The internet as a production platform and cultural space

In this post I’d like to reflect on some recent events in the online community, as a springboard for thinking about the internet as a publishing platform and cultural space more generally.

First: SOPA. The Stop Online Piracy Act was introduced in the US House of Representatives in October 2011 with the apparent aim of expanding the ability of US law enforcement to combat the online dissemination of copyrighted intellectual property.

SOPA was met by vocal dissent from pretty much every worthwhile corner of the internet, and the public relations battle was on. Opposition to the bill could have been painted as an alliance between layabout internet pirates and Silicon Valley tycoons, all seeking to profit from the content made by others. But any efforts to do this were unsuccessful.

I opposed – and continue to oppose – SOPA. I am anxious about instituting effectively worldwide censorship without due legal oversight. I believe that the burden of proof is the wrong way round, with the establishment of innocence seeming to be of more importance than the obligation to reasonably prove guilt. Whilst criminalising links rather than content makes pragmatic sense, it’s troubling to see law enforcement focus on criminalising speech rather than the more substantive crime at its root. And with the shutdown of Megaupload (a popular location for legal and illegal file hosting), taking place at around the same time as the height of the SOPA controversy, it doesn’t seem as if law enforcement is particularly powerless to target hosts directly.

More importantly, perhaps, I have a strong feeling that the future belongs not to last century’s broadcast media industry – and its associated delivery and legal frameworks – but rather to the people who are not only forging the way into the wilds of the digital space, but who are also setting up a functional, safe and productive society there. Our best bet is to support them in this process, rather than ceding control to the tired and confused pioneers of yesteryear.

Part of this process is mapping property rights onto the digital space, or, alternatively, setting up new systems which sidestep the fallout of the infinite reproducibility of digital works. The lumbering enlightenment copyright model has to some extent at least been turned to the benefit of large media rights-holding organisations. Now is a good time to reconfigure how we support and fund content creators, and how we deliver content.

Large-scale production processes, such as the creation of Hollywood films, require a considerable investment. Organisations or individuals with the money to fund such ventures must shrewdly evaluate the potential of any such investment opportunity. They seek a return on their investments, rather than a loss, and as such are vigilant in declining to fund projects that do not seem likely to be successful. But these gatekeepers are a burden.

An overarching concern for profitability can hamper the pursuit of true creative success, and the commercial rewards that sometimes come with it. Sometimes the gatekeepers can  hold back the creation of something that content creators want to make, and consumers want to purchase. Whilst the internet has not yet been used to source funds for a creative venture on the scale of a Hollywood film, in some cases it does allow the middleman to be circumvented.

Kickstarter is an website for funding creative projects. A project explains its aims, sets an investment target, and requests funding from the community. If enough people pledge to invest in the project and it meets its funding target, the pledging users are then charged and the project receives the funding. Projects usually offer different rewards to backers for different levels of funding pledge. If the project does not meet the target, the users are not charged.

In the PC gaming community, Tim Schafer is something of a legend. As the creative force behind some of the great adventure games – Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, The Secret of Monkey Island and Psychonauts -he has a considerable amount of prestige and reputation. Fans have continually called for Schafer to make an ‘old-school’ adventure game, but no publisher has been interested. So Schafer went directly to the community through Kickstarter, and achieved the $400,000 target on the very first day. By the time the funding window closed, the project had obtained nearly ten times the funding target.

Similarly, the Code Hero project set a more modest target of $100,000. With 10 days to go, it didn’t seem that the project was anywhere near reaching its target. But a concerted mobilisation of people who believed in the concept and the project – particularly through Reddit, but also through established community hubs and blogs – meant that the project gained momentum and raised $200,000. Kickstarters for other projects have burst into  prominence – Wasteland 2 and Takedown are two funding success stories so far. Kickstarter is an American platform, but other platforms, such as indiegogo, are starting to make a name for themselves.

Whilst Kickstarter projects do not necessarily have the detailed specification or deliverables that other projects might have, this may aid creative flexibility. The target community is well placed to judge the merits of the creator and the proposed creation. Giving them a role in funding projects they want to see is a neat way of closing the circle.

I expect that such projects won’t always work smoothly, but that doesn’t undermine the potential of the platform as a whole. Indeed, over time I would expect its robustness and rigour to increase as these questions are worked out through painful experience. We need to see, for example, how much leeway an expectant community will give the creators, and how creators will impose order on the creative process with the buzz of the community in their ears. Will it help or hinder their work? I’ll be watching the Double Fine adventure develop with this question in mind. We also need to see how any over-funding is dealt with. If a game ends up with more funding than requested, how should the process of deciding what to do with that extra funding work, and how can existing funders consent to to or reject this? Certainly Kickstarter isn’t the solution to all the challenges of developing, promoting and publishing a creative work, but the online space as a whole has done an impressive job in these few examples.

