Works in Progress Podcast

Sam Bowman (00:00:00):
Hi there. Welcome to the Works in Progress podcast. I'm Sam Bowman. I'm one of the editors of Works in Progress. I'm here with Ben Southwood, who's another one of the editors of Works in Progress, and our guest today is Anton Howes. Anton writes a really, really good substack called Age of Invention, and he's also written a really, really, really good book called Arts and Minds. I think of Anton as basically being the intellectual lionhead of the progress studies movement because he does work in why invention happens and why progress has happened historically. Ben, what do you think about Anton's work? Before we bring Anton in,
Ben Southwood (00:00:34):
I would basically call myself an Anton is or a Howesian. Anton convinced me 10 years ago that his theory of the industrial revolution and why we have economic growth and progress at high speed like we have had since the Industrial Revolution. He convinced me of his theory and since then I've been going around telling everyone else about his theory and since then he keeps finding new details of his theory and elaborating and so on. And then I become a believer in all those details and elaborations as he releases them on his blog, which by the way, everyone should follow. I was going to ask Anton partly because I want to hear how he'll answer, but also because I think the other people would like to hear he'll answer, Anton, why did Britain have the industrial revolution?
Anton Howes (00:01:18):
So great question, and the way we need to approach it though, I think is to sort of question the whole concept of, or the name Industrial Revolution. When we say industrial revolution, we immediately think of Dickensian Health scapes from the mid 19th century. We think of Oliver Twist, we think of cotton mills and Luddites and machine breakers. We think of coal, of cotton, of steel, of iron, of great belching, smoked stacks and filthy faced urchins roaming about the streets of London. And in many ways those are some of the results that you eventually see of what economic historians like to call the industrial revolution. But really when we talk about the industrial revolution, what we're talking about is the beginning of sustained continuous, technologically led economic growth. So this kind of constant increase in living standards that we've grown quite used to over the past few centuries where nowadays if we talk about anything less than one to 2% GDP growth per year, it seems like stagnation that whole way of being, this constant growth, not just in cotton, in steel, in iron, whatever, but actually across all different industries is what the industrial revolution is.
(00:02:40):
So in a sense it's a kind of acceleration of innovation that takes place. And really it's not even necessarily just industrial. I mean it's something that takes place first and foremost really in agriculture, but also in various parts of services in infrastructure building, in roads, canals, in postal networks, in advertising. I mean anything that you can think of from agriculture all the way to watchmaking, I'll try to get an A to Z to zoology, let's say anything from A to Z is going to have some kind of innovation that takes place and really starts to take off over the course of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. So when we talk about the industrial revolution, we have that kind of Dickensian vision. What we're actually looking at there is kind of a hundred, maybe even 200 years on from the acceleration beginning.
Ben Southwood (00:03:32):
So wait a second. Did you just say over the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. So most people I think would associate the industrial revolution with the 1770s or 1780s and particular steam engines being invented, but, and I've heard some people point to the 1700s, the 18th century as being actually earlier on in that century there were big improvements happening and we missed timed it. I've never heard anyone say that the 16th century, the 1500s were the starting point of the industrial revolution. So can you explain where you're coming from there? You are saying by the 1700s or something, a lot of the industrial revolution had already happened.
Anton Howes (00:04:13):
That's exactly right. So the standard periodization of the industrial revolution will be usually about 1780s to 1830s or maybe 1760s at a stretch to 1830s. My view is that if you actually look at what's going on in Britain versus the rest of Europe, let alone the rest of the world, Britain is already by far and away the place where everyone's looking to, in the same way that today people look to say Silicon Valley as the place where all the innovation is going on. It's already got that status by 1700. And we actually got some pretty interesting proof of this because already in the 1710s, there are loads and loads of industrial spies from Sweden, from Russia, from Spain, from France, from basically everywhere coming to Britain and essentially trying to either get their way into various factories or get their way into various workshops to see what's going on or even trying to entice workers abroad to the extent that in the 1710s parliament gets quite spooked and passes a bunch of acts, basically saying that people who are skilled artisans we're talking watchmakers, people who have been making instruments in microscopes, telescopes, anything to do with metal tools of any kind, those people are not allowed to leave the country.
(00:05:32):
So already by the 1710s there's this kind of defensiveness about English industrialization, about English innovation and invention. And so what happens in the 1760s and 1770s is that a lot of the really key industries that really grow to an extent that's almost unfathomable before iron or textile machinery and so on, the ones that are quite famous, that's when they really take off. And so the steam engine certainly is a big part of that. But even if we look at the history of the steam engine, I mean the Thomas Savoury engine, the original one to exploit atmospheric pressure and as well as the expansive force of steam that's invented in the 1690s, and the Newcomen engine, which is most famously used initially for pumping mines, especially coal mines where it's most economical because the fuel is itself, it is itself being used to pump up the fuel to drive it.
(00:06:25):
I mean that's invented over the course of the 1700s becomes public in 1712. Already a lot of these things are in place. I mean, even if we look at some of the stuff that people think of as being key to the industrial revolution in a scientific sense, if we look at the foundation of rural society that takes place in the 1660s. So my view is that actually nearly all of the things that make Britain the place where the industrial revolution is most likely to happen, that's already well in place by 1700 and maybe even well in place by the 1650s, 1660s. So let's put this in other terms. I mean the country is already significantly more industrialised than anywhere else. London is already growing into the largest city in Europe and soon to be the largest city in the world by 1700. It's already got 575,000 people.
(00:07:16):
It's already exceeded Paris. It's already hot on the heels of the really mega cities like Constantinople, and it's already on hot on the heels of even Chinese cities, which were significantly larger, although spread over a much larger space. So I think if we actually want to look at what the origins of the industrial revolution are, we need to go much further back to the point at which England is the least obvious place for the industrial revolution to be occurring, or this acceleration of innovation to be occurring rather than when it's really kind of obvious to all contemporaries that it's the place where things are happening.
