The water jump

A hundred years ago today, a large biplane lumbered into the air at St John’s, Newfoundland. Sixteen hours later, the Old and the New World were much closer

It wasn’t a great year. The First World War had stopped, but no peace treaty had yet been signed; meanwhile fighting continued in much of Europe as new countries were born and quarrelled with each other. Finland was recovering from a terrible civil war; that in Russia was at its height. In Hungary, the Soviet regime of Béla Kun would hold power for five months, during which it managed to fight two of its neighbours before being destroyed by a third. In Ireland the War of Independence began. In India, British troops killed hundreds of demonstrators in the Amritsar massacre. Even if you dodged all these, you weren’t safe; a global flu pandemic was in progress. It reached every country on earth, and is thought to have killed up to 5% of the world’s population. In fact, 1919 was a bit shit.

But even in a year like that, good things can happen. Just before 4pm on Saturday, June 14, a Vickers Vimy biplane bomber taxied out for takeoff in a field at St John’s, Newfoundland.

Named after Vimy, the site of a major battle in France, the type was big for 1919 – 43ft long with a 68ft wingspan, and a takeoff weight of some 11,000lb (about 5,000 kg). It had two 20-litre V12 Rolls-Royce engines, rated at 360 HP each, and they must have made a noise to awaken the dead. They would need every one of those 720 HP, for they were taking off into a fierce wind, the direction of which was forcing them to take off uphill; moreover they were laden with extra fuel, as the journey ahead would be nearly 2,000 miles, over twice the type’s normal range, and the bomb racks had been replaced with extra fuel tanks. A large crowd was watching. What happened next would be described much later and with, one suspects, some embellishment, by American journalist Chelsea Fraser in his book Heroes of the Air (1937):

For 100, 200, 300, 400, 500 feet the plane taxied along, and as the watchers saw the obstacles in front drawing alarmingly near a look of greatest anxiety filled their eyes, and, indeed, two or three feminine shrieks could be heard. ...Twenty-five feet more and the daylight showed under the four wheels. The aviators heard a cheer from the crowd, and their own hearts lightened.

One doubts if the two men heard anything of the sort above the racket from the twin V12s; in fact they couldn’t hear each other, and would communicate in writing in the air, despite sitting right beside each other. Author David Beaty describes the moment with less hyperbole in his wonderful book The Water Jump (1976):

A crowd had assembled expecting to see them kill themselves. ...The Vimy lumbered up the hill in a strong crosswind, skidded round some rocks, and lurched unsteadily into the uneven air. Once airborne, the bomber immediately dropped into a valley, our of sight of the spectators who were convinced it had crashed.

But it hadn’t. The plane continued westwards, it being too dangerous to turn the heavily-laden aircraft at low altitude over land; but once out over Conception Bay, it turned onto a new course of 124^o magnetic – into the open Atlantic. Alcock and Brown were on their way.

*

There were very good reasons for bridging the “water jump”. The First World War had seen unrestricted submarine warfare, a quite new phenomenon; at its height in 1917, it had posed a real threat to Britain’s food supplies. The British were not the only country to be aware of the strategic implications. On August 25 1917, the U.S. Navy’s Chief Constructor, Rear Admiral David W. Taylor, wrote to a colleague that the airplane was the means by which “the submarine menace can be abated ...The ideal solution would be big flying-boats which would [save] the valuable time now lost in delivering aircraft to European waters by means of ocean-going freighters.”

Admiral Taylor himself had encouraged the development of just such a flying-boat, the Curtiss NC (for ‘Navy Curtiss’). In early 1919 four NCs were readied for a crossing attempt at their base in Far Rockaway on the edge of New York City. One was quickly cannibalised for spares, but the remaining three headed to Newfoundland, arriving there on May 15 1919. Their plan was to fly from Newfoundland to Plymouth in England via the Azores and Lisbon. One plane landed on the water and foundered when taken in tow, while another suffered mechanical difficulties and taxied the last 200 miles to the Azores. But the third plane, the NC-4, reached the Azores, and went on via Lisbon to Plymouth.

The NC-4

This was not a non-stop transatlantic flight, and besides, this operation was a very different proposition from Alcock and Brown’s; the Navy had no less than 60 destroyers strung out across the Atlantic to aid the flying-boats if they came down on the water, as two of them did. There were also two support ships with fuel and spares. Even so, the achievement should not be underestimated. Far from being overkill, the expedition demonstrated the American genius for technology and organization that, 50 years later, would take them to the moon. Moreover, the huge support operation cannot negate the fact that the NC-4 had completed a 1,200-mile nonstop leg over water, much of it in darkness. Its commander, Lieutenant Commander Albert Cushing Read, an Annapolis graduate and career naval officer, and his crew later received the Congressional Gold Medal. NC-4 can be seen to this day in the National Museum of Naval Aviation in Pensacola, Florida.

*

For all its skill and courage, the US Navy’s expedition hadn’t been a proper, continuous crossing and had not demonstrated the viability of transatlantic air travel. But it would clearly not be long before someone did. The US Navy thought the British would pull out all the stops to get across the Atlantic first, and as Beaty points out in The Water Jump, this was a reasonable supposition – especially as it was not the US but the Brits who had the world’s largest flying-boat (the five-engined Felixstowe Fury). But the British government did nothing, apart from – as Beaty says – “rather grudgingly” providing meteorological support in Newfoundland. (This was then still a British colony; it did not federate with Canada until 1948.) Everything was left to the private sector.