Broadly speaking, the process of delivering a product to an audience entails creation, promotion, and distribution. Kickstarter has shown how creation can be funded. Furthermore, in both of the above examples, promotion was largely taken care of by the community, with social media and the internet’s impressive ability to talk to itself driving the process. The basic Code Hero public relations and communications work wasn’t particularly slick, but it communicated the vision and concept sufficiently well to win over the community, which then amplified the message more powerfully than any fancy piece of marketing copy.

So what about distribution platforms? How should these work in the online space; what does a good online distribution platform for digital content look like, and what about piracy?

The PC games industry gives us another good example here. Valve led the way into digital distribution and have made a real success of it. I would argue that this has not only been because Valve took a chance on digital distribution at a very early stage, but because of the strong conceptual underpinnings of their Steam distribution platform.

As Valve’s Gabe Newell asserted in a recent interview, too many people in the industry are misunderstanding piracy, leading them to implement ineffective draconian solutions:

“people always want to treat [piracy] as a pricing issue, [thinking] that people are doing this because they can get it for free and so we just need to create these draconian DRM systems or ani-piracy systems”. But from Valve’s extensive experience running Steam, this “just really doesn’t match up with the data.”

Rather, he argues, companies need to focus on delivering value to customers, and on maximising the opportunities afforded by the digital and online space to do this:

“You want to figure out how you can connect customers with the right collection of content and services and you need to get away from the sort of one size fits all broadcast mentality. Pricing is one of those things where a lot of people are still approaching it in almost a pre-internet fashion instead of seeing that there’s actually an opportunity to do a better job of delivering the right stuff to the right customer for the right combination of pieces.”

Whilst the Steam platform is secured by some formidable anti-piracy software, it feels more enabling than obtrusive as a platform. It is very effective at connecting the user with their games – wherever they may be – and at delivering valuable experiences (through the Friends service, Community and Achievements). There’s also a great deal of consumer surplus to be had through the Steam store, as its regular sales allow users to purchase games at impressively low prices.

From the perspective of the producer, we may be simply moving from one middleman to another (information on the how much a cut Valve takes from transactions is not public). But for consumers, this heralds an improvement from pre-online distribution. The platform is being used to increase value rather than to restrict the user. This is why the Steam platform has gained such positive consent in the community. Valve have been rewarded for empowering the consumer: people are prepared to pay if they are given a valuable experience.

Digital distribution may be a backwards step, however, in terms of content ownership and the persistence of a user’s access to material. If Valve were to go bust, what would be the fate of all users’ games? How would you be able to download anything, or even access the games already installed on your hard drive? This is a real and legitimate concern which has not yet been answered. Creating and distributing digital content allows for some incredible advances, but ownership of digital content is not as physical and permanent and secure as placing a new tome on your bookshelf. But digital content delivered through an online service can be more secure and permanent than any mere physical object, as long as the servers stay up and people are able to access them. I’m not sure what the long-run solution to this problem is, but I’m confident that Valve are a good organisation to be entrusting with the search for a meaningful solution.

I’m certain that the digital medium and online publishing allows for a more creative and connected world, with empowered consumers and producers. There are plenty of rough edges, but the examples reviewed here lead me to feel positive about the direction of travel.

The infinite reproducibility of digital content is the biggest free lunch in human history. Let’s work out how to use it to maximise the benefits to people, and perhaps to improve our society along the way. The digital pioneers continue onwards, forging new terrain and setting up new systems to allow us to reap the bounty of this fertile land. For the time being at least, it feels that the right people are in the driving seat.

Why my resolutions for 2012 will only become clear at the end of the year

I would like to do a myriad of things with my free time this year. But actions and practice are ultimately what counts. For a desire to be real it must be real and relevant in the moment; not just in the hazy dreams of the new year’s birth, remembered at arms-length.

So this post is a snappy summation of some of what I now feel I would like to do with my free time this year, to serve as a reference when I am at liberty to indulge my whims and fancies. A shopping list of inspiration and treats to be indulged in, rather than a list of chores or resolutions to which I must adhere, lest I be unhappy or a failure.

I feel no compulsion to go through the stress of marking out what I must do in the coming year, and then binding myself to it for the rest of 2012, successfully or unsuccessfully. Rather, my priorities and desires will flourish in the present – indeed, that is their only home – and we shall dispassionately see which threads appeal most in the only moment that matters.

