice, it's not going to be like that. It's going to be another form of welfare and I just wouldn't focus on it basically.

Ben (01:04:28):

That makes sense. Would you prefer a universal basic infrastructure? That's something that Diane Coyle who's also been on the podcast has mentioned. Or maybe more controversially, I hear sometimes a kind of job guarantee system have no idea how that would work but to get around this problem about actually jobs do mean something to people.

Mark (01:04:48):

Yeah. I'm not too in favor of a job guarantee because I think it's too much messing with market incentives. I don't know what Diane Coyle means by the universal right to infrastructure, but I think that you want people to not fall below basic minimum which is set by your society. So it's going to be higher in a richer country than in a poorer country. You don't want that to have too many disincentives to work. So in that sense, maybe some basic payment could be justified but it would have to be small. The problem is there's always a tradeoff between setting the incentives not to penalize people who want to work, and also not penalizing people who cannot work. But in some sense you can't square the circle.

Ben (01:05:42):

Yeah, that makes sense.

Mark (01:05:45):

The current UK welfare reform seems to be in the right direction. I know they're unpopular but I can't remember what they're called, which are trying to minimize the tax incentive you face from going from welfare to work. I think that's important to any scheme.

Ben (01:06:01):

Yeah. It is a universal benefit. I think Diane Coyle meant by infrastructure essentially very good public services. So rather than give people income, you're giving people a more equal opportunity. It's that sort of concept. So final two questions. One is, are there any current projects you're working on you'd like to share or anything we haven't mentioned that you want to highlight?

Mark (01:06:27):

Well, I've got a Templeton Grant with Desiree (Desierto) this year-- that’s my wife. We’re working on the origins of liberal institutions in England; which was not just us. We have several graduate students at GMU as well. So that's a big project, but it won't come to fruition for several years because it's really in the data collection stage. So that's the first thing that comes to mind. I've got some other projects on things we've touched on like the Black Death. This one on liberal institutions. Basically from Norman Conquest, Magna Carta all the way up to Glorious revolution. So it's very historical, but it's going to be more data intensive than anyone's done on all those topics, I think. So it's quite ambitious. That's the big project.

Ben (01:07:14):

That sounds really exciting. I was recently speaking to Jacob Soll (Jake Soll), and he put a lot of weight on thinkers thinking about Cicero influencing these institutions. But anyway, there seems to be a lot there.

Mark (01:07:27):

Yeah. It's a more history of ideas way of thinking about it. People have asked us if we are going to integrate it with a history of ideas. In principle I'm open to that. I like reading about Cicero and so on, but it's not something… Even though I like that stuff, my research tends to be more on the material side of things.

Ben (01:07:47):

You like the data?

Mark (01:07:48):

Yeah.

Ben (01:07:51):

Great. And then last question. Do you have any life advice you'd like to share or maybe you could have an advice for a policymaker for one policy-- although it sounds like your policy is carbon tax and maybe we discuss that. Or maybe advice for other people who are interested in becoming an economic scholar and the route you've taken. So any career or life advice you want to share?

Mark (01:08:15):

I'm not sure I'm the best person to ask. It's easy that we put amazing resources online. So podcasts; everything is online basically. The young person who's ambitious and interested can actually get to speed quickly. So you can teach yourself econometrics by watching tons of YouTube videos. Most people won't because there's other stuff to watch on YouTube, there's other stuff to do. I could be teaching myself foreign languages on YouTube and I'm not doing it because my opportunity costs I guess is maybe high. But if you're young and wanted to study this stuff, you can get a huge head start just by use of the internet cleverly. Tyler Cowen’s advice is find the right mentors. Find some people and learn from them. But you get a huge amount early on to give yourself a head start before you go to university because to be honest, the university experience isn't necessarily going to be all that growth. It depends on where you go. You don't know what you'll get into and you'll be distracted by other things. So I would start early and try and learn as much as possible on your own and then you can be ready for your PhD program by the time you're an undergrad.

Ben (01:09:43):

Okay. That makes a lot of sense. So basically, use YouTube and the internet very well. Did Tyler interview you coming through? Did you have a classic difficult Tyler question?

Mark (01:09:55):

Yeah. He interviewed me for my job; this job, but a long time ago now. To be honest, his questions-- I can't remember exactly how I did. He asked some good questions. Yeah, of course.

Ben (01:10:07):

Nothing really tricky that you remember to this day.

Mark (01:10:11):

One of his questions was, “What's the most important thing in economic history?” Then when I said what it was and it wasn't exactly what I was working on, "Why aren't you working on it?"

Ben (01:10:23):

That's tough. At least said, “Well, now I've written a book,” so…

Mark (01:10:28):

I just said I was. Basically, my answer was just what I was working on indirectly shed light—although it’s really important thing, even if it wasn't it. I can't remember all the others, but he obviously asks sharp questions although they're slightly different I think the ones you ask in those days, the ones you asks now.

Ben (01:10:47):

Do you still think it's the same, the most important thing in economic history today?

Mark (01:10:51):

Yeah. I basically said the question of his book, “The origins of economic growth.”

Ben (01:11:02):

Yeah and you've written on a book on it. I do think maybe you should extend it slightly into thinking about what the lessons might be for today, but I guess that's for the forecasters to think. But I think it's really intriguing because the way you put it all together and it has made me think about some of these things that if you go back to some of the historical roots, that maybe some of them you could just do more of or maybe radically more of and we should try that. So I highly recommend everyone listening to get a hold of the copy of the book available from the internet and all good bookstores and the like. Mark, thank you very much for joining me.

Mark (01:11:41):

Thanks Ben. Yeah, it's been a pleasure.