In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes considers the oddity that as the British economy expanded during the early Industrial Revolution, each new discovery had less and less direct impact on the economy as a whole:
What this means is that when there were even some slight improvements in agriculture alone, the effects on living standards could be dramatic. But absent such improvements, a rich culture of innovation affecting everything from clothes to watches to books, wine, glassware, metals, and pottery would have been almost entirely masked from the figures. Importantly, the same applies not only to the composition of average notional consumption baskets, but to the contributions of different sectors to the economy as a whole. While the total amount of food has increased dramatically for the past few hundred years, for example, agriculture’s share of the economy steadily fell (from over 40% of the English economy in 1600, and an even greater share of total employment, to less than 1% today, with a similar trend repeated worldwide). So the relative importance of your typical agricultural innovation for overall growth rates has fallen dramatically. Perhaps it’s no wonder that twentieth-century agricultural pioneers like Norman Borlaug still don’t really get their due.
The same goes, more recently, for manufacturing. The reason the textbooks always name Kay, Hargreaves, Crompton, Cartwright and Arkwright, is because they made improvements to what was already one of the most important sectors of the economy: textiles. In the eighteenth century, textiles as a whole accounted for a whopping 16-17% of the British economy. So any growth in the value of wool, linen, and increasingly cotton goods, had an appreciable impact on overall economic growth. Today, by contrast, you’d be hard pressed to find many sectors that account for even 5% of the country’s economy (except construction, and possibly financial services, depending on how broadly you define them). And while Britain may have long lost its role as the workshop of the world, textile production in China today still only accounts for about 7% of the country’s economy. To put it another way, the modern Arkwrights and Cartwrights and Cromptons of China, to have any comparable effect on national statistics, would have to make productivity improvements to their industry that are at least three times as impressive.
And impressive they are, though you won’t have heard of them. Arkwright and Crompton multiplied the number of threads that a single machine could spin, from one to dozens. Today, thread is spun by the thousands, at speeds they could have scarcely comprehended, and with entire factories hardly needing a single pair of human hands. Automatic sensors monitor the yarn’s tension and detect any defects while it is being spun, with robots even whizzing along to repair any snaps, able to find a loose end and piece the yarn together again — a task that once required the nimble fingers of small children. From an eighteenth-century perspective, our textile machines routinely now do magic, and are getting ever more fantastical every day. Imagine showing Arkwright the use of lasers in fading and cutting jeans.
But by replacing human labour, innovation has become ever more hidden. Many people don’t realise that British manufacturing is actually larger and more valuable than ever. It’s just that it employs fewer people than ever, so hardly anybody gets to witness its great strides forwards (to witness a flavour of manufacturing’s modern marvels, I recommend checking out MachinePix).
And more importantly, the overall effect of each innovation has also been steadily diluted — itself the result of growth. Innovation has, in a sense, been the victim of its own success. By creating ever more products, sprouting new industries, and diversifying them into myriad specialisms, we have shrunk the impact that any single improvement can have. When cotton was king, a handful of inventors might hope to affect the entire national textile industry in some way. Nowadays, there’s not a chance. Doubling the productivity of cotton spinning is all well and good, but what about nylon, polyester, rayon, and the host of other fibres we have since invented? And which kind of spinning machine would you improve? An old-fashioned ring-spinner, a newer rotor spinner, or perhaps even one of the brand new air-jet types?
If you make an improvement, it’s not going to be to the industry as a whole — it’ll be specific. And actually improvements have always been specific; it’s just that the industries have since multiplied and narrowed. Inventors once made drops into a puddle, but the puddle then expanded into an ocean. It doesn’t make the drops any less innovative. This paradox of progress affects all innovation, such that it is no wonder that the number of researchers has been increasing while national-level productivity growth has appeared fairly stagnant. Even general-purpose technologies, like the recent dramatic improvements to telecommunications, computing, and software, have had a muted effect, being applied more slowly than we’d have liked. I expect that all future general-purpose technologies will fare even worse, for it takes still further effort and innovation to apply a technology to a given industry, and those industries will continue to multiply. All future general-purpose technologies, that is, except improvements to energy.