But there was an incentive. In 1913, the Daily Mail had offered £10,000 (then about $50,000) for the first non-stop crossing of the Atlantic. The war over, it had renewed its offer. By May 1919 – the month the NC-4 crossed via the Azores – Newfoundland was a hive of aeronautical activity. In mid-May, Australian pilot Harry Hawker and his navigator Kenneth Mackenzie Grieve had made a determined attempt at the Atlantic crossing in a purpose-built aircraft, the Sopwith Atlantic. The latter’s single engine proved its downfall; its failure brought the Atlantic down in the Atlantic. Hawker and Grieve were rescued by a passing Danish steamer. But they had got within 750 miles of Ireland, and while their courageous attempt did not succeed, it was clearly proof of concept. Sadly, Hawker himself would be killed n a crash only two years later, though not before co-founding what became Hawker Aircraft.

Meanwhile, a team from the Handley Page company had arrived with a disassembled Handley Page V/1500, a massive bomber with a maximum take-off weight of some 30,000 lb – three times that of the Vimy – and four, instead of two, Rolls-Royce Eagle engines rated at 375HP each. The Handley Page team was led by Admiral Mark Kerr, a distinguished naval officer who had been at the Battle of Omdurman. He had a long-standing interest in aviation, and had been a wartime proponent of a large bomber fleet. The massive V/1500 was conceived as part of such a force, but it was too late. In November 1918 three of them set out on their first mission, to bomb Berlin – only to be flagged down as they taxied out, and told of the Armistice. Only about 40 V/1500s were ever completed.

Massive: A Handley Page V/1500

Still, at the turn of the year a V/1500 had made the first through flight to the Indian Empire, landing in what is now Pakistan in January 1919 after a month-long journey. Now there was another V/1500 in Newfoundland, ready to scoop the Mail’s coveted prize. The Handley Page team searched for a suitable landing strip, a more difficult task than it might seem; even with four huge V12 engines, the V/1500 would need plenty of space to get its mighty 33,000lb bulk off the ground. But in due course a suitable place was found at Harbor Grace, some way from St John’s, and the team set about assembling the aircraft.

Unfortunately for Handley Page, Kerr, ever the naval officer, was a perfectionist. Every nut and bolt must be perfect. And by the time the V/1500 neared readiness, a small team had arrived from Vickers; they had travelled on the Mauretania, docking at Halifax. The team included John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown.

*

Alcock was 27, Brown 31. Both were British – Alcock had been born in Manchester, Brown in Glasgow – although Brown’s parents had been American. Both had flown in the war, Alcock as a pilot and Brown as an observer. Both had been shot down and taken prisoner, Brown by the Germans and Alcock by the Turks. After the war Alcock had approached Vickers with a proposal to fly the Atlantic, and the company had been impressed with his enthusiasm. When Brown also came looking for a job, his knowledge of navigation prompted Vickers to assign him as Alcock’s navigator.

The two men were different in aspect. As Beaty puts it: “Alcock looked like a big and smiling farmer’s boy, while the navigator Brown was studious and solemn – again, the extrovert pilot and the introvert navigator, typical temperaments for these two professions throughout the years ahead.” Beaty’s book includes a picture that bears this out. It shows them in their flying gear just before takeoff. Alcock looks bluff and cheerful, while Brown, a little smaller, looks apprehensive. Oddly, they both look a little like Michael Palin.

Brown may have been right to look worried. They had done little testing, anxious to get in the air before the Handley Page team, whose plans were well advanced. Not least of their problems had been finding flat ground from which to take off. A proposal to Admiral Kerr that they use the aerodrome he had prepared was fruitless; Kerr demanded half the cost of its construction, and insisted that they not use it until the V/1500 had taken off on its crossing attempt. He was, perhaps, within his rights; Handley Page had a lot invested, and according to a 1955 article by Graham Wallace in the Canadian magazine Maclean’s, it had taken 100 men to clear the Harbor Grace ground. But it was a blow for the Vickers team. Wallace recounts how Alcock “immediately began his search for an airfield for the Vimy, which needed a clear run of five hundred yards. But the land around St. John’s was ill suited—rocky, barren, swampy or covered with forest. Alcock drove around hopelessly in a rented car, and got glummer each day.”

Brown (left) and Alcock in Newfoundland, May 28 1919

Alcock had to make do with a site at Quidi Vidi on the edge of St John’s itself. Even this would not suffice; they could assemble and test the aircraft there, but it was not suitable for taking off with a full load (which would include 870 gallons of petrol). Eventually a contractor offered them the use, for free, of a large stretch of land – what Beaty calls “a large meadow balanced on the side of a hill with a swamp at the bottom”. Meanwhile the US Navy team had departed for the Azores from nearby Trepassey Bay.

Still, in due course the Vimy, disassembled and in crates, arrived at St John’s on the SS Glendevon, and the Vickers team assembled it as quickly as they could and made their first test flight, according to Chelsea Fraser’s account, on June 9. It was not unsuccessful, but Alcock landed with a long list of minor things that needed to be attended to. His mood will not have been improved when, the following day (according to Fraser), the huge V/1500 flew over Quidi Vidi and soared off above St John’s.

