------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------
Published by EH.NET (December 2006)
Vaclav Smil, _Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations
of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact_. Oxford: Oxford University
Press 2005. vi + 350 pp. $35 (hardcover), ISBN: 0-19-516874-4.
Vaclav Smil, _Transforming the Twentieth Century: Technical
Innovations and Their Consequences_. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2006. vi +358 pp. $45 (hardcover), ISBN: 0-19-516875-5.
Reviewed for EH.NET by Joel Mokyr, Departments of Economics and
History, Northwestern University.
It is hard to describe in a short sentence the kind of intellectual
that Vaclav Smil represents. Professor of Geography and Environmental
Science (whatever that exactly embodies) at the University of
Manitoba, he has produced in the past decades an incessant stream of
books on the technological developments of the modern age and their
significance. Of those, my favorite is _Enriching the Earth_, in
which he made the plausible case that the Haber-Bosch
ammonia-producing process should be regarded as the invention that
was as epochal as it was paradigmatic of the twentieth century. The
ammonia process provided in abundance the food that was necessary if
humanity was to be able to do other things and sustain even growing
numbers at the same time.[1] Other books by him have discussed the
energy revolution and the earth's biosphere. In these two volumes,
Smil sums up what he has learned about what made the modern age. His
scholarship mocks the boundaries that separate history from
economics, geography from technology studies. He is unusually adept
at combining his knowledge of how techniques actually work with his
ability to illustrate their overall effects on society and the human
condition.
The amount of pure learning and erudition that Smil brings to these
700 pages has to be experienced to be believed. In telling the story
of modern technology since 1870 in a coherent way these 700 pages
totally eclipse the competition.[2] Smil's writing, richly but not
excessively illustrated, with a keen eye for the telling anecdote,
the right illustrative number, makes his points with an eloquence and
authority that has become all too rare in a world of technical
scholarship in which hypothesis testing has taken precedence over a
good narrative. While the narrative inevitably concerns the big
breakthroughs, there are neat and cleverly presented little case
studies of inventors who are anything but household names: George de
Mestral, the Swiss inventor of Velcro, or Nils Bohlin, the inventor
of the car seatbelt. Yet these books are anything but coffee table
readings. They are thoughtful, analytical, even pensive at times.
Smil full-well understands the environmental impact that the age of
energy has had on the planet that unleashed it, and worries, like the
rest of us, about nightmarish scenarios of the kind that Albert Gore
has recently brought to every thinking person's home in America.
These volumes, in this reviewer's judgment, establish Vaclav Smil as
another entry in a list of illustrious and erudite scholars whose
main competence is in the History of Technology, yet who were able to
lift themselves out of the quagmire of old gears and cogs to see a
bigger picture, a picture of humanity struggling with the harshness
of the environment and the niggardliness of nature, the deviousness
of germs and the sheer violence of natural disasters. Other masters
in this genre, familiar to every trained economic historian are A.P.
Usher, David Landes, Donald Cardwell, Nathan Rosenberg, and Arnold
Pacey. The big picture produced by Smil, it should be added, is more
about the immediate effects of technology than about what it did to
the economy. Smil is not much interested in the standard things that
economic historians do: he uses patents for illustration (and
ridicule) but does not count them, he seems to have little regard for
national income statistics, and he has very mixed views about our
ability to measure progress through total productivity. He does not
engage in social savings calculations, and his interest in the
economic models that explain economic growth is rather limited.
Intellectual property rights and economic incentives hardly figure in
his story at all. Oddly enough, then, this is a book that gives to
economic history much more than it takes from it.
There is no real explanation of what happened. Smil's view of
technology is that it is all rather inevitable; when the ideas are
there and have been tested, "subsequent advances appear to have the
inexorability of water flowing downhill" (I, p. 280). In the context
of the Western economies after 1870 this view seems to make sense,
but in fact history is full of examples in which technology did
indeed freeze in its tracks for long periods, to be revived only when
some further breakthrough or social change allowed it do so. Smil
does not stress enough, to the taste of this reviewer, that the
Western World (later to include a few Asian Tigers) was a highly
unusual economic environment, in which a large number of factors had
come together that were absent almost anywhere else. Conditional on
that environment, progress may seem inevitable. But there was nothing
inexorable about the technological blast-off in the West that is
described in Volume I.[3] Indeed, Smil here and there seems to be
subconsciously given to what is known as "hindsight bias" -- the
notion that what happened had to happen. He has little interest in
techniques that might have been but were not: the airship -- a rather
substantial technological achievement at the time -- does not get a
mention, presumably because it did not make it. The electric car is
dismissed in one short paragraph and the steam car deserves no
mention at all, even hydroelectric power barely gets two paragraphs
(I, pp. 90-91). For Smil, history is definitely written backwards:
start with what we have now and see where it came from. Let the
economic historian who is without this sin cast the first reprint.
