The Rational Optimist (P.S.)

by Matt Ridley

In 1300, Europe was probably on a trajectory towards a labour-intensive ‘industrious’ revolution of diminishing returns. Remember the miller of Feering who halved his wage by sharing his job with his son in the 1290s? Or consider the women who were paid half what their menfolk earned when they carried water (for making mortar) to the site of a new windmill being constructed at Dover Castle in 1294. No doubt they were delighted to have a job and earn a little cash, but they came so cheap they provided their employer with an incentive not to buy a cart and bullock. Yet by 1400, Europe had partly switched to a labour-saving ‘industrial’ trajectory instead, and the pattern was repeated after the cold and brutal seventeenth century, when famine, plague and war once more reduced the European population: in 1692–4, perhaps 15 per cent of all French people starved to death. Unlike Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, Mexico, Peru, China and Rome, early modern Europe became capital-intensive, not labour-intensive. That capital was used to get work out of animals, rivers and breezes, rather than people. Europe was, in Joel Mokyr’s words, ‘the first society to build an economy on non-human power rather than on the backs of slaves and coolies’.