June 14 dawned blustery. Fraser (who may have been exaggerating) says there was a “40-knot half-gale”. It was not propitious. However, Alcock was convinced the V/1500 was about to go. In fact, it is not clear that it was; Admiral Kerr was fussing over every detail. But the Mail’s prize, and the glory that went with it, were too big to risk. At 3.50pm the Vimy’s port engine was run up; the starboard followed 12 minutes later, and at 4.10 the Vimy began its takeoff run. One of the great flights of history was under way.

*

One problem appeared very quickly. The Vimy was carrying radio equipment, and would need it both to report its position and to obtain weather reports from ships ahead of them. The latter was crucial, as weather forecasting was far poorer than it is now, and little data would be available in advance. As the aircraft swung over Conception Bay and picked up its course for Ireland, Brown tapped out the message: All well and started. Not long afterwards he became aware that the transmitter was not working. Its power came from a small propeller that rotated in the slipstream and drove a generator. This was not visible from inside the aircraft, but Brown knew it could be seen from the wing. If Chelsea Fraser is to be believed, Brown climbed out on the wing to have a look, grasping one of the struts between the engine and the wing. He found the generator propeller to have lost three of its four blades. This also disabled the headphone system the two men used to talk to each other, so they would now have to communicate with scribbled notes. (One can guess the first one was from Brown and read, “It’s f***ed” – or the 1919 equivalent.)

Neither was this to be the only problem. Both men had electrically-heated flying suits, a necessity in an open cockpit in the North Atlantic, but the accumulator used to provide them with power was insufficient, and some way into the flight the power failed. To add joy, part of an exhaust pipe fractured, spitting flames back over the rigging; there was little to be done about this, and Alcock decided they were not in immediate danger. But there was one big piece of good news; the wind was on their side. The Vimy had a top speed of 120 mph, but Alcock had decided to throttle back and fly at 90 mph, to save the engines; after all they would have to run continuously for 18 hours, far longer than would normally be expected. However, a tailwind gave them a cruising speed near the Vimy’s maximum. In this they were lucky; an early aviator could find themselves flying into a headwind and standing nearly still. If this happened when they were too far from land to turn back, they would have no choice but to ditch in the sea.

As in all early long-distance flights, navigation was a major problem. A small error could take the aircraft a long way adrift over such a long distance; if unlucky, they could pass north of Ireland and not make landfall. Brown carried a sextant with a spirit-level, knowing that he would rarely see the horizon. But he would need star shots every now and then. A few hours after nightfall, finding themselves in dense fog, and needing to know where they were, they were forced to climb to 12,000 ft so that Brown could fix their position. This was way above the normal service ceiling for the Vimy. Brown got his fix, but found that they were north of their planned route, suggesting that the wind had blown them off track; it became urgent to know by how much, but for that they would need to see the sea so the whitecaps would give them some idea of the wind speed and direction, enabling Brown to calculate the drift. So from 12,000 ft they came down nearly to sea level, but found themselves in fog almost until zero feet and narrowly missed flying into the ocean.

Later in the night they flew into a hailstorm that lasted four hours. Poor visibility continued, making it hard for Alcock to know the angle at which he was flying. This is fatal in the air, and a pilot who is thus disoriented may not know whether they are flying straight and level. They may dive steeply, or pull back so far on the stick that the aircraft stalls. In our own time, a faulty attitude direction indicator caused the crash of a Panamanian airliner in 1992, while inadequate information on the angle of attack contributed to the Air France disaster in 2009. In 1919, a pilot had little to tell him what the aircraft was doing in zero visibility. Towards the end of the night Alcock flew into a dense bank of fog, and got the impression that he was diving; the corrective action he took put the aircraft into a spin. Beaty explains what happened next:

And then they left the cloud as abruptly as they had entered it. A hundred feet from the wave crests, Alcock caught sight of the horizon. Immediately he regained his sense of balance and brought the Vimy out of the spin. At full throttle, the bomber skimmed straight and level just above the sea – now pointing westwards back to Newfoundland.

Alcock turned back towards Ireland and climbed to 6,500 ft. But their problems were not over; the weather worsened again, and Brown was forced to wing-walk once more in order to clear ice from the instruments.

Every now and then Alcock would take a break. In common with some other large early aircraft, the Vimy had a steering wheel rather than a joystick, and he had equipped this with rubber clamps so that he could fasten it in place and use his hands for something else. Brown would then pass him sandwiches and, according to Fraser, ale (Wallace says it was whisky, either neat or in coffee). As day broke, they realised that they must be nearing Ireland. Then, as Brown would write later:

Alcock grabbed my shoulder, twisted me round, beamed excitedly and pointed ahead and below. ...I followed ...his outstretched forefinger, and barely visible through the mist, it showed me two tiny specks of – land. This happened at 8.15 am on June 15.

They had made landfall pretty much where they had intended to, near Clifden in Connemara. Brown’s navigation had been spot-on. They had flown 1,980 miles in 16 hours and 12 minutes.

Damn.

Alcock put the aircraft down in what looked like a meadow, realising too late that it was actually a bog. The aircraft sank into its axles and tipped over its nose, causing some damage. Alcock and Brown were saved by their belts, and clambered out, dazed and deafened but unhurt. The Mail prize was theirs. King George V, told of their arrival as he left church in London, promptly wired his congratulations; these were followed, very soon afterwards, by a pair of knighthoods. The V/1500 crew, still in Newfoundland, realised they were beaten; there would be no knighthoods for them. Kerr’s navigator, Trygve Gran, whose English was not perfect, cabled to his new wife, an actress: “Sorry you aren’t a lady”.

*

Sir John Alcock did not enjoy his fame for long. He remained with Vickers as a test pilot. Less than six months later, in December 1919, he took off for Paris in a new type of amphibian, the Vickers Viking, which he intended to land on the Seine as part of an international air show. Caught in fog, he crashed attempting to land near Rouen; he survived the crash but died before he could be taken to hospital. He was buried in the Southern Cemetery in Manchester, the city of his birth. Sir Arthur Whitten Brown joined an industrial and electrical engineering company. In World War Two he served in the RAF’s Training Command, but his health deteriorated, and he was forced to resign his commission. He was further affected by the loss of his son, who was killed when his Mosquito aircraft crashed in the Netherlands in 1944. Brown’s health never recovered and he died in October 1948, aged 62. But they had shrunk the world. 

And the Vimy? It was repaired, and donated to the nation. In December 1919, three days before his death, Alcock attended its unveiling at its new home, the Science Museum in South Kensington. If one wants, one may see it there still, and marvel at the day, 100 years ago, when two young men defied a dreadful year to play their part in the human adventure.

Mike Robbins is the author of a number of fiction and non-fiction books. They can be ordered from bookshops, or as paperbacks or e-books from Amazon and other on-line retailers.

Why nations fail

In 2012 two economists claimed they knew why countries succeeded or failed. They didn’t. But they were onto something 

Daron Acemoglu is a Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. James A. Robinson is an economist too; he taught for some years at Harvard and now holds a professorship at Chicago. Both men have published widely, sometimes together. In 2012 they published a hefty tome titled Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty.

Acemoglu and Robinson’s thesis is as follows: A nation’s success or failure depends on its institutions. A country will fail if they are extractive; that is to say, an elite has access to resources, extracts them for its own purposes, and permits no competition. Such a society will not develop, and in time will face senescence. Where enterprise and political change is possible, however, there will be progress. They draw upon a wealth of historical examples to show how some societies have progressed and others have not; those that do, have institutions that force the elites to allow change, even when their the economic interests are threatened – by, for example permitting the creative destruction of technology, rather than suppressing inventions that bring it about. They use the manufacturing and textile innovations of the 18th century as a key example, and see the erosion of absolute authority in England in the 17th and18th centuries as key to their argument; it made way for the Industrial Revolution. In particular they stress the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, when absolutism was forever banished and the country sprang ahead of its neighbours.

In a sense, of course, this isn’t a new idea. As John Stuart Mill put it in On Liberty (1859), the prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely the whole truth and “it is only by the collision of adverse opinions [that it] has any chance of being supplied.” Acemoglu and Robinson, however, underscore their thesis with the conviction that a society’s status is path-determined; that is to say, once a society has extractive institutions, the elite that controls them will have no incentive to surrender control, and every reason not to – and the country will remain poor. But where a process of change has begun from below, it will be in an elite’s interest to accommodate it lest the rule of law as a whole be threatened, leaving them exposed to whatever chaos comes next.

The book went viral; the paperback is still in the top few thousand in Amazon’s sales rankings, seven years after it was published. That’s unusual for an academic work. The fact that the authors promoted the book energetically themselves will have helped. But also, this book has been written for public consumption; the reader won’t be troubled by econometrics, multiple regression, p-values, footnotes or in-line citations. It helps, too, that the text is accessible and, for the most part, well-written. That does not mean the ideas in the book are oversimplified; they are not, and are most absorbing. As Paul Collier put it in The Observer (March 10 2012): “Mostly, such people write only for other academics. In this book, they have done you the courtesy of writing a book that while at the intellectual cutting edge is not just readable but engrossing.”

But not everyone has bought the ideas in this book. Some have pointed out that China has advanced and prospered, despite not being a democracy. Others have been critical of the authors’ refusal to accept that natural-resource endowments, climate, and even dumb luck play a part in a country’s success or failure. In fact some of those who take the latter view have been quite harsh in their criticism, perhaps seeing Acemoglu and Robinson as passing judgement on countries that are poor for no fault of their own. Given the book’s impact, it seems worth examining the arguments.

First, this book is as much history as it is economics.


The historical perspective
As economists – and social scientists – the authors might be expected to marshal evidence from contemporary data and use it to tell us where we should go next. They do not do that. Instead, they use a series of historical examples. They begin with the town of Nogales, which is bisected by the US-Mexican border. The south, they say, is relatively poor; the northern half is not.

The reason that Nogales, Arizona, is much richer than Nogales, Sonora, is simple: it is because of the very different institutions on the two sides of the border, which create very different incentives for the inhabitants of Nogales, Arizona, versus Nogales, Sonora. To explain this, we are taken to the colonial experience. The Spanish Empire was extractive, gorging itself on mineral wealth procured for it by abundant slave labour, and the institutions of Latin America developed accordingly; an elite was afforded access to the spoils, this access being in the gift of colonial rulers who used it to keep control by proxy. There was no incentive to surrender control, and it remained absolute.

North America was different. Acemoglu and Robinson argue that the lack of gold or silver meant that, in Virginia, there was less for the English colonisers to extract; moreover they lacked a defeated population to enslave in order to extract it. There were no resources to control and thus no patronage to give; the colonists were forced to make what they would of the land themselves, and the colonial authority had no alternative but to let them. Thus a different polity developed. This fed back into the home country, where a process of change had already begun with the Black Death several hundred years earlier; this had broken the absolute power of feudalism, for with less labour available, what was left could make greater demands on the ruling class. 

Well, at least it drove up wages

The country came to what the authors see as a major climacteric with the Glorious Revolution in 1688, when James II, who had tried to rule as an absolute monarch, was replaced with William and Mary, who agreed to rule with Parliament as a condition of the throne given to them. From that time, extractive institutions would decline. The growth of civil rights saw the enforceable patent that encouraged inventions, while elite interests were no longer able to prevent their adoption. Crucially for the authors, this led to the creative destruction by which new technology breaks old, outmoded institutions and drives the future.

The authors draw on a number of other historical examples to support their argument that inclusive institutions drive progress, while extractive ones cause a society to stagnate and even to collapse. Some are fascinating. There is the decline of the Mayan civilization. There are the differing paths of nations and polities in Africa – a chapter on South Africa is especially interesting, suggesting as it does that black African farmers were progressive and invested heavily in the late 19th century, but that colonial institutional constraints then frustrated them. Other evidence is drawn from the Spice Islands, Axum and Nubia. In Africa, the authors draw on Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe as examples of countries that have had extractive governance, and have failed; and Botswana as a country that evaded the worst excesses of colonialism and has prospered, with the help of wise leadership (in particular that of Seretse Khama, its first leader).

It is not unusual to construct a global thesis in this way, reaching back into the past in search of rules that may guide us into the future. H.G. Wells foresaw the utility of using history to light one’s path in his 1902 lecture The Discovery of the Future. One cannot predict the future of one man, he argued, but he is but one grain of sand; you can’t predict what a single grain will do but you can probably say, from experience, what a large quantity will behave when you tip it on the ground. In recent years several authors have been successful in this respect; Jared Diamond is one, while Joseph Tainter’s work on the collapse of complex societies has sought to illuminate the reasons why some civilizations have vanished.

But for some reason historians themselves appear to have abandoned the field. As Jo Guldi and David Armitage argue in their 2014 book The History Manifesto, they have tended to retreat into silos and specialise on a minute scale, immured in the minutiae of historiography and immune to the broad sweep of human experience. Thus a modern historian will have an encyclopedic knowledge of the parish registers of some obscure village in the 16th century, but could never write on the scale of historians of the past such as Gibbon, Toynbee or A.L. Rowse. Guldi and Armitage think this unfortunate, but I wonder if that much has been lost; after all, other disciplines have taken their place. Tainter trained as an anthropologist. Diamond is a biophysical scientist. And Acemoglu and Robinson are economists. There is nothing to regret in this. But it holds traps, not least that it demands a multidisciplinary mind; what if the clue you seek is in a body of literature or a journal that you would not have encountered? In my view Acemoglu and Robinson do fall into that trap in places – but more of that below.

For now, their argument may be summed up as follows: History shows that extractive institutions make everyone poor. Inclusive institutions, in which property rights and intellectual property are secure from seizure, and the way is not blocked by elite monopolies, will make us all rich.

One might argue that the time to say it was in the 16th century; these are lessons we have long learned. I am not so sure. But first, what has been the critical reaction to this book, and what are its perceived weaknesses?


The critics
On publication, Why Nations Fail was mostly welcomed but did have its critics. Bill Gates, no less, piled in on the book on his blog (Good Ideas, but Missing Analysis, February 26 2013). The book was, he said, “a major disappointment. I found the authors’ analysis vague and simplistic. Beyond their 'inclusive vs. extractive' view of political and economic institutions, they largely dismiss all other factors—history and logic notwithstanding.” He went on to berate the authors for dismissing (for example) the influence of weather and water on the Mayan collapse. He quoted numerous examples of countries, especially China and other Far Eastern economies, whose people had prospered under undemocratic institutions. “The incredible economic transition in China [has] occurred because the leadership embraced capitalistic economics, including private property, markets, and investing in infrastructure and education,” said Gates. “This points to the most obvious theory about growth, which is that it is strongly correlated with embracing capitalistic economics—independent of the political system.”

One wonders why the book upset Gates so much, and why he felt obliged to give it so much attention. After all, his own fortune was built on the sort of creative destruction wrought by technology that the authors see as essential to progress, and impossible under the wrong institutions. Still, the authors gave as good as they got in a piece by Acemoglu titled What Bill Gates Got Wrong About Why Nations Fail (Foreign Policy, March 12 2013). “Did the Microsoft founder even read our book before he criticized it?” he asked, slating Gates’s “inability to understand even the most rudimentary parts of our thesis”. Ouch. No scholar, they said, had ever argued that the Mayan collapse was due to the weather. (They are probably right, though the Mayan collapse does have many scholars; I suppose it is hard to resist the allure of a nation once ruled over by a king called ‘18 Rabbit’.) The authors also attacked Gates for his sweeping support for ‘capitalistic’ markets. “What about South Africa under apartheid, based on private enterprise by whites, but disempowering and exploiting the majority blacks?” There is more. Suffice to say that Gates gave the book a good kicking but got a bigger one back.

Gates: Not impressed

Jared Diamond’s review (in the New York Times, June 7 2012) was a lot politer, as was the authors’ response some weeks later. Diamond took Acemoglu and Robinson to task not for stressing the importance of institutions, but for ignoring other factors, in particular the geographical; as might be expected from Diamond, given the thrust of his own work, he considers these factors very important. For instance, he stressed the importance of tropical diseases. The authors countered that many areas now poor had been richer than the Western countries before they were forced to confront the colonial empires, whose institutions permitted them to develop faster and to have greater drive and enterprise. Diamond politely refuted their refutation, insisting that a country’s biophysical legacy was an important factor:

Tropical diseases cause a skilled worker, who completes professional training by age thirty, to look forward to, on the average, just ten years of economic productivity in Zambia before dying at an average life span of around forty, but to be economically productive for thirty-five years until retiring at age sixty-five in the US, Europe, and Japan (average life span around eighty). Even while they are still alive, workers in the tropics are often sick and unable to work.

The authors themselves have said that the fiercest criticisms of their book have come from those who feel they have ignored the importance of natural-resource endowments. This is understandable. The allocation of resources is not equitable, and if a country is poor because it lacks them, that is scarcely its fault. Acemoglu and Robinson, by contrast, seem to be arguing that a country’s fate is its own fault, since its institutions are extractive and closed. So it is easy to see why some critics, especially on the left, might be angry with the book for this reason. But those critics may have oversimplified the authors' argument; they see countries as locked into an institutional heritage that has often been imposed upon them, often by colonialism. There is no judgemental element here. 

Even so, others besides Diamond were quite critical of their failure to take geographical and other elements into account. Jeffrey Sachs, in a review in Foreign Affairs, September/October 2012 (available on his website here), also pointed out that authoritarian elites are quite capable of modernising their countries, especially if they face an outside threat; he cites the Meiji Restoration in Japan. In fact, that is a case that Acemoglu and Robinson do cite but from which they derive a different message, seeing it as a move away from extractive institutions. Indeed, different observers may draw different conclusions from the same point in history, as Joseph Tainter shows very clearly in The Collapse of Complex Societies (1987).

I had my own problems with Why Nations Fail. Not in the sense that Gates did; I found his criticisms sweeping and dismissive. Acemoglu and Robinson present a lot of evidence for their thesis. They made a case, and Gates did not disprove it. But Diamond and Sachs were closer to doing so, for the authors’ dismissal of biophysical factors in geography is itself sweeping. This is not just about tropical diseases. Tropical soils can be very fertile, but in a hot climate, soil organic matter mineralises very quickly once the land is cleared for agriculture. Farmers know this and often use manure or crop residues, or long-fallow rotation, but the high food production per hectare common in Europe and North America is not always possible. This does constrain the growth of a productive labour force that has moved off the land. Not all economic factors are about institutions.

I had some other problems with this book.


Path-determination?
First, as stated earlier, the authors see a society’s institutions as path-determined; once extractive or inclusive, they will not easily change. As we have seen, they state that where extractive institutions are in place, they will persist because the elites that control them have too much to lose; where extractive institutions are weaker, and fundamental change is possible, elites will permit reform for fear of something worse. But there is no reason why the second case might not apply to the first scenario. A country can be flipped on its head in an instant by war or revolution. Acemoglu and Robinson acknowledge this but say that a country cannot switch from extractive to inclusive institutions so quickly; the mentality will not be there, and the liberators will by default become replacement oppressors. This seems too neat a view, and does not explain the evolution of southern Europe in the 1970s or of eastern Europe 20 years later.

A more solid case for path-determination was made many years ago in Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, by Robert Putnam (again, not an historian but a political scientist; the historians are nowhere to be seen in this debate). In 1970 authority was devolved to new local governments in Italy. This enabled Putnam and his associates to compare the performance of these institutions, all of which were starting, on paper, from the same base – and see which ones did better, and why. The book was a labour of love, taking over 20 years. Putnam and his colleagues used a number of ruses to test government performance – for example, writing to the local administration to ask how one could be reimbursed for medical costs incurred abroad, and comparing the speed and quality of the reply. Taken together with the public’s own perception of their region’s efficiency, there was a startling difference between the wealthy north and relatively poor south. Clearly, the richer a region was, the better its government was likely to be; but why?

Putnam found a correlation not just with per capita income, but also with ‘civicness’ – a tendency to associate in groups. The range of groups he accepted for this analysis was very broad, including for example choral societies. The number of such groups varied from one per 1,050 inhabitants in Trentino-Alto Adige to one per 13,100 in Sardinia. Newspaper readership was also much lower in impoverished regions. So Putnam did not conclude that wealth alone created civil society. The evidence seemed to suggest a more complex link than historical wealth; in earlier centuries the south had been, if anything, more industrialized and wealthier than the North. ‘Civicness’ earlier in the century seemed to indicate more economic development now. “Economics does not predict civics, but civics does predict economics,” Putnam wrote.

It is of course one thing to find a purely correlative relationship, which of itself proves nothing. It is quite another thing to find causality. But Putnam claimed he had. His argument, briefly stated, was this: in the Middle Ages, the collapse of existing power structures all over Italy led the north and south to diverge. The South and Sicily found themselves part of a strong Norman empire: “As the centuries passed, the steep social hierarchy came to be ever more dominated by a landed aristocracy endowed with feudal powers,” wrote Putnam. In the north, however, no-one imposed order; rather, there was a dark chaos against which townspeople were forced to unite: “The solution… was quite different, relying less on vertical hierarchy and more on horizontal collaboration. …The extent of popular participation in government affairs was extraordinary.”

To Putnam, what was lacking in the south was social capital. This is an amorphous beast, much discussed but hard to define. Broadly, it is the existence of a relationship with or trust in others that lowers transaction costs in such a way as to make economic or other interaction much easier. In an influential 1988 paper, Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital, sociologist James Coleman cited the community of Jewish diamond merchants in New York, who can lend each other gems for inspection without huge investment in security and insurance; and traders in Cairo’s Khan el-Khalili market, who cooperate so closely that unrelated enterprises function in effect as a huge department store. From my own observation, the great souk of Aleppo in Syria functioned in a similar way before the awful current conflict. Moreover traders in similar commodities tended to work in the same alley, and may have shared mosques and baths. Access to such social capital may have a profound effect on living standards, although much research remains to be done on why.

Putnam: Social capital is the key

It is odd that Acemoglu and Robinson take no notice of Putnam’s theories and other writings on social capital, which have been highly influential. (They do include Making Democracy Work in their bibliography, but it does not appear to be reflected in the text.) Instead they rely on their thesis that exclusive/inclusive institutions survive as they are because of what the stakeholders have to lose. One could argue that the Russia’s imperial royal family had plenty vested in extractive institutions in 1917, and nothing to gain from laying them aside. They still ended up with their bodies stuffed in a mine. A similar fate befell the French aristocracy. So a better explanation is needed than this for the path-determination of societies. Putnam has one. He may not be right, but has given us a better reason why extractive institutions might persist but inclusive ones might also survive and prosper.


This sceptred isle
There is another key area where I have doubts about Acemoglu and Robinson’s argument that institutions are all-important. This is in their treatment of Britain (which they also refer to, wrongly, as England; even before 1707 this was not completely accurate). The authors put great store on the 1688 Glorious Revolution, which they see as fundamentally setting Britain on the path to inclusive institutions, and thus to the extraordinary leap forward that we now call the Industrial Revolution.

There is nothing wrong with seeing 1688 as a waypoint in this process, but it may be nothing more. The winds of change that wrought the workshop of the world were many and various. They also go back much farther. Acemoglu and Robinson rightly acknowledge that they began with the Black Death, which slashed the supply of labour and in so doing broke feudalism, giving birth (albeit protracted) to a more autonomous labour force that would, in time, demand institutional change. Yet they nowhere mention the Enclosures, the process by which the more powerful seized common lands and in so doing displaced much of the rural population.

This process long predated 1688; indeed it reaches back before Tudor times, and the resulting displacement was already much in evidence in the 16th century. A.L Rowse, mentioned earlier, highlights the demography of the time in his magisterial The England of Elizabeth. He explains that, thanks in part to the work of the 19th-century pioneer of demography John Rickman (1771-1840), we know that 16th-century rural parishes often had a high surplus of births over deaths – but that town parishes did not; mortality was high. This allows us to see that there was a surplus rural population, and also to see where it went – the towns – and that it died there. When the technological changes of the 18th century arrived (steam, the spinning jenny), there was a workforce ready to work, instead of to die. One could argue that institutional change itself drove this, but not at all in the way that Acemoglu and Robinson would have you believe; enclosure was an extractive institution par excellence.

A slightly different theory is offered by the work of J.D. Chambers (1898-1970), Professor of Economic History at Nottingham. Chambers grew up in rural Nottinghamshire and was the younger brother of Jessie Chambers, the first girlfriend of D.H. Lawrence and the presumed model for Miriam Leivers in Sons and Lovers. An outstanding economic historian, he drew much of his evidence from his home county. In 1967 he gave a series of lectures that were published, after his death, as Population, Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial England (1972). In it Chambers posits that population increase was already underway before 1750 and may have provided the economic opportunities that led to the Industrial Revolution, rather than being driven by it. Indeed Chambers seems to have seen population growth in England as an almost autonomous factor that created the economy as much as it was defined by it. At the time, not everyone bought Chambers’s conclusions – indeed one or two reviewers were quite rude, which was perhaps easier since he died just before publication. Moreover the later work of Robert Fogel suggests that there was indeed a variable – the reduction of malnutrition, caused by greater availability of food as agriculture became more productive – a theory expounded in his seminal 1990 paper The Conquest of High Mortality. Again, there was now a workforce ready to work rather than die. But the point here is that there are factors at work in the 18th century that Acemoglu and Robinson do not consider. While the Glorious Revolution of 1688 could be seen as pivotal, it could also be seen as incidental to the forces swirling around it.

