A Story of Love and Hate.

• Author: Lemieux, Pierre

More: The World Economy from the Iron Age to the Information Age

By Philip Coggan

470 pp.; The Economist, 2020

I am certainly not the only one to have a love-hate relationship with The Economist, the venerable magazine created in 1843 to defend free trade. At least over the past 10 years, the magazine seems to have become more tolerant of Leviathan, but it remains a source of serious information and it keeps me up to date on what intelligent social democrats think.

I had the same feeling reading Philip Coggan's new book More, which, as the subtitle indicates (The World Economy from the Iron Age to the Information Age), attempts to cover the whole economic history of mankind. The fact that Coggan is a journalist at The Economist may have something to do with this. On the one hand, he presents an exhilarating story of trade and human ingenuity over the millennia. On the other, he seems to view the expansive state as being as innocuous as John Maynard Keynes did.

Ingenuity and institutions / History offers a plethora of examples of human ingenuity. Genetic engineering through seed selection is thousands of years old. In the 14th century, the cost of a given amount of artificial light is estimated to have been 12,000 times higher than today. Despite the environmental scares of the 1970s, famines have become exceedingly rare, even if there is a risk that COVID-19 and the policies adopted by governments (lockdowns and export restrictions) take some countries backward.

Social institutions can encourage or discourage human ingenuity. The more economic freedom and private property rights, the more inventions and innovations. In ways reminiscent of Leonard Read's 1958 essay "I, Pencil," Coggan gives examples of the complexity and productivity of an economy based on free institutions. British designer Thomas Thwaites attempted to build a humble toaster from scratch but only demonstrated that no single person can produce the 400 parts and 100 materials typical of today's toasters. After nine months of work, his rudimentary toaster melted down within five seconds.

But sometimes Coggan downplays the role of good institutions. Developing countries, he claims, have recently shown "that prosperity could be achieved with more than one model, including the Chinese approach of a heavy state presence." In their 2012 book How China Became Capitalist--which Coggan does not mention--Ronald Coase and Ning Wang argue that China's success is explained by the advance of free markets, not the persistence of authoritarian institutions. (See "Getting Rich Is Glorious," Winter 2012-2013.)

Trade / One social institution that is closely related to economic freedom and property rights is trade, which constitutes a major thread in More. "This book," Coggan writes, "is in part a story of how trade became broader and deeper over thousands of years, to the extent that cross-border trade encompasses more than half of everything the world produces every year." Trade is both a consequence of, and fuel for, human ingenuity.

As far back as 7,000 BCE, the ancient world knew some long-distance trade. In the first millennium BCE, the Phoenicians and the Greeks established a trading network across the Mediterranean. The security provided by the Roman Empire further extended trade. Reactionaries already existed: "Pliny the Elder complained of the fortunes that were lost from the empire annually to purchase Asian products, 'so dearly do we pay for our luxury and our women.'" Today, it is the workers in general who import from Asia furniture, clothes, and electronic devices (often just assembled there in the middle of long production chains).

...