The below list is designed to serve as inspiration, and reflects my expectations about what I might enjoy doing this year. But 2012 will not necessarily be a failure if I consciously and willingly decide to not partake in any of the below in my free time. That would simply suggest that I’ve found some other things that I enjoy doing even more. 2012 will be a failure if I misallocate my free time and waste it on things I don’t actually want to do, or which don’t stand much chance of making me happy.

In short: here’s a list of stuff I think I’d like to do this year. I resolve to be mindful of this list when deciding what to do with any unit of free time. Let’s see what I actually want to do most!

1) Playing guitar – probably with a focus on rhythm guitar technique and learning to play some specific tracks by artists I like.

2) Recording and creating music.

3) Meditation.

4) Learning about coding and computer science. I would like to improve my shallow and patchy knowledge and understanding of computers; to obtain some agency over them.

4) Learning about philosophy: I know practically nothing about the discipline. Presumably it will help me understand – or at least think about – myself, my actions, and other people, and how I might live better.

5) Reading fiction.

6) Reading non-fiction and academic prose.

7) Playing the best computer games.

8) Consuming quality broadcast media.

9) Attending cultural productions.

10) Listening to music and expanding my aural horizons.

11) Spending proper, dedicated time with my friends. Meeting up for a drink or a meal, rather than hurriedly half-interacting online.

12) Volunteering – using my skills and abilities to make some sort of positive difference outside of my work.

A desire to learn, encounter and discover runs through this list.

There are two other intentions to note, which I will not mark as resolutions, and do not conceive of as part of the other list:

a) Running.

b) Blogging.

What will their fate be this year? Will their survival depend upon marriage to at least one item from the above list?

My resolutions for 2012 are therefore:

1) To map out, as faithfully as I can, the full range of what I would like to do with my spare time.

2) To update this list with any further desires that seem relevant.

3) To mindfully choose how to spend my spare time. To choose from this list and to choose in a real attempt to maximise my own happiness.

I don’t want to waste time agonizing about priorities. Having roughly mapped out the terrain in which I expect to enjoy myself, it’s time to get going. Happy 2012 everyone.

How can we tell if digital is good for education?

Last month I was at The Schools Network‘s 2011 Annual Conference, and was fortunate to enjoy the keynotes of three particularly interesting educational thinkers – Alan November, Lord Puttnam and Tony Wagner. Their ideas and my discussions with colleagues have helped drive and shape my thinking, and have encouraged me to set down some of my thoughts on the current possibilities for education.

The main topic at the conference was the place of technology in education, and its potentially transformative role. Some delegates were grappling with this question in practice in their schools, whilst others were still uncertain as to whether to embrace technology in the classroom. I’d like to take this opportunity to propose a conceptual toolkit for evaluating digital technology in education, before applying it in the field.

The acid test for any educational procedure or process is whether it improves and promotes learning. So before we look at digital technology I’d like to start by looking at the learning process, the culture of learning, and the purposes of learning. If we arrive at a shared understanding of these, we’ll be in a stronger position to evaluate the potential – or otherwise – of digital technologies for education.

Our understanding of learning has broadened from simply seeing it as a deferential act – the transmission of knowledge by an expert and its absorption by those under instruction. We now give more focus to the interactive and peer-led elements of the learning process. Group discussion in the classroom, for example, has increased in prominence at the expense of ‘chalk and talk’.

Unfortunately, however, this more passive provision of learning persists – a situation not helped by our examination system. And so there is a problem of a misunderstanding or misapplication of the process of learning that pre-dates digital technology. Whether we embrace digital technologies or not, this problem should be addressed. Perhaps there’s something in digital technology that could be used to do so.

Learning has always been an active process. The process of revising for exams exemplifies this – it’s focused on active engagement rather than vainly hoping for the passive absorption of knowledge. Thinking back to some of the strongest elements of my Cambridge education – writing weekly essays and then developing arguments in one-on-one supervisions, and in fantastic informal interdisciplinary discussion with peers at mealtimes – were all intensely active learning experiences. Lectures, on the other hand, were less helpful.

The conference’s keynote speakers were of a similar opinion as to the nature of the learning process. Alan November argued that the core components of the learning process are purpose, autonomy and mastery, and that they are not currently being adequately facilitated. He posed a question spanning both the culture and process of learning, asking “Who owns the learning?” He advocated that learning should be owned and driven by the individual learner, rather than by teachers. Similarly, Tony Wagner argued that the current system socialises young people into being passive consumers (by focusing on instilling specific competencies and units of knowledge for exam success) rather than motivated active learners.

