The Rise of the Engineer: Inventing the Professional Inventor During the Industrial Revolution

See Engineering Economic Growth: My Long-Read Q&A with Walker Hanlon by James Pethokoukis of AEI. Excerpts:

"Walker is an associate professor in the department of economics at Northwestern University. Among his thought-provoking works in economic history is a recent working paper, “The Rise of the Engineer: Inventing the Professional Inventor During the Industrial Revolution.”"

 "And what you found was that the engineer is a key factor. Could just talk about that for a second?

Hanlon: Yeah. The context here is that we sort of know, looking back in history, that before the Industrial Revolution economic growth was sporadic, and it was only after the Industrial Revolution that we experienced sustained economic growth, the kind that we enjoy today. Which is what provides us with all of these wonderful devices and benefits that we enjoy.

And so something fundamental happened during the Industrial Revolution. And that, I think, is one of the biggest mysteries of economic history: trying to understand what happened. And we kind of know it has to be about technology because that’s what really is the long-run engine for growth. And what this paper is about is looking inside that system through which technology was being developed and realizing that it was changing in an important way. And specifically what was going on is that there was this emerging group of people who became like professional inventors and designers, and they called themselves engineers. And so we’re familiar with this group today, but what I do is I really look back and think about where this group came from and when exactly they emerge and what that meant for pushing us onto this path of modern economic growth."

"And at least initially, was this primarily a phenomenon that we saw in Britain?

Yeah. So what’s really interesting about this type of engineering—which at the beginning of it they called “civil engineering” because they wanted to differentiate this from a preexisting occupation, which was military engineers—is this was really a British phenomenon. And I think it was related to the fact that Britain had this booming, private market that could support people who were professional inventors. And these guys who invented stuff, they could sell their inventions or they can make money off them in other ways. And so in the paper, I compare [Britain] to France a little bit. France had great engineers, but they were really military or public infrastructure-type engineers. And they worked on the things that the state cared about. And so they weren’t out there inventing the kinds of mechanical devices that were driving economic growth in Britain. So this new type of engineering, this civil engineering, which is using their terminology rather than ours, was really a British phenomenon, at least at the beginning.

Looking at causality, did the engineers drive economic growth? Or did a more market-oriented society allow people to be engineers? Or was it all happening at the same time?

It was all happening at the same time. And this is all an endogenous part of this evolving economic system. And so there’s lots of work about what may have set off the Industrial Revolution. It wasn’t that someone invented engineering and then the Industrial Revolution happened. The Industrial Revolution is going on. And one of the things it’s doing is opening up the opportunities for people to start to specialize in invention. And what that did is, it was a mechanism through which economic growth started to accelerate. And it may not have been the only mechanism. But it was one of the mechanisms, at least I would argue, through which economic growth accelerated, that emerged endogenously due to other factors, which include the ability, I think, crucially, to monetize their inventions and to do it without becoming business owners but through other means that allowed them to continue to be inventors.

You sort of alluded to the subject of why the Industrial Revolution happened, when it happened, and where it happened. It’s hardly an understudied area, and there are multiple theories. And I think you’re suggesting that yours is not a separate theory, but it actually syncs nicely with some other ideas.

Yeah. I think that’s exactly right. There has been great work about the importance of institutions and property rights in making this in an environment in which you could be an inventor."

"Are there ideas that were once in vogue that have sort of been de-emphasized or set aside?

That’s a good question. I’m not quite sure about that. I would say maybe if there’s any idea that I think is maybe a little bit less emphasized, it’s just a pure resource endowment story. I think there’s reason to believe that having coal, for example, mattered, but I think Britain wasn’t the only place that had coal and it wasn’t the only place that had coal in a location where it could be utilized. And so maybe that story is a little bit less compelling than it was in the past, although it’s probably still part of the overall picture."