Hobby Science

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As to the hobbyist in general, evidence shows him (along with the hungry adventurer and the private investor) to be at the source of the Industrial Revolution. Kealey, who we mentioned was not a historian and, thankfully, not an economist, in The Economic Laws of Scientific Research questions the conventional “linear model” (that is, the belief that academic science leads to technology)—for him, universities prospered as a consequence of national wealth, not the other way around. He even went further and claimed that like naive interventions, these had iatrogenics that provided a negative contribution. He showed that in countries in which the government intervened by funding research with tax money, private investment decreased and moved away. For instance, in Japan, the almighty MITI (Ministry for Technology and Investment) has a horrible record of investment. I am not using his ideas to prop up a political program against science funding, only to debunk causal arrows in the discovery of important things.

The Industrial Revolution, for a refresher, came from “technologists building technology,” or what he calls “hobby science.” Take again the steam engine, the one artifact that more than anything else embodies the Industrial Revolution. As we saw, we had a blueprint of how to build it from Hero of Alexandria. Yet the theory didn’t interest anyone for about two millennia. So practice and rediscovery had to be the cause of the interest in Hero’s blueprint, not the other way around.

Kealey presents a convincing—very convincing—argument that the steam engine emerged from preexisting technology and was created by uneducated, often isolated men who applied practical common sense and intuition to address the mechanical problems that beset them, and whose solutions would yield obvious economic reward.

Now, second, consider textile technologies. Again, the main technologies that led to the jump into the modern world owe, according to Kealey, nothing to science. “In 1733,” he writes, “John Kay invented the flying shuttle, which mechanized weaving, and in 1770 James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, which as its name implies, mechanized spinning. These major developments in textile technology, as well as those of Wyatt and Paul (spinning frame, 1758), Arkwright (water frame, 1769), presaged the Industrial Revolution, yet they owed nothing to science; they were empirical developments based on the trial, error, and experimentation of skilled craftsmen who were trying to improve the productivity, and so the profits, of their factories.”

David Edgerton did some work questioning the link between academic science and economic prosperity, along with the idea that people believed in the “linear model” (that is, that academic science was at the source of technology) in the past. People were no suckers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; we believe today that they believed in the said linear model then but they did not. In fact academics were mostly just teachers, not researchers, until well into the twentieth century.

Now, instead of looking into a scholar’s writings to see whether he is credible or not, it is always best to consider what his detractors say—they will uncover what’s worst in his argument. So I looked for the detractors of Kealey, or people opposing his ideas, to see if they address anything of merit—and to see where they come from. Aside from some comments by Joel Mokyr, who, as I said, has not yet discovered optionality, and an attack by an economist of the type that doesn’t count, given the devaluation of the currency of the economics profession, the main critique against Kealey, published in the influential journal Nature by a science bureaucrat, was that he uses data from government-sponsored agencies such as the OECD in his argument against tax-funded research. So far, no substantive evidence that Kealey was wrong. But, let us flip the burden of evidence: there is zero evidence that the opposite of his thesis is remotely right. Much of all of this is a religious belief in the unconditional power of organized science, one that has replaced unconditional religious belief in organized religion.