The two volumes here start in the late 1860s and take us all the way
to the present. The first volume is dedicated to illustrate one
central proposition: that the period between 1867 and 1914 -- the age
that most of us refer to in our classes as the second Industrial
Revolution and which Smil calls the "age of synergy" -- was the age
in which the technological foundations of twentieth century
developments were laid. These two generations invented most of the
technology that twentieth century growth was built upon.
The second volume proceeds to tell the tale of how these seeds
blossomed, in the post 1914 period, into the kind of technology that
has transformed our world. Not much in these chapters will surprise a
practicing economic historian teaching the origins of economic
growth, but no one in our profession, I venture, is familiar with the
enormous detail of technological progress that Smil provides on the
sectors he is interested in. Technological progress, more than any
other topic in economics, has had a certain black-box kind of nature.
It is supposed to be somehow emerging as the result of the right kind
of incentives and investment in human capital and R&D. It enjoys
increasing returns, suffers from market failure, and in general is
approximated by total factor productivity figures, patent data, and
social savings computations if feasible. Smil puts a great deal of
factual flesh and blood on that skimpy skeleton. Inside the black box
of technological change, as he shows so richly, was a complex world
of ambitious and curious creators, and greedy businessmen hoping to
profit from their innovations. In the end, the consumer was the one
that benefited by far the most, but, as Smil stresses, at a price.
These two volumes are not quite tantamount to a full history of
technology in the second Industrial Revolution and the twentieth
century. Smil is interested in energy and materials, and devotes a
great deal to these favorite topics. In his picture of the world, so
to speak, given enough energy and materials, we can lift the
earth.[4] He also devotes much space to information processing and
communications. When all is said and done, he argues, what sets our
modern age apart is it consumption of fossil-fuel burning energy,
which increased from 22 EJ/year to 320 EJ/year (an EJ, as some
digging will reveal, is an exajoule or 10 to the 18th joules, or a
very large number of very small units of energy). The average
American household today, he reflects, commands about 500 kW, as much
energy as a Roman landlord with 6,000 strong slaves (II, p. 260) but
without the management hassles. Energy drove everything, but, as Smil
reflects wistfully, it also is the Achilles heel of the entire
system. There is also a long chapter on "rationalized production" in
Volume II, and the development of mass production, Taylorism,
Fordism, and TPS (Toyota Production System -- Smil loves acronyms,
one of the few faults in his otherwise highly engaging writing
style). There are some major advances that are left out, such as
pharmaceuticals, genetic engineering, textiles, and civil engineering
to name a few, but the areas he covers are so important and the
coverage so competent and persuasive, that these are minor flaws.
Underneath this improved use of energy and new materials, of course,
was something deeper: better knowledge of natural processes and
regularities, pure science, better mathematics, improved engineering,
and networks of scientists and people of knowledge who distributed
and applied a growing body of useful knowledge that made all this
possible.
The two volumes are structured in similar way: the core of each
consists of four chapters on specific areas of technology, preceded
by an introductory chapter, and followed by two concluding chapters.
The core chapters do not follow exactly the same pattern, but the
overlap reflects Smil's interest and expertise. Much of the two
volumes is dedicated to reproducing over and over the hockey stick
effect, namely that somewhere around the end of the nineteenth
century the world started to change at a high and accelerating rate
compared to which the rest of human history looks rather flat.[5]
Smil's hockey stick numbers are quite mind-numbing due to his
virtuoso ability to pick numbers that really illustrate his points.
To demonstrate the fact that new technology was biased toward
destruction, for instance, he points out that the kinetic energy of a
World War I shrapnel shell was about 50,000 times that of a
prehistoric hunter's stone tipped arrow but the Soviet 100 Megaton of
1961 was 140 billion times that of the shell (II, p. 295).
In the somewhat tedious debate between "gradualists" and
"saltationists" -- again, a discussion that every economic historian
knows well from the Industrial Revolution literature -- Smil takes a
firm position with the saltationists, and is not coy in actually
using the term saltation. He cites H.G. Wells as noting that this was
the greatest change that humanity has ever undergone, and while there
was no single "shock," neither is there one at daybreak. This
observation, reminiscent of the statement attributed to Edmund Burke
that he could not tell when day ends and night begins, but he surely
could tell one from the other, represents Smil's saltationism. His
view is that between 1867 and 1914 more changed in human control over
their environment and their ability to manipulate natural
regularities than ever before or after, or in his own felicitous
phrase (I, p. 13), "the pre World War I innovations tumbled in at a
frenzied pace." Many of the great advances in productivity and
product innovation were building on the discoveries of these two
generations of miracles.