But perhaps this exploration of the processes and culture of learning is missing the point. Any attempt to assess an education system must surely ask about its purpose. So what’s the point of education? Whilst I would argue that the pursuit of knowledge and intellectual and personal growth is in and of itself a positive for society and the individual, it remains the case that the investment of economic resources is most easily justifiable if it produces economic returns . So what does the economy need out of education?

Tony Wagner’s excellent keynote approached the digital question from this perspective, asking “What does it mean to be an educated adult today?” Tony argued that we should focus less on teaching units of content and more on developing the skills by which knowledge is mastered. Knowledge is constantly changing, so the skills rather than the content must be the focus. Having surveyed the demands of business leaders of their workforces, he concluded that “Employers don’t care about what you know. They care about what you can do with what you know.”

Tony mapped out a set of ‘survival skills’ for navigating the 21st century economy:
1) Critical thinking and problem-solving
2) Collaboration across networks and leading by influence
3) Agility and adaptability
4) Initiative and entrepreneurialism
5) Effective oral and written communication
6) Accessing and analysing information (For example, if you memorised the periodic table of elements, or the planets, even only a few years ago, your knowledge is now out of date.)
7) Curiosity and imagination

I wonder what an education system predicated on instilling these skills, rather than one based around discrete subjects and knowledge bases, would look like. Presumably it would still have space for students to follow personal interests and intellectual abstractions to at least the same extent as the current system allows. If that is the case, then perhaps even the pursuit of knowledge and intellectual  advancement for its own sake has nothing to fear from such a reconfiguration.

I would agree with Tony Wagner, and see the purpose of learning as developing conceptual flexibility and an ability to interrogate and master skills and information. And if we place this conceptual and analytical ability at the fore, rather than prioritising any specific unit of knowledge, then the distinction between more practical and less practical subjects dissolves. The place of arts subjects is secured – indeed, perhaps the more abstract and purely conceptual the better. It’s no surprise that humanities degrees are highly valued for the skills they inculcate, even if my knowledge of the twelfth-century renaissance will probably never see daily use.

How should we conceive of – and define – conceptual and analytical ability? Is conceptual and analytical ability a meta-skill, or can this too be subdivided? As a history graduate who has utlised and developed a wide variety of both practical and theoretical toolkits spanning linguistic analysis, visual rhetoric, political processes, cultural analysis work with bodies of statistical evidence, perhaps my analytical toolkit could be sharper and wider. Perhaps a richer understanding of mathematics, IT systems and philosophy would be of benefit.

So I agree with Lord Puttnam of Queensgate that computer science is the essential knowledge of the twenty-first century, in the sense that we should be actively engaged with the transformative impact of digital technologies, rather than mere consumers; but I think the issue runs deeper than that.

Having looked at the processes of learning, the culture of learning, and the purpose of learning, we are in a position to draw together the toolkit that will allow us to properly think about digital technology and education.

So in evaluating the potential of any piece of digital technology for education, we must ask:

1) Does it foster active – and perhaps peer-led – learning?
2) Does it help us meet the purpose of education?

Testing out this toolkit in the wilds of digital technology, it flags up some serious questions when we look at the ‘traditional’ e-learning model.

It’s easy enough to harness computers to deliver some level of teaching and assessment electronically. In the traditional e-learning model this is based around the user rote-learning specific units of information, or simple competencies, and being tested on this knowledge by the software. Whilst incredibly useful and powerful to a point, by allowing students to master units of competency, this model risks being a step back to the days of passive learners, and deferential, non-interactive education. In almost all cases, learners should be able to question, disrupt, link ideas, and challenge (I would add a ‘challenge’ or ‘panic’ button to any static e-learning system). So we need to make sure that digital technology is harnessed to allow the learning experience to improve.

Thankfully the social media revolution presents us with the opportunity to truly harness the power of computers and the internet to improve learning as a social process. Social media is predicated upon communities, interaction and content creation and sharing. Social media and learning are therefore natural partners. Let’s quickly explore some examples of this.

Online publishing is easy, and collaborative tools (such as Google Docs and wikis) mean that group learning is readily achievable. By collating, interrogating and sharing information as groups, learners can grapple with the provisional nature of knowledge and improve the skills needed to continue to navigate in a world of knowledge in flux.

Forums are a great vehicle for discussion-based learning. I’ve also recently been recommended the edmodo platform by @wjputt, which is basically a Facebook for communities of learners and teachers. I’m currently setting up an online philosophy study group to see how continuing collaborative higher education might work in this space.