The Industral Revolution: Glasgow in 1831 (D.O. Hill)

The Industrial Revolution was, moreover, the product of a natural resource: coal. This is an argument that Jared Diamond and Jeffrey Sachs, certainly, would understand. In the Tudor era the remaining forests, such as those of the Weald of Kent, were worked out. Coal replaced them, and allowed the use of innovations such as the Newcomen engine. There is of course an institutional aspect to this; steam drove coal, and could not have done so without a structure in which one could register a patent, and know that one’s work would not be suppressed or expropriated by rivals. Acemoglu and Robinson highlight this, and it is important. But it does not account for the actual presence of coal, without which that structure would have been of no avail. I have even heard it suggested that the advanced polities of Arab Spain did not develop technologies of this type because the fuel, in the shape of wood, was not available. That may be speculation, but it is an interesting thought.


A partial explanation
All of the above is germane to Acemoglu and Robinson’s argument. Does it invalidate it?

The short answer is no. They have laid out a well-researched, interesting and combative argument for the importance of institutions in human affairs. To them, politics creates economics, not vice-versa, and they have presented a lot of evidence to that effect. But there are some problems here.

First of all, their argument is all-embracing; institutions, we are told, define success and failure, and there is no sense that they are one of a series of phenomena that will define the course of a country’s history – including biophysical factors, which they consider but dismiss too readily. Second, their approach is insufficiently multidisciplinary. Their sources are not confined to economics, but they are biased that way. They knew of Putnam, but do not really seem to have absorbed his work, or that of others who have worked on social capital. They may have known of A.L Rowse – Robinson especially would do, as he is British-born – but will not have searched his work for evidence, and it seems unlikely that they would have known of Chambers.

But there is no question that Acemoglu and Robinson were onto something. They may attach too much importance to institutions, but they are surely right to regard them as crucial enablers. Moreover this book has been timely. I said earlier that its lessons appeared to be more relevant to the 16th century than to today, when its lessons have – supposedly – long been learned; but they haven’t. Acemoglu and Robinson say little or nothing about the current state of the Western world. Their concern is why some countries (e.g. the developing world) remain poor. But in recent years we have, in fact, seen key institutions of the West go backwards, as the control of monopolies has become less important and Wall Street has regained much of its power. It could be argued that much of Teddy Roosevelt’s work in controlling extractive institutions and their monopolies has been undone, as has that of his kinsman FDR in bringing Wall Street to heel after the 1929 crash. It was a party on Wall Street that caused that crash; likewise, it was the uncontrolled misuse of assets by an elite that brought the 2008 meltdown. (Ironically, Why Nations Fail was shortlisted for the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.)

Meanwhile the Internet’s creative destruction has delivered us all into the hands of big players such as Facebook, Amazon and Google. These may not be extractive institutions in quite the same way as the colonial silver mines of Bolivia or the conflict diamond mines of Sierra Leone, both of which the authors discuss. Neither Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg are in the slavery business. But there is a whiff of the monopolistic and extractive about them.

This lurch back towards extractive institutions has had a concrete effect on living standards. Robert Reich, Labor Secretary in Bill Clinton’s first administration, pointed out in his 2014 book Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future that the process of wealth concentration had been going on for years before 2008. “The wages of the typical American hardly increased in the three decades leading up to the Crash of 2008, considering inflation. In the 2000s, they actually dropped,” says Reich, and goes on to say that the economy has grown so much over that period that, had the benefits been divided equally, the typical person would be 60% better off.

Acemoglu and Robinson actually say little about the dangers of extractive, elite-controlled institutions re-establishing themsleves. They do include an interesting passage on medieval Venice, where they see a process of elite capture as a trigger for decline. And Thomas Friedman (in the New York Times, March 31 2012) quotes Acemoglu as saying that the growth in inequality could be a threat to the US’s institutions. “The real problem is that economic inequality, when it becomes this large, translates into political inequality,” In the book, however, Acemoglu and Robinson generally see a society that has freed itself of extractive institutions as remaining so. The history of the present suggests they are wrong. One of those who saw the book as irrelevant to the current situation, it seems, was Bill Gates. “I don’t think even these authors would suggest that the Great Depression... or the global financial crisis of the last few years came about because of a decline in inclusiveness,” he wrote. Are we sure? This may need further thought.

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty is a remarkable book, well-presented, readable and based on serious scholarship; and anyone with a serious interest in how nations do succeed or fail should read it. There is no question that it demonstrates the importance of institutions, and at least partly proves that their influence can persist over centuries. But there is a lot here that does not quite fly – not least because those institutions can go backwards, and seem right now to be doing just that.

Maybe what this book shows us, above all, is that an all-encompassing theory of history is rarely correct; history is just too big, long and messy for that. It is a point Jeffrey Sachs made well in his own review, pointing to the uncertainties wrought by climate change and technological advances. “In such a complicated world, explanations of growth that center on a single variable will become even less useful,” he wrote. But as long as that warning is borne in mind, Acemoglu and Robinson have much to tell us. And their book may contain a more urgent warning than they themselves would claim.

Mike Robbins’s books are available in e-book or paperback from most online retailers, including Amazon (UK and US).