Much of what is wrong with the modern age is summarized by Smil in a
citation from H.G. Wells from 1905 (I. p. 312): "were our political
and social and moral devices only as well contrived to their ends as
the linotype machine, an antiseptic operating plant, or an electric
streetcar, there need now be ... only the smallest fraction of the
pain, the fear, and the anxiety that now makes human life so doubtful
in value."[6] In general, Smil argues, this is what bedevils the
advances in technology, not the technology itself. In the closing
chapters of Volume II, his earlier techno-enthusiasm seems to have
cooled. Until July 1914, it seems, the human race was on a path
toward progress, but then it all fell apart through violence,
destruction, and collective irrationality. However, Smil is not
blaming only politics and institutions for the wrong turns that
technology has taken, he also pours disdain on some private
decisions. For instance, he does not like cars. If a sapient
extraterrestrial civilization observed the earth they would see that
"wheeled organisms, besides killing annually one million bipeds ...
were also responsible for very rapid climatic change and make life
for the bipeds increasingly precarious" (II, p. 266). Elsewhere he
heaps scorn on SUV's referring to them as ridiculously oversized,
incongruous and wasteful machines (II, p. 207). Above all, he notes
caustically that all the technological disasters that the twentieth
century was supposed to have inflicted are dwarfed by smoking and
excessive eating, and cites a study that notes that most supposedly
negative consequences of technology are the result of lifestyle
choice rather than environment factors caused by technical advances
(II, p. 294).
There are only two serious risks that the "Great Synergy" has brought
about that he thinks are worth talking about, the proven risk of
armed conflicts between technologically-advanced societies, and
global warming. On both of this he sounds concerned, but not
alarmist. At the end of the day he concedes that the energy-intensive
society that the 1880s and 1890s created cannot be sustained. He does
not tell us how society can move away from this flawed system, and at
times he equivocates. Thus he concludes after much fascinating
technical detail in his survey of the nuclear industry that the
twentieth century use of fission for electricity generation was a
"successful failure" (II, p. 63), technologically successful but too
costly. It is hard to see it this way from Smil's own account,
because nuclear power was the only large-scale energy generation
system that does not contribute to global warming, and was probably
much cheaper than the solar, wind- and tidal sources that are
currently discussed.
Smil is measured and balanced even when he discusses distinct
technophobes like Ivan Illich and Jacques Ellul, and while he dubs
Illich "an unorthodox thinker," he does not engage Illich's
well-known neo-Luddite views. Smil himself is no Luddite. He is
deeply impressed by the triumphs of modern technology, as he
demonstrates over and over again. He knows full well that the
technophobes' notions of the serenity of pre-industrial pastoral life
is a risible cartoon, and that the view that industrialization
deepened, rather than relieved, human misery, is "indefensible" (I,
p. 299). But he is too smart and too learned to be a triumphalist. In
the end, his judgment remains ambiguous and full of contradictions,
much like the tale he tells so well.
Notes:
1. Vaclav Smil, _Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and
the Transformation of World Food Production_. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2001.
2. The closest are Trevor I. Williams, editor, _A History of
Technology, Volume VI: The Twentieth Century, part I and II_. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1978; and Ian McNeil, editor, _An Encyclopedia of
the History of Technology_, London: Routledge, 1990.
3. See Philip Tetlock, Richard Ned Lebow and Geoffrey Parker.
editors, _Unmaking the West: "What-If?" Scenarios That Rewrite World
History_. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2006.
4. Even in his discussion of agricultural productivity, energy
dominates the story, arguing the importance of increased energy
inputs rather than improved know-how in using the sun, in a section
significantly entitled "potatoes partly made of oil" (II, pp.
154-56). One might object that the oil represents stored-up solar
energy, and that the increased input of energy in farming was very
much dependent on improved knowledge.
5. Joel Mokyr, ""Hockeystick Economics," a review essay of Robert
William Fogel, _The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death: Europe,
America, and the Third World_. _Technology and Culture_, Vol. 46, No.
3 (July 2005), pp. 613-17.
6. Freud, in _Future of an Illusion_ (1927), said much the same
thing: "While mankind has made continual advances in its control over
nature and may be expected to make still greater ones, it is not
possible to establish with certainty that a similar advance has been
made in the management of human affairs."
Joel Mokyr is the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences and
Professor of Economics and History at Northwestern University. His
_The Enlightened Economy_ will be published by Yale University Press
and Penguin Books in the near future.
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