Ben Southwood (00:07:51):
One thing I picked up on, which you haven't mentioned, but it is a particular interest to me because it's to do with infrastructure, is that I've read about in the 1700s or even earlier than that, the roads in England were considered to be uniquely, you could go very fast on them, they're very smooth. And this led to waggons that were going extremely quickly. The European visitors would be astonished by the eight miles per hour that a waggon could go and they would run waggons 24 hours a day so that you could get your posts delivered overnight and they would change horses when they were halfway down. And I was actually reading a novel called the Quincunx, where a key plot point of the first third of the book is that the boy really wants to see a post waggon go past because it's going so fast and he wants to leave his village and walk to the turnpike road where there's a post waggon whizzing past, and then he'll shout like way I've seen a post waggon. Is this an important part of it as well? And I mean, I've also read about canals. I've seen a picture of a lock which has 29 stepped stairs. So you go into one and then they let the water, they'd add the water in, you go to the next one, they add the water and they go to the next one. They add the water so you can take ships up a hill. Are stuff like canals and turnpike, roads part of this story?
Anton Howes (00:09:05):
Yes. So absolutely canals, roads a really big part of the story. It's extremely striking to a lot of contemporaries talking foreign visitors in the 18th century. Not just how quick the English roads are, but how well maintained they are. A lot of that has to do with turnpikes, although even before turnpikes start to take off, it seems as though the road network in England is improving quite considerably. I still have to get to the bottom of exactly why.
Sam Bowman (00:09:36):
What's a turnpike?
Anton Howes (00:09:37):
So a turnpike is a road where essentially you have to pay a toll to access it and it would be managed by a turnpike trust who would essentially be the company that would be responsible for maintaining the road. And so they're set up by individual acts of parliament, which essentially gives them the rights over those roads to take those tolls.
Ben Southwood (00:10:00):
Am I right in thinking that we had or Britain had especially big and strong horses, is that correct?
Anton Howes (00:10:08):
Big and strong horses and also a lot of horses. My favourite case of this is two French Duke sons visiting the 1780s. They're just completely flawed by the fact that everybody seems to have a horse to the extent that even farmers have not just a horse that they use for pulling the plough, but they have their personal use horse that they can ride for going into town or that their wife will use, maybe even their wife will have a separate horse that they'll use just to go to market whenever they feel like it. That kind of proliferation of horses, especially very large horses, is a bit like, I guess visitors from the Soviet Union to America in the 1960s, seeing just the sheer abundance of cars and how widespread car ownership is, that seems to be what's going on in Britain. So yes, and not only are horses being used in fields or for transportation already, even before steam engines start to take over most of the rotary motion for grinding pigments for paints, let's say, or for polishing stones, which are going to be for stone work or any kind of grinding work or any rotary motion that's needed is predominantly done in the major cities like London by horses.
(00:11:33):
So horses are the literal industrial workhorse of the economy.
Ben Southwood (00:11:37):
And is this to do with fodder availability? So why is it that Britain has so many horses? A related thing that I have looked into a little bit is that I've always wondered why even in the 1700s and the 1600s, even the earliest American cities are laid out with very wide streets. So this is confusing because if you built a new town in, there's a hexagonal town in Sicily that was built in 1693, so it was all demolished by an earthquake and they built it fresh. So we can see what someone in 1693 in Sicily thought was the ideal kind of town which have no constraints, and they're pretty narrow streets. The reason being that it makes sense to have all the buildings relatively huddled near to one another because they don't have any mode of transport that anyone's using faster than walking.
(00:12:22):
The richest people are all walking nearly everywhere. There aren't really sedan chairs in Europe and on the streets of Europe generally, you wouldn't cart yourself around unless you were the richest of the rich. And so I've always been surprised by American cities being laid out very wide. But one theory I have now is that American fodder is so cheap because land is so cheap that everyone can afford a horse, even really normal people. And since normal people have got a horse and cart, you basically have high car ownership because you have high horse and cart ownership. And so you lay your city streets out widely to deal with all the horses and carts you expect to go down them. Is it something like that? Why have we got so many horses in England or Britain and not in Europe?
Anton Howes (00:13:03):
I suspect that's exactly right in that it's to do with horse availability or horse abundance. Possibly in Italy they might be using mules as well as just going at their own walking speed. So that's typically what you see in places where you have very, very bad roads is that you'll just load stuff onto pack mules because they're able to do this winding stuff rather than dragging carts or waggons and so on. Coaches along. I think the main reason for it, and this is actually one of those ways in which I'm a bit of a coal sceptic, we can maybe come back to that later, but one of the main ways in which I think coal does transform the English economy very early on, so from the 1580s onwards really, which is the initial is that coal by replacing wood or fuel over the course of 1580s onwards, frees up a lot of woodland as well as alternative sources of fuel.
(00:14:03):
Like heath, like the kind of furs and gorse that you find growing on heathland, it frees up heathland, it frees up woodland, it frees up marshland, which is often used for turf and peat for burning people's homes. Coal essentially replaces all of that, all of those fuels so that all of that land can suddenly be transformed and conversant agriculture, and particularly not just arable agriculture, but pasture as well. And so you essentially have this kind of coal abundance in England in the 16th century creates grain abundance and livestock abundance to a much greater degree than anywhere else, which is why by the 18th century when coal has really taken off and pretty much as a result of ribbon allegations as a result of the growth of canals as well, all of these things are reinforcing one another so that more and more land, which used to have to be maintained for fuel, for wood, for peat, for furs and gauze and so on, all of that can now be used for grain instead.
(00:15:05):
And so that kind of muscle abundance that you get, and it is not just making horses more common, but also making literally the people of England much larger than the people pretty much anywhere else as well. I mean most visitors are commenting on just how massive the English people are, not just in terms of muscles, sometimes it's in terms of fat as well, but all of these things are kind of correlated with one another. I mean, most visitors are absolutely horrified by the extent to which a relatively well off Englishman, even Yeomen people who are essentially engaged in agriculture, they'll spend half the day basically at a meal. The idea of the Hobbit saying, what about second breakfast is very, very a real thing in the 18th century, especially to foreign visitors.
Sam Bowman (00:15:54):
So does population growth take off at the same time as this?
Anton Howes (00:15:57):
Yes, massively. So England, interestingly, after the Black Death, it goes for about five, just over 5 million people down to, well, first there's the black death wave, which kills off about half the population, and then it actually continues to decrease as a result of further plagues, and then just fertility completely collapses. So the country's population starts to hover just over 2 million people over the course of the late 16th century. However, it suddenly starts to increase again, it not only gets up to its pre plague level, at which point before the black death we're talking in the 1340s at which at that point there's a kind of demographic crisis, your proper malus crisis that people scarcely have enough land to live on essentially already you've got these kind of famines, periodic famines, periodic plagues that are killing off the population to keep it at that level. It can't really exceed that.
(00:16:58):
What happens in the 17th century, however, is that the pre plague limit is not only reached but then exceeded and at the same time as people getting richer and richer and living standards continuing to be maintained. So England's population growth is quite striking over the course of the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries in that it just continues to grow and grow to a level that beforehand, given the kind of old technology that you had in the 1340s, would've just been impossible. And I think actually the adoption of coal and the replacement of all of this land with agriculture is a big part of that. It just makes just calories in the economy as eaten by livestock, by horses, as well as by people just so super abundant that a very large population can be maintained to the extent that England is actually throughout this whole period. So this late 16th century onwards, a net grain exporter, and it's only really in the 1760s or so that you start to see the signs of the demographic crisis or some demographic checks beginning to bite a little bit. So there's greater reliance on foreign imports and there's greater reliance on Irish livestock and dairy and so on. But even then, they're able to afford a lot of the food imports that they require in order to keep that demographic expansion going.
Ben Southwood (00:18:22):
Okay, so let's say we agree with you that by 1700 or some point, you can clarify if you think there's a specific time, but let's say we agree with you by 1700 European visitors could already see that Britain was the Silicon Valley of its time. It was the most technologically advanced country. People could eat more, they had more animals, et cetera, et cetera. When did this actually start? Was Britain set up to succeed from a really long deep history in 1550, for example? Was it obvious from that vantage point that Britain was going to lead? This is like a long, long story is the more we dig into it, the more we find that there were roots or did something change.
Anton Howes (00:19:06):
So I think something very significant changes over the course of the 1540s and 50s. I think if you were an extra terrestrial visiting the world and you are looking for an acceleration of innovation, you're looking for earth's Silicon Valley and you visiting the world, if you were to look at England in the 1520s/30s, it wouldn't even come onto your radar. You'd be looking elsewhere. If you were looking at cities as centres of innovation and culture and so on, you'd be looking at northern Italy, you'd be looking at the low countries. So modern day Belgium and the Netherlands, which are extremely urbanised, have very commercial societies. You might be looking at China for some of the largest cities in terms of population density overall, if you were looking for the largest states thinking that you need to have a strong state in order to fend off predators, you most certainly wouldn't be looking at England because it's extremely vulnerable to foreign predators.
(00:20:05):
Pretty much the history of the 15th century, the Wars of the Roses we think of as being this internal sign warfare. But actually if you look at what's happening is that England is being repeatedly invaded from across the sea by French backed or Burgundian backed, or even breon backed pretenders to the throne, some of which succeed. So Henry VII, the first Tudor King is an extremely unlikely candidate to be king. He's basically sent with Breton and French backed mercenaries to invade the country, manages to get to Milford Haven, march hundreds of kilometres in land before he's met at the ball of Bosworth and just happens to win almost sheer accident. But there's loads and loads of other repeated invasions over the course of it. So in many ways, England is not only a very, very weak country. It's gone from in the 14th century during what we might call glory years of the beginning of the Hundred Years War, where England is about a quarter to a third, the size of France, but actually in practise is actually larger than that because most of what the French King controls is not really his to control.
(00:21:18):
You've got the Dukes of Burgundy, you've got the Dukes of Britain, they're kind of semi-independent. The dutchy of Accutane is actually controlled by the English king. So actually the difference isn't so great by 1500 England is, it's about a sixth the size of France, and France is actually fully under the control of the French King, with the exception of this tiny little toehold left at Calais, which is the one remaining fortified bit of the English land water with France. So it's not a particularly strong state. You've got very large empires that are suddenly growing. The Habsburgs are emerging, the French kingdom is growing significantly, even conquer Scotland to the north, which is only a fifth, its size by population. Ireland is kind of under nominal control, but not really something, not really an area where the English king, his writ actually extent does very much beyond the pale around Dublin as it's called.
(00:22:21):
So England is not a particularly strong state. It's not particularly urbanised. It's not particularly industrialised. Most of it's the things that it requires in terms of keeping up to date with the gunpowder revolution. Nearly all of that stuff has to be imported from Antwerp. So from the low countries, it's entirely dependent for nearly all of its access to culture, science, technology that's going on in Europe via that trade that it has with Antwerp. In many ways, London is a kind of satellite city to Antwerp that only really exists as a major cultivation, about 50,000 people, really quite small, not one of the largest cities in Europe, not really, I think even in the top 10, despite being a capital city. So it's really a minor backwater, if you like, and the economy as a whole is extremely agrarian.
Sam Bowman (00:23:11):
So England at this point is exporting and producing raw materials, but not transforming those raw materials into anything more sophisticated. Is that what you mean by because industrialization or industry in this period feels a bit anachronistic to my mind at least. I think of steam and coal and things like that, but you're using the term slightly differently.
Anton Howes (00:23:31):
The main industry by far this period, and actually well into the 18th century as well, is cloth making. So taking your raw wool, spinning it, which is quite time intensive or carding it potentially first or at least combing it, spinning it, weaving it. And then for English wool cloth, what you'd also do is you'd oil it up and you'd fill it, which is kind of pound all of the very short fibres into a kind of felty mass, which would then be stretched out over tenter hooks. And that's the main industry that England has. There's a bit of tin mining, which is, there's some of that, there's a bit of lead mining as well. But really in terms of what we might think of as interesting industries, I mean, some of the stuff that later takes off is barely being touched. I mean, iron, about 75% of England's iron is imported from northern Spain, from the Basque country.
(00:24:32):
Copper is just almost unheard of. There's something, although there are loads of copper mines and loads of copper in the ground, it's just simply not being exported. Brass isn't being produced despite the fact that you've got everything you need for brass production. So even with even basic materials where you think there could be some primary production going on that's not taking place, let alone the secondary production that you might see in terms of working up those materials into something else. So yes, I'm not talking necessarily about steam engines and factories and so on, but really even just the taking your primary produce and turn and transforming it into something slightly more sophisticated with the exception of cloth making, there's very little going on. So
Ben Southwood (00:25:14):
Why then with this incredibly bad starting position with Britain being a poor, backward, small, ineffective, weak country constantly being invaded by foreign pretenders, how then according to you, did this change so quickly?
Anton Howes (00:25:33):
So before I answer that, I'll say it gets even worse before it gets better, and I think the way in which it gets worse is actually quite important to understanding why it gets better. So what happens during Henry VII's reign is that he essentially decides that like his namesake Henry V, one of the things he'd likes to try is just to keep invading France and see if he can recon make Britain great or make England great again. So he attacks the French in the 1510s in the 1520s. In the 1540s, he often also attacks the Scots, not with a view to conquering them, but really just to keep them at bay so that he can then completely destroy as much of Scotland as possible before he then has an invasion of France. In order to do this, he taxes the hell out of the English population to a degree that simply hadn't been seen before.
(00:26:25):
Many people have heard of the poll tax as being a thing in the 1380s, at least the peasant revolt. What they're unaware of is that there's another poll tax in the 1510s and another poll tax in the 1540s to pay for Henry's wars. And he comes up with this whole structure of taxation, which was unlike anything that had been seen for well over a hundred years, at least, if not since the beginning of English history as far as I can tell, which is essentially getting parliament to vote what were called subsidies, which is a bit confusing, but they're subsidies to the crown in order to fight wars. So essentially there are actually taxes rather than subsidies. So by parliament voting these taxes to the king. However, one thing I hadn't even realised until I was researching this and writing up these bits about a year ago is just how inefficient these taxes are, just how terrible it would've be the economy.
(00:27:20):
Because what they've done is they're levied as percentages year after year with often sps of years. So it only happens every time parliament's called. But every time it happens, there's this, the whole economy has a mini recession and a credit crunch because for most people it'll be levied on their goods and their goods as value. So essentially any capital that you owned, the whole value of that is what's being taxed. So when it's 2.5% or 5% year after year for a sp of years, as Henry goes off to repeatedly and try to invade France and fail pretty much every single time, what's happening is that your typical taxpayer, let's say it's a merchant or even just a yeoman who's trying to farm some land, what they're having to do is they're having to value all of their goods, all of their stock in trade, all of the debts that are owed to them, minus the debts that they owe, even the value of the lease of their house or the lease of their farm.
(00:28:26):
All of that is what's being used for the calculation of what the percentage is going to be. So your 2.5% is not just 2.5% of what you've got in cash is 2.5% of all of your stock in trade, essentially all of your assets. So these kinds of wealth taxes that you're essentially seeing are extremely damaging to the economy because most people don't actually have that much cash on hand with which to pay them. So suddenly you often see a kind of deflationary recession because everyone's having to try to sell off their goods just to pay the tax. But because everyone's doing that all at once, it results in prices plummeting and the effective tax rate actually being higher than that, that was originally they were assessed on. So that whole bureaucratic infrastructure is set up in the 1510s to do this. Interestingly, it's done secretly because what they do is they do it initially as a way to figure out what the military capabilities of the country are.
(00:29:25):
And so they went around the country sending people for this kind of military survey in the 15, 10, 1520s to work out how many nights weapons everyone should have because based on your wealth, you are supposed to be able to provide a certain number of soldiers or a certain amount of weaponry in order to go and fight in the king's wars. And so you actually get lots of people very optimistic going very Jing Egoistically saying, oh yeah, I've actually got, I'm even wealthier than I say I am because I want to show just how patriotic I am about the impending invasion of France. And those people I suspect were really regretting it when they turn around a few years later and they kind of say, well, actually what we've used to assess your military capabilities and how many weapons, how much you've got, we're actually going to use that as the basis to tax you for these wealth taxes.
(00:30:21):
And interestingly, the other way round it is that it's not just based on people's wealth, but if you are a landholder and so nobility/gentry, you've paid as a percentage of your rent, so your income rather than of your landed wealth, the idea being that it's not very easy to sell land. So what essentially happens is there's actually a kind of great big distortive effect of this, which is a lot of merchants at the moment, they get rich, they immediately try to put as much of their wealth into land as possible because it cuts their tax by about 95% because is always taken us to, which is the larger your landed wealth or your wealth in goods as it's called. And so very often you seem to see this kind of wholesale shift of people out of the mercantile economy and out of manufacturing into simply trying to become landholders as well.
Ben Southwood (00:31:13):
This is a bit like the Herberger tax that people have proposed where you have to self-assess the value of something and then pay a tax based on the value you assess it at, but you have to sell it at that value if someone comes to you.
Anton Howes (00:31:26):
I suppose in some ways it might be similar to that, the extent to which it self-assess kind of interesting. It appears as though it is self-assessed and then increasingly under oath, which people took very, very seriously in those days for the first few decades of Henry's wars, only after the 1540s does the tax tapes start to decrease. And it seems as though people start getting, because it just keeps happening, they start getting a bit wise to it. But you do have commissioners essentially who go around the country and also on oath to parliament, go around assessing what they think their neighbours are worth. So it does become this kind of extremely oppressive system. But essentially every time there's a war, you see not only this recession and deflation, but because there isn't really a Royal Navy, it's barely a dozen ships, it increases a bit over Henry VIII's reign to a few dozen.
(00:32:20):
But even to send his invasion force, he's essentially requisitioning all pretty much the whole of the English merchant, Marine, any ships that are in English ports in order to send his invasion force. So trade often just comes to us complete standstill as a result of it as well. So that's one extremely damaging aspect. But to fight the wars in the 1540s that turns out to be not even anywhere near enough over the course of 1530s, tax on the clergy increases, especially with the break with Rome. So the rise of an English church separate from Roman, the jurisdiction of the Pope in Rome, they increase taxes in addition to the stuff that they thought was just being syphoned off from the English economy to be sent to fund the papacy.
(00:33:13):
Even that however, doesn't account for even a third of what's required. And so there's this wholesale seizure essentially of church land, monastic land and also land for chant trees, which is kind of a lot of charitable stuff that's being done with a kind of religious aspect to it. So funding, even town infrastructure, city infrastructure guilds, a lot of the kind of charitable uses that that's done, people over centuries would've donated land to the church. Essentially the idea that the income from that land would've then funded all sorts of charitable uses, some of the religious, some of them kind of quasi-religious, some of them with a religious aspect to something that's actually kind of more like what's being done to favour civic society. And in the 1530s, Henry essentially claims it gets parliament to back him and seizes all of that land and then starts selling it off and market rates as quickly as possible over the course of the late 1530s, early 1540s, which accounts for another third of the expenditure that he has.
(00:34:19):
Oh, and I should actually add, there's another aspect that makes it even worse. I'm going to keep going with the ways in which it gets worse and worse and worse over Henry VIII's reign. But another one is that a lot of people assume that English property rights were quite secure over the course of well back into the Middle Ages. But the reality of it is that in the 1530s, there's another kind of tax that even the landholders, the Genting mobility of paying, which is always the kind of inheritance tax that being done in the most oppressive way possible, which is that if you are what's called a tenant in chief, that's someone who holds land directly from the king. So in theory, all land in the country is actually owned by the king, only the king has title to land. Everyone is actually kind of a tenant.
(00:35:05):
And then everyone who's a tenant of those tenants, the tenants in chief as they're called, are sort of subtenants of the king, a system that seems to have existed since shortly after the northern conquest and maybe since the 10 eighties. It's unclear if you are a tenant in chief. So essentially then ability or the gentry who hold land directly from the king if you die before your heirs of age, then the ward, so the orphan that you've left and we're talking, I think it's people under the age of 21, the awards doesn't actually get to enjoy their land that they've inherited. Instead, the ward is essentially kept by the king, and then the ward's lands pretty much often auctioned off to the highest bidder to be managed by that person who often just kind of runs the assets of the ward down until they're of age.
(00:36:07):
So you don't really get to enjoy your inheritance until you're 21, and in the meantime, your inheritance has been completely depleted. Any timber that you've got growing is going to be cut down and sold off the land is going to be worked as hard as possible so that the soil is all depleted. I mean, anything that you can think of in terms of basically other people controlling your inheritance. As a result of which over the course of the 15th century, there's a tax dodge that's come up with, which is essentially to instead of ever having the holder of the land die, the person who's the owner gives it over to a trust called a use.
(00:36:44):
So essentially to be used instead and is able through the use of these kind of immortal trusts to assign land whoever they like using wills. So the whole concept of having a will and saying, well, I actually want my assets to be divided up in such and such a way or the land to be divided amongst say lots of children, or I don't really like my older son, so I'm going to give it to a different son, or potentially give it to some of it to daughters to provide for various different relatives or to a wife or whatever. The use of wills becomes extremely common over the 15th century as a result of the use of uses and loads and loads of case law shows that uses are perfectly legitimate, but it's resulting in the kind of income that the crown gets from the feudal dues from wardship depleting.
(00:37:32):
So when Henry VII comes to power through his coup in 1485, he tries to really crack down on the remaining people who are still not using uses. And then under Henry VIII in the 1530s, Henry VIII essentially because Parliament doesn't do anything to reform what he sees as the abuse of landholding and this use of wills with the use of uses with these trusts, he essentially leans on judges to give him a judgement . I mean, we're talking actual full on bullies, the judges to essentially render all of the use of uses completely invalid, essentially throwing all land in the entire country into open question because over a hundred years, nearly all of that land has been changing hands as a result of that had originally been this tax dodge. So pretty much all property, if you've been a tenant of that property, is rendered uncertain until he basically gets parliament in the 1530s and around the time, interestingly, where a lot of the break with Rome is going on and things like the dissolution of the monasteries are being discussed, gets parliament in exchange for a kind of amnesty where all of the existing property titles which have just been rendered illegal, are confirmed to basically bring back to abolish the use of uses.
(00:39:01):
So it's called the statute of uses and abolish the use of wills as well. And it's only in the 1540s just a bit later that because he's so short on cash and keeps having to come back to parliament, that there's an amendment to this, the statute of wills, which essentially allows them to not have to do this to two thirds of the land that they're passing on. So in exchange for reducing just how onerous warship is and all of these futile dues that come alongside it, all these extra essentially inheritance taxes that the ability and gentry having to pay, he kind of gets this quid pro quo
Ben Southwood (00:39:40):
By completely undermining property rights for a few years. So Anton, so I'm hearing that with backward, small, weak country constantly invaded, lots of coups, very high taxes and also property rights are extremely insecure and we have kind of an authoritarian government smashing everything. Did they do anything good? How did this change come about? I'm interested in and why after all of this by 1700, you say that Britain has already gone through the industrial Revolution, it doesn't seem like that much time. What's happening now? What are these big changes that happen?
Anton Howes (00:40:11):
So the biggest change of all is that after all this stuff, they do the worst thing possible, which is that because a third of the war in the 1540s still can't be funded, they debase the currency. And the reason that's important, I won't go into the details of debasement, but essentially it's a kind of creates this extremely damaging inflation. So for most of the 15th century, you essentially have to remember that the country is kind of in this deflationary recession, but pretty much a whole century you had a bit of inflation off the black death, and then everything is completely stagnant the entire 15th century and well into the early 16th century as well with a bit of an uptick towards the end. Debasing of the currency creates extraordinary inflation over the course of just a decade because they keep debasing something that essentially hadn't really happened much in English history at all, right?
(00:41:06):
So many other countries throughout the rest of Europe has had a bit of inflation because they were periodically to base the currency in order to fund wars, and it kind of just depleted English. The famous English sterling is extremely, extremely high in its silver content as a result of the fact that debasement just hadn't been something that was resorted to by English kings until Henry VIII just towards the end of his reign, and then by the regents of his success of the young boy, king Edward, Edward VI. And the reason that's important is because you essentially kind of get what always looks like the 1970s over the course of the 1540s/50s where because of this sudden inflation, which no one is prepared for, even the government's not prepared for it, all of the long-term revenues of the English crown are depleted because everything is done pretty much in nominal terms.
(00:42:05):
So customs revenues absolutely crash. Even the crown as a landholder in terms of the rents it receives from its own crown lands, all of that is inflated away. Most of the ability to see their incomes inflated away, especially because they had for many during the deflationary period, being much like with a mortgage, you kind of have fixed or variable mortgages during the deflation. You want to kind of fix your tenancy in a very, very long-term tenancy. So they're always paying a fixed amount because the thing you're worried about is not having a tenant at all when inflation suddenly hits. However, a lot of the people that they'd locked in who would essentially been those two poor since the 15th century, the descendants of serfs and villains, those have been too poor to get onto nice and flexible variable tendencies, very short term ones where they can chop and change things very easily.
(00:42:57):
Those people are suddenly a bit, I guess a bit like New Yorkers who have got rent control apartments since the 1970s, and they're paying absolute pittance for some prime agricultural land, especially as prices of all produce is rising as a result of this kind of monetary shock that you see in the 1540s and 50s to pay for Henry's and then Edward VI's Wars. So you've got this complete upheaval to the extent that in the 1540s essentially the English state almost collapses because you see mass protests across the entire country. There's a coup of Edward VI's Regent, his uncle, uncle, the Duke of Somerset. Even I think you can even look at the rise of English Protestantism through that lens in that the clergy who are also on these fixed incomes are kind of radicalised because they're losing about half their income and through inflation.
(00:43:56):
And so half of them are thinking, oh, things used to be better when the monasteries were still around. We should go back to Catholicism. The other half are saying, look, everyone's becoming so greedy and demanding higher wages and demanding higher prices. So they blame merchants, they blame landlords for higher rents, they blame even workers for demanding higher wages, and they're thinking greed is becoming this thing that's becoming more common in the economy and throughout the commonwealth is a kind of cancer on the commonwealth without really realising the actual root cause of it. And the reason that's all important is because the change occurs as a result of I think the people. And if you look at the precise people, the people who actually understand what's going on, there's a handful of people generally associated with the mint. So actually often the people who has had to put the debate into effect as well as a lot of merchants who are engaged in foreign trade, people like Thomas Gresham, who's essentially Henry VIII's guy in Antwerp who's raising foreign loans, which again are getting more and more biting as inflation bites.
(00:45:04):
So there's this handful of people who understand what's going on. They know that the root cause is to basement. And actually one of the key people, and this is one of these texts that I really think ought to be like a key text in English history, almost no one's heard of, I think because the author, a guy called Thomas Smith is such an unremarkable common name. It's a bit like if their name was John Doe, John Smith, Thomas Smith is one of the key people in the government who's not always been listened to, but he writes when he's actually sidelined in the fifties, forties, he writes what's called a manuscript called the Discourse of the Common Wheel, in which he actually just goes through in a very, very simple terms in a way I guess that policymakers would understand a kind of dialogue between all of the different groups of society.
(00:45:50):
So there's the landlords, there's the merchants, there's the artificer, and then there's the doctor represented by himself who goes through all of the problems in the commonwealth. All of the things that all of the kind of inflationary effects are actually the root is the root result of debasement. And the reason that's important I think, is that the debasement people, if you look at them, they're exactly the kind of people who think that the way out of the problem is that they need to get an injection of silver into the English economy because unfortunately, undoing debasement is extremely, extremely difficult. There's essentially only two ways to undo it. You either need to get lots more silver because having taken a sort of currency and added lead, it's very difficult to essentially remove the lead out of it. You either need a technique that's only really known in Germany, so you can either get foreign antithesis from Germany where they know how to do this over into the country, or you need to use foreign trades to try and get extra silver into the country because essentially there aren't really gold and silver mines in England.
(00:46:53):
There's a bit, but there's really not very much that can be used. So you either get, and again, you might need foreign miners, foreign expertise to try and even find these mines in the first place. And the way to get silver into the economy is essentially through trade. If you can create a positive balance of trade, if you can make sure that English exports are worth more than the imports, then potentially you can get an injection silver with which to undo the basement to recall the currency and kind of get rid of this root cause of what's going on. And so what they do is, again, they think that the way to do this is to rely on foreign expertise is to get people who know what they're doing from other countries, foreign experts who can come in and teach the English essentially how to do this.
(00:47:34):
And one of the key ways they do this is not just through, I guess through we might call proto industrial policies, proto innovation policies. It's not just through bringing foreign expertise over, but one of the ways they want to do this is through by more directly trading with the places that they can potentially export to. So rather than all of English trades essentially coming through Antwerp and being extremely vulnerable in that regard, instead having English ships, taking English exports directly to Spain, directly to the Mediterranean across the Atlantic, and potentially even, and this is the thing they really try to do, go around Europe all the way to China.
Sam Bowman (00:48:20):
So Anton, what you've described sort of sounds to me like a rational basis for mercantilism. Usually we think of it as being about accumulating gold, but the basic idea of exporting more than you import so that you can hoard some precious metal normally sounds crazy to us in the present day, but what you are describing makes it sound like it's quite rational.
Anton Howes (00:48:45):
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think mercantalism got a really bad rap in the 18th century when it's taken to new extremes. It's almost like that you might call the bullism where there's this obsession with always having enough gold and silver. But from the context of the 16th century, I think is extremely rational because they do need more silver in the economy. They do need to be able to sell, they do need English exports to be worth more abroad in order to get the kind of luxuries, not just luxuries, but kind of basic necessities even that they're importing. And actually, if you look at some of the tracks that are written about trade at the time, some of 'em are rubbish as you'd expect, but a lot of them are actually extremely subtle in the way that they think about foreign trade. And then the way they think about bullion.
(00:49:31):
It's not bull for its own sake. They do realise that they do need efficiently circulating currency. They need one that's not being completely debased, and they also need to not be completely dependent on foreign merchants for their foreign trade where everything could be dictated by essentially the pawns potentially of foreign powers. To give a good example of this, throughout the whole period we're talking, I think it's from 1437 onwards, even the merchants of the Hanseatic league, so this is German and Baltic merchants who had the league itself as alliance of mercantile cities and merchants, they are actually paying even lower customs duties than even English native merchants in England. I think it's only 25% for most imported goods compared to what English merchants are paying because England is so reliant on foreign traders. So a lot of the mercantalist ideas, the idea that you should be trying to boost the value of exports, the idea that you should be controlling English trade, have it in English ships with English merchants in control of them, a lot of that does have this origin there, and I think is actually quite important for the way that they're thinking about the way to economic recovery from the real pits of the 1540s and 50s.
(00:51:01):
The thing that I think gives it a bad rap, and I think rightly so, is that there is also at the same time some people are saying, well, the other way to address the trade balance is to reduce foreign imports as well. And so you do see a kind of mechanical attitude there where you see things like sumptuary laws, which are laws essentially saying that people shouldn't be buying more expensive cloths and more expensive kind of luxury things to wear because it's something relatively easy to enforce because you can see literally what people are wearing. There's this idea that only people of a certain degree or rank should be wearing certain types of cloth or certain kinds of things on their person. So that in many ways is a way to try and restrain the trade balance as well. So there is a rational basis to it, certainly.
Sam Bowman (00:51:50):
Just to clarify, why don't prices just rise to normally when you have inflation, you have a period that's really awful where some prices are rising, wages haven't risen yet, or some have, but some haven't. But eventually you settle at a new price level and you can live with that. So why is it that doesn't happen at this time and that you need to undo the debasement rather than just adjusting to this new normal?
Anton Howes (00:52:17):
So I think a lot of it is to do with that. When you get this kind of inflationary period, it's so dramatic, but also it propagates unevenly that when people experience inflation, certain people benefit actually at the expense of others. I mentioned long-term tenants, the descent of serves find themselves sitting in these locked, fixed in rents. Some of these rents literally inheritable, they'll be passed down for generations and generations. These guys are descendants of serfs. They end up within just a few decades being wealthy, yeomen buying land themselves, becoming even landowners within just a short space of time while everyone else ends up being who was on a very short lease. Their rents are suddenly rising absolutely through the roof. They're being what's called rack rented as they're on a torture rack by their landlords is how it's referred to landlords. At the same time, they find themselves, well, often three quarters of the land that they had would be on permanent fixed rent leases, ones that last for either lifetimes or even multiple generations, or even sometimes even less so decades. But on these very fixed long-term leases, they're finding themselves unable to adjust very quickly. And so they're getting annoyed. The government has, in order to raise taxes to new levels, has to implement changes.
(00:53:43):
I mentioned that customs duties were based on, in normal terms, their own rent. They're a landholder themselves. All of that is, again, they have exactly the same problem that things are very fixed in, and so they find it very difficult to adjust. So you end up with a very, very weak state from the mid 16th century onwards in that everything Henry VIII does pretty much, he gets all these massive boons seasons of monasteries, debaters, the currency, all these massive mega one-off windfalls. But his successors basically find themselves with very, very decaying revenues and extremely difficult to increase, again without causing a lot of civil strife, if you like. And merchants as well, they can't necessarily respond because since the 14th century, since the last time there'd been inflation, market prices are very heavily regulated. So justices of the piece, everything had to happen in the market or buying and selling justices and magistrates at market are making sure that people aren't asking over certain prices. So there's all sorts of different problems that you get of adjustment where instead of actual the price going up, the quality decreases, problems like that. And then the other aspect that I think is really important is that wages are also capped since the 14th century. So the ability of labourers to even demand more is very, very heavily restricted because there's all sorts of problems in place in terms of, again, justices of the peace capped wages, and they're trying to prevent people from earning more.
Ben Southwood (00:55:21):
So Anton, you've now given me an extra reason why I wouldn't expect the industrial revolution to happen in Britain, which is that they have debased the currency. You said the one thing they did that made it happen is they did the worst possible thing. I feel like I'm further away from an explanation, and then as we were explaining the details of the one worst thing they did, you explained some other reasons why I wouldn't expect them to have an industrial revolution, like they have massive wage and price controls and various other constraints. How did all of this stuff like the Debasement lead to your theory of the Industrial Revolution?
Anton Howes (00:55:53):
So the key thing is that the group of people who understand the causes, who understand that debasement is the problem, they're the ones who essentially a very small group of people is mint officials and a few merchants who really understand what's going on. They basically self-organize and they shift in place certain, they managed to get the government to put in place certain policies that allow for the new trajectories to take place. So Britain, over the course of just these few decades, or England over the course of these few decades, goes from being basically a land economy, an agrarian economy, to being one that's stressing the importance of trade. It's one that stresses the importance of having a Navy. It's one that stresses the importance of having its own merchants. It's a merchant marine. They get people like Sebastian Cabot or Caboto, who was the Venetian born, allegedly.
(00:56:55):
He's born in Bristol, but the Venetian born head of navigation for the Spanish Empire. They managed to poach him in the 1540s, late 1540s, bring him over to essentially teach the English, how to navigate, how to use the kind of latest navigational techniques so that they can start trading directly with the Mediterranean directly across Atlantic. He sends them off in search of a northeast passage to China, and given it's actually pretty icy, what they actually find is Russia, and there's a direct route where they can trade with via the port of Archangel with the tar of Muscovy, they start trading into the Baltic, they start extending that range. And so you've get this great wealth coming into London as a result of that. And I think London's growth is particular growth starts to take off as a result of that. And then the other is that they bring over the artifices and experts that they need to undo the effects of the basement specifically.
(00:57:55):
So there's a group of Germans, essentially who they hire to do the Recoined in 1560 to 1561. And what's especially astonishing, and the more I've looked into this, the more striking it is, is that they set up a bunch of companies, which all of these, this group, small group of people are the main investors again and again and again in essentially joint stock corporations, which hadn't really existed before. Those are set up in order to exploit various English industries for the first time in a very major way. So copper mining and brass production, the kinds of things where they've been entirely depending on foreign trade for before taking English resources and using them in ways that hadn't been appreciated before. Even the origins of coal use, which I think has a lot to do with the adoption of various foreign techniques. The German invented technique for brewers in London in the 1570s and eighties.
(00:58:59):
The people who have been brought over to implement those are exactly the same people who have been brought over in the 1540s/50s/60s to try and undo the effects of debasement specifically, and by that specific very small, tight-knit group of people who understand what's going on. So it's essentially a small group of people who have the no or have that understanding of what the sources of many of England's problems are. Those are the people who bring over with this kind of emphasis on trade on England as a maritime nation rather than a kind of land nation which has land borders with Scotland, with France, around Cali to the west around with the rest of Ireland, to being one that we think of as a kind of island nation that we've thought of ever since. All of that emphasis, all of that change of vision, if you like, for England, all of that comes about, I think as a result of that group of people.
(00:59:53):
And what they set in motion is that generation after generation, because you have such a weak state that's been completely impoverished by debasement essentially, and as a result of the knock-on effects of a lot of these things is that they put in place or they're forced to put in place the kinds of institutions like joint stock corporations like the use of monopoly patterns where the Monarch essentially gets to introduce a new technology without actually having to hire directly the people to do it. They give them the monopoly. With the monopoly, they're able to get investors for a much broader group of people. It creates this kind of more robust infrastructure, if you like, or institutional infrastructure, which over the course of the late 16th century and early 17th centuries makes London the place to be. It means that instead of being completely reliant on the centre on the Monarch to be the fungi of innovation, which is what you see in the courts of the rest of Europe instead because they're so impoverished, but because this infrastructure has been set up to draw investment and draw support from essentially the entire mercantile community and even some of the inability of gentry that results in a kind of robustness for support for innovation.
(01:01:08):
Because a lot of those institutions keep getting more and more investment. They keep getting more and more support generation after generation after generation. That I think is kind of the key element that makes first London and then the rest of England so important.
Ben Southwood (01:01:22):
Sorry, I'm confused. I had always taken you to have the view that the important thing that went on is everyone starts innovating all the time. And so like you said at the start, we were talking, they improve watches, they improve ship sails, they improve navigation, they improve everything, not just cotton. And now it sounds like your theory is about the institutional structures that existed that allowed the industrial revolution to happen. Which one of those is true?
Anton Howes (01:01:50):
Well, I think they're both connected is once you have these institutional structures set up, when you have the use of patents, when you have the use of joint stock corporations, when you have this broad investor class that's being created in a sense in London, and you have that kind of broad based bottom up support for a lot of the things that are necessary. I mean, this even extends to print culture, right? Because you have this broad investor class and you are trying to always get investment from lots of merchants rather than just from the monarch. You end up with a lot of the secrets to innovations being printed over the course of the late 16th, early 17th centuries. Not necessarily all the details, but enough of the details to get investors interested. So there's a kind of selective revelation of a lot of invention, which again builds one thing upon the other.
(01:02:42):
So by broadening the knowledge base, that becomes a crucial driver of more knock on innovation, not just in that particular field within other ones as well. So because London becomes this hot bed and starts growing as a result of the wealth that comes in pretty quickly as a result of those changes, it means that it has that kind of, it's something in the air if you like, as people would refer to with Silicon Valley, that it's actually a result of all of these separate pieces that result in it being kind of a bottom up source of support for innovation, for invention. And that applies across the board. That's what applies to all of the various different industries and is I think the result that is the reason we need to look at the late 16th century as being the key period.
Sam Bowman (01:03:30):
So is Shakespeare and is the literary and theatrical flowering that's going on at this time, is that related to this or is this happening independently?
Anton Howes (01:03:40):
I think there probably is some relation. I've not looked into it closely, I'll admit, but I think there must be some kind of connection there. It's striking even that Shakespeare's patrons are often of that kind of second or third generation who are involved with a lot of the same projects. The group around the Earl of Southampton, Walter Raleigh, the Earl of Essex in the 1590s before he tries to do a coup and gets killed. A lot of the same sorts of people are connected. Even some of the artists like Nicholas Hilliard, he's the famous miniature painter of the late 16th century. He's also, funnily enough, a jeweller in Goldsmith who tries to do all sorts of stuff with mining and salt making up in Scotland. So he seems to be involved with the same set of people with these foreign connections and constantly bringing over foreign artisans and foreign innovators making England one of the most attractive, one of the more, at least certainly more attractive places for them to flock to.
Sam Bowman (01:04:45):
And what role does the Crown have in this, and what role do the monarchs, so Henry VII sounds like basically the worst monarch in English history so bad that he created the crisis that kind of led to the revival. Is it Elizabeth or James or who gets the credit for steering the country in a different direction?
Anton Howes (01:05:10):
I think in many ways they're just very constrained because of the fiscal crisis that Henry VIII leaves to his successes. Mary does a little bit of it. She does rerate the customs. So the customs become a much bigger deal in English or for crown revenues, which possibly actually makes it a little bit more sensitive to mercantile demands rather than just the demands of landholders landowners. So there's possibly something subtle going on there, I'm not sure. But really I think Elizabeth, in many ways it has her hands tied. There's very little that she could do even to raise the salaries of her officials all the time. She ends up granting monopolies, or even not even necessarily monopolies, but the reversions. So when someone dies and they lose their monopoly, she even sells the next person sells the right to become a monopolist to the next person on just to raise some cash.
(01:06:04):
So because she's so constrained and James after that as well, from 1603 to 1625, when James VI of Scotland becomes James I of England, he's very, very constrained in what he can do. The only thing I would say though, that maybe Janes has to his credit, which I think helps enormously with England really starting to very noticeably take off over the course of the 17th century, is that he keeps the country at peace for an extraordinary long period of time, pretty much from the moment he becomes king, he very quickly makes peace with the Spanish, and then he persistently avoids getting drawn into the 30 years war despite the fact that it's his own son-in-law and daughter who start the whole thing when as the elector, as the electoral of the pattern, they claim the crown of Bohemia. So he's constantly fighting this battle, even against his own domestic interests to keep England at peace. And I think that actually probably does result in if we were to give credit to at least one monarch over the course of this, I think James the first as a peacemaker, as the peaceful king potentially allows England to do a great deal of economic development and growth through trade.
Sam Bowman (01:07:12):
So Anton, what you've described actually sounds a little bit like the story that you often hear about the Renaissance, where the fall of Constantinople leads to a lot of artists and merchants and so on. Fleeing to northern Italy and kicking off the Renaissance. What you are describing is craftsmen and merchants and inventors and people like that. Moving to England, the catastrophe is in England, but this causes this influx of people to come in. What I don't understand is why England, there were catastrophes all over Europe at this time. There were catastrophes that led to debasement of currencies and wars as you've talked about that led to essentially states going into permanent decline. So what was it about England that led to the rising from the ashes that you've described, whereas so many other countries just never had that?
Anton Howes (01:08:11):
My story right is very much one of a small group of people I exercising agency. And despite the fact that they've got the card stacked against them, despite the fact that English government is repeatedly doing all sorts of other crazy laws and other regulations as well, making often the crisis even worse, they do manage to get a few of the key policies that they need through in order for England's trajectory to change. So really it's actually, it's not that there's anything about England at the time. It's not that there's anything specific geographical or even economic that's necessarily causing that causes the change in terms of an underlying factor. It's that it's human agency ultimately, there's a small group of people with the right ideas, with the right diagnosis, and then solutions that I think often even unintended by them have these massive ripples, massive echoes further down the line. Essentially it's really down to human agency. I think that England was lucky enough to have the right people at the right time with the right skills and with the right persistence, if you like, to get through some of those policies that they needed to poach exactly the right people that they needed for England's transformation.
Sam Bowman (01:09:28):
So there you have it, a country on its knees economically that thanks to the agency of a few individuals focusing and prioritising the right solutions managers to fly out of the ashes if only there was a country today that had some kind of parallel at that. Anton Howes, thank you very much for joining us. Ben. Thanks for being here with me, and thanks for these excellent questions. Anton, where's the best place for people to find you if they want to hear more and read more of what you do?
Anton Howes (01:10:00):
The best place would be my blog, my Substack, my blog/newsletter, which is ageofinvention.xyz.
Sam Bowman (01:10:08):
And if you want to hear more from Anton and read more of his excellent work, go to ageofinvention.xyz and subscribe to a Substack. And if you want to hear more from us, visit worksinprogress.co read everything that works in progress is doing, and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast. Thanks a lot.