The online space can be used to create new communities of learning – outside and beyond the classroom. These can extend beyond the curriculum and have a life that extends beyond a single year group’s experience in a single academic year. As Alan November asked: “Are your students leaving a legacy that will benefit other students?”
So what are the key messages from this discussion?

When evaluating the potential of a digital technology, ask yourself:

1) Does this new technology foster active – and perhaps peer-led – learning?
2) Does this new technology help us meet the purpose of education?

Static e-learning can be useful, but education usually requires much more than this.
To obtain the best from digital technology:

1) Think social. Online collaborative learning, through wikis and forums, works hand-in-hand with content creation and publishing, both of which are now very easy.

2) Think transformative. It seems that digital technology offers some solutions that map nicely onto existing problems. It also offers the possibility of an educational transformation, and must not be seen simply as an extra ingredient in the pedagogical mix. As Lord Puttnam of Queensgate asserted: “if all we do with technology is support existing practices, why would we expect anything better than existing results?” So we should not just digitize old practices and methodologies; rather, we must fully harness the transformed possibilities of learning through the digital medium.

So whilst it’s important to rigorously analyse the usefulness of digital technology for learning, it is even more important to remember that we’re only just starting to learn about how digital technology could help improve learning.

Growing Up

I was trapped on the train from London back to Cambridge.
Months after graduation I reeled at change and time, looking back on a breadth of possibility broken down forever by being lived through.

Just by sitting here I advance away from my essence, shackling my identity to a succession of events; a once-radiant possibility prismed and chained into a mundane hue. Where once there was anything now there is one thing.
Unravelling my delusions of expansive possibility, the act of living destroys me:
Iron rails are far from the glory of God.

And at this moment I have to tell you all who I am, louder and clearer than ever.
Now I must fence myself in from what I have not become, to close off from unformed potential and claim that this route was the plan, and the only journey to happiness.

Looking back I don’t regret the way I’ve come, but to see life concrete and done is death.
This is all I can be, all I was. Track is being laid and I can’t stop it.
Whether I worry about it or not I can’t get off the train.

Perhaps I’m reassured that this is nonsense.
If our lives can be narrated or seen as a passage, then they don’t work as trains.
The points through which our journeys run are anything but fixed and dead.
I conjure them in the present through disposition and focus; they move and appear as I will. Controlling my present mind, I direct or subvert the entire journey.

Life is a shifting dreamed canvas, with nightmares and monsters.
I have no idea where I’m coming or going, and cannot presume to compute trajectories.
It isn’t a rigid line that I can control or not control forever.
We can master the present, whatever the warping patterns that dance around our pasts and futures. Every moment exists on its own terms, and so do I.

Imagining a better Dream School

I’ve got a lot of respect for Jamie Oliver. Whilst he could quite easily just spend his time tending to his restaurants, he seems genuinely driven to improve the world around him. Having first tackled school meals he’s recently turned to education through the Dream School project. Whilst I really admire the basic idea of the project – seeing how the education system could be improved to help those who currently leave school without qualifications – it  has not been made into good television.

If Dream School was intended as an investigation of why people are failing in the current school system and an exploration of how the situation could be improved, it could have been presented differently. It needed to be much more analytical, discursive and evidence-based. As a social experiment, Dream School was not easy to capture on television; and the attempts to do so imposed constraints which did not help the experiment. So my article here is both an exploration of how Dream School worked as a television programme and a response to some of the ideas about education raised in the show.

Viewers were guided through the Dream School experience by near constant narrative-spinning. It was certainly important to help viewers relate to the students as legitimate people facing challenges, rather than as a threatening homogenous problem mass. But the relentless drive to craft narratives undermined the series. It was incredibly hard to track how the project as a whole was progressing or to form one’s own judgements. I wanted to see timetables and lesson reports; I wanted to see much more detail on the students to better understand each of them. There could easily have been a few episodes before the school gates opened, discussing how the experiment would run and looking into the students chosen and their backgrounds. The experiment would then have been based on much more robust principles than “maybe some celebrity teachers will fix everything”.

Even worse than preventing me from making my own conclusions, the programme went out to make some pretty ramshackle conclusions on the viewer’s behalf. Countless sections of the programme felt crudely manufactured to portray the mood and message sought by the producers. The upbeat feel of David Starkey’s essay class towards the end of the series, for example, was created through confident voiceover and music, and quietly ignored the fact that only 7 students attended the class. We only saw the remarkable lessons, rather than the mundane ones. Did Ellen MacArthur only have one neatly packageable ‘breakthrough’ during all her sailing trips, or did she only lead one expedition? Were Michael Vaughan’s lessons really a complete waste of time? (They didn’t amount to any filmed material deemed worthy of inclusion) When it comes down to it, I still don’t really have a clue what Dream School entailed for its students.

Whilst the series laudably attempted to give us an insight into the lives of a handful of the students, there was no real attempt to follow their development, beyond the most superficial sense needed to package up an episode’s worth of footage. Whilst it was clear that Jamie Oliver really cared about what was going on, I never got the impression that the  producers felt the same way.

Take Henry’s episode with Ellen MacArthur. Watched uncritically, it was a moving journey – one young man facing up to himself, improving his confidence and taking some time and space to reflect on his life and relationships. But this was misleading: this event could have happened at any point during the series, and we are left with no idea as to whether the impact was sustained. I want to see the ordinary experience as well as the breakthrough; the slow, dependable victories rather than the flickering sunset of illumination.

Other than seeing a sweet poem he wrote for his parents at the end of the project, we never find out what happened to Henry. But the programme pretends that we do – it pretends that this one moment, this one apparent realisation, is enough. Dream School has been edited to create narratives that may not be legitimate. This problem with Dream School’s use of television as a medium is, in fact, the same problem at the core of its pedagogical understanding.

The final episode finishes with the conclusion “well, we proved they could be inspired.” But that’s not a surprise; nor is the suggestion that too many rules and regulations can stifle teachers’ creativity. The question is how you create this inspiration, and what you do next.

Turning a life around is not just about moments, it’s about graft. We’re right to understand that inspiration is crucial, but change is about much more than one encounter with something amazing. A spark on a wintry night can spark a conflagration that dwarfs the stars, but without any nurturing it’s just more tears lost in rain. People need to be shown how to understand their inspiration and how to work to implement it in their own lives. They are inspired because they have stepped beyond their usual practice and routine – the next thing to do is to help them create new lives. Once you’ve helped someone get a little glimpse of the destination, you have to give them a map and a set of sturdy boots so that they can do the legwork.

This is why I was a little apprehensive about the concept of ‘star teachers’. Setting to one side the implication that somehow ‘normal’ teachers are not capable of inspiring students, my real problem was about creating dependable learning relationships. I would argue that the changes that these young people need to undertake require people to dependably be there for them, to actually challenge them. If the educational legwork after the moment of inspiration does not take place, then soon enough the moment of lucid realisation and understanding will be subsumed into the young person’s usual mental structures and routine, a jewel lost under the waves. These young people need awe coupled with stability, not more abandonment by the forces that are inspiring them to greatness.

Academic success is more to do with self-discipline than it is to do with intellectual prowess. And I mean self-discipline both in the traditional sense and in the sense of the word ‘discipline’ used by Foucault. Success in the education system is much more about conforming to accepted standards of behaviour than it is about intellect. In this sense David Starkey hit the nail on the head: regardless of whether this is a good thing or not, socialisation is essential to academic success.

The exams that young people sit are designed to test – and ritually manifest – this submission as much as anything else. Most exams are a test of one’s ability to sit quietly for a certain amount of time, to use certain writing mechanisms and means of expression. (A lot of the more able students find this a problem too.) Some of this makes sense – when sitting a science exam, for example, it is important to have internalised the scientific way of thinking. One’s scientific self-discipline needs testing. But what doesn’t need testing is the host of superfluities, such as someone’s ability to write using a pen. That’s testing people on something irrelevant and arbitrary, and damning them if they don’t meet this set of standards.

What this all means is that even if Jamie can show that practical teaching works well with these young people, and even if such practical methods of teaching can be used to engender an appropriate depth of understanding, it remains the case that for examinations, one size fits all. Or rather, the individual student had better make themselves fit, lest they get left by the wayside. Dream School didn’t tackle this problem.

Dream School was trying to do an awful lot, and had a grasp of the importance and complexity of what it was setting out to do. But a short television series was not the best way to address this issue. These constrains left its pedagogical vision stunted and rendered its engagement with the wider issues stunted. And the headline innovation of having ‘star teachers’ might make for eye-catching adverts, and some good teaching, no doubt, but might underestimate the complexity of the problem. I don’t think we need to accept these inadequacies – the documentary format has shown us one way of presenting such issues in depth, and drama has shown us another. Having seen the fourth season of The Wire (which looks at the schooling of young people in the inner city), programmes like Dream School seem wilfully facile. The production team didn’t seem to share the vision or drive that of Jamie or his headteacher Dabs, and the end product was much less than it could – or should – have been. But the project as a whole had such a grand aim – to not only understand but to try and solve the problem of young people not fitting with the education system – that I can’t help but admire Dream School.

When the boot’s on the other foot

A few weeks ago I had a rubbish time playing football. Whilst I was with a great group of people and everyone around me was enjoying themselves, I felt isolated and vulnerable. What was going on here, and what have I learnt from the experience?

I’ve recently moved down to Margate to work on an education website for the East Kent NHS Trust, and had been invited to join the weekly game of football amongst residents of the staff accommodation. I was a little apprehensive about competitive exercise, but keen to get to know people and to go out of my comfort zone a little, so enthusiastically accepted.

I went along expecting a leisurely kick-about on a patch of grass somewhere, but we ended up driving to a nearby astroturf and renting a pitch. It was pretty serious stuff – a group of twenty-somethings in appropriate kit with practised sporting minds and robustly functioning bodies. I was sporting hiking trainers and came equipped with a body that hasn’t been accustomed to proper exercise for at least four years.

We hired a pitch and split into two five-man teams. It was time to be humbled.

I like to think of myself as a competent and dynamic individual. In my work and in my thinking, I enjoy taking on challenges, confident in my skill, impatient of incompetence and anyone not displaying initiative. All these assumptions about myself were abruptly taken away, and I was left scared and weak in this environment. To put it lightly, I was out of my comfort zone and out of my depth.

Slipping and sliding around ill-shod, what little dexterity I mustered was further befuddled by my footwear. The slightly reinforced tips of the shoes jostled my toes in parody of the protection for which they were designed. My football skills and instincts were some way behind the others’ – from skill at dribbling and intercepting to tactical awareness of plays and the fluidities of space. My body wasn’t used to this level of exertion, and it let me know. At first its complaints were noisy, but later they took the form of the desperate pleading of the exhausted. Having never played five-a-side before, I quickly picked up all the rules (albeit by unwittingly breaking each of them in turn), and had my chance to play in each of the positions, botching each one in turn. In short, I was a pretty dreadful football player, and I sure felt it.

I was mute. I didn’t call for the ball – I didn’t know where to run with it if I had it, and if I was passed it, the odds were that I’d lose possession almost immediately; more so, I didn’t feel that I had any authority to call out plays or make suggestions to the other players, even when I could think of them. I hoped to be left alone, to be left with the shame of my incompetence, to not be tested and humiliated again. I was probably scared of the ball coming my way. Time dragged, and whilst some part of me was enjoying the experience, I was desperate for it to come to an end. I was exhausted, and felt ashamed and guilty for spoiling the experience for the other players, who, I must repeat, were a great group of people whose only crime was being good at football and in decent shape.

During the game, the other players really helped me out. They called where I needed to run, and helped motivate me to haul my body around the pitch when my lethargy threatened to sabotage everything. I was very grateful to be managed and commanded, and appreciated their praise and encouragement.

When the game came to an end, I left with two main thoughts. For starters, I felt a rush of empathy for people who aren’t in a position to conform to my own expectations of decisiveness, initiative and competence. It seems clear that the ability to take initiative and engage with challenges is simply a function of one’s ability relative to a specific set of circumstances. Whilst there may be a baseline level of drive and initiative in a person, the potential for this to be manifested seems to depend an awful lot on circumstances. Who’s to say that people who have frustrated me over the years in professional or academic contexts were not simply in a similar position to myself – powerful and commanding elsewhere, but scared and floundering in the environment in which I encountered them? So it’s important to find out which circumstances suit each of us best, and to try and expand on these where we can. At the end of this evening, I was certain that this was my aim.

I was motivated by the prowess and positive disposition of those around me, and, of course, by the desire to not feel so inept and uncomfortable. Here’s how I’ve started trying to do this:

I decided to start working on my level of fitness. Given that the weekly football was on hold for a few weeks, I started going for a couple of runs a week. Just short affairs – fifteen minute round the hospital – but they were tiring enough. Running such a short distance, I was just about to get into the rhythm of running when I would stop. This was hardly ideal, so I needed a new route.

I was given the necessary inspiration two weeks ago. I was chatting to my friend and flatmate Rags, who told me of a ‘short’ run he’d done recently, over to Broadstairs. A simple route, and right down to the beach. It was a gorgeous evening – blazing sun, but with a cool, crisp atmosphere. It didn’t matter that ‘short’ turned out to be 2.7 miles each way. Rags had raised the bar and given me the inspiration I needed to transcend the rather parochial paradigm in which I was operating, showing me that I could aspire to something much larger. So I ran to Broadstairs and back.

I was accompanied by some music (Nas’s ‘Illmatic’), and the horns of several passing motorists. It was a fair distance, but I took it at a steady pace and ran right down to the sand. Turning back and returning up the hill, I ran towards a glorious sunset over Margate and towards a well-deserved shower, dinner and an episode of ‘I Claudius’. I was exhausted, but I was pleased that I’d seized the moment and done it.

I’ve now settled into a routine of playing football on Mondays and going running with Rags on Thursdays. This seems to be pretty sustainable, both in terms of not being too demanding, and in giving me time for other things. And it seems to be improving my fitness – when I played football on Monday I was tired but not exhausted and ineffectual, and I felt a little more confident. I was a little fitter, and so much better able to direct my body to my bidding as I started to get my head around how to play this game. I’d purchased some astroturf trainers since my first match, and these helped give me a lot more dexterity and control. I no longer lost pretty much every ball I started with, and was able to get past and even intercept people from time to time. I managed to score 2 or 3 goals over the course of the evening, and was quietly delighted by this. I was still below the average standard of the group, but not by a problematic degree, and felt like I was starting to build up an image of competence from a completely blank slate.

This new exercise regime has been set up to hopefully take into account the weaknesses of mine that are most likely to derail any conviction to improve my fitness. This desire to do more exercise has been transferred into two set exercise sessions each week, both of which are social occasions. These two factors – dependability/regularity and sociability – make it a lot more likely that this will be sustainable.  By setting a regular time each week, the victory of will has already taken place. Otherwise, it has to be re-enacted, and the time for exercise re-negotiated with my lazy self each and every week. It may be rainy, I may be tired, or be busy with other commitments. I know that there are many reasons for me to not exercise regularly, and many opportunities for one level of my motivations to overpower the other.

Sociability is also massively important. First of all, it’s an incentive: I enjoy spending time in good company, and look forward to having a chat with Rags when we go running. But it’s also a great way of getting the group to impose some discipline on me. So I’ve both made it that I have a social encouragement to exercise, and a social obligation to exercise to avoid breaking social commitments. When combined with regular and dependable timings, this structure should help channel my desire to improve my fitness into tangible results, unsabotaged by internal lethargic forces.

Have you ever wanted to change your routine, but known that this fragile desire alone will not transfer to sustained action in the face of your own established practices and ways of thinking and valuing your time and activities? Have you ever had to set up systems and structures to overcome such a ‘lack of will’? If so, what have you tried, and how has your experience been?

Taking it a step further, what actually is willpower? Is ‘will’ being able to persistently turn one’s focus to something without internal discord, or is it the act of exertion to bring one’s mind to bear on the desired end? Or should we break down the distinction here, and see will as the progressive training of focus?

If Meat is Murder

Eating meat is a completely natural thing to do. At least, it is for a boy raised in a white, middle class English household. Eating meat was so normal that it didn’t even occur to me that some people would go without it.

At some point I became aware of vegetarianism and grew to have some sympathy for it, but my practice never changed. From time to time I would question the morality of eating meat and come to the conclusion that it was immoral, but these thoughts never had any impact – I would return home to eat meat for dinner each day, and didn’t ever think of changing my own practice. Making a change was, in a sense, unthinkable. I was fortunate that a friend gave a chance to step back and make a choice.

He had vowed to go without meat for a couple of weeks, to see what it was like, and I decided to join him. As it happened, we both found this incredibly, almost outrageously, easy. At no point did meat appear to me any less delicious, but there was never any question of eating any. I had made a choice to not eat meat, and any thoughts of how tasty it might be were an irrelevance rather than a temptation.

I carried on after the two weeks were up. This was a wonderful moment, in which I had a genuine choice. I was no longer an entrenched meat eater, but I was also no longer committed to my trial of vegetarianism. I therefore had complete freedom to choose either path, and it was simply a question of following my desires. I chose to carry on not eating meat. Why?

The straightforward answer is that it felt right. For those who like to look at decisions from an intellectual/thinking standpoint, my reasoning was mainly based around the fact that eating meat didn’t seem necessary. I didn’t want to bring about the death of various animals for my consumption if there was no good reason for doing so. I’d eaten well in the preceding two weeks, and couldn’t bring myself to actively eat meat.

After 6 weeks of test-run vegetarianism, I returned home from university to my meat-eating family. For the moment, this was to be the end point of my experiment. This wasn’t a function of principle or experimentation, but simply the product of a lazy desire to avoid preparing my own meals.

On the first evening back we had a chicken curry – tasty, no doubt, but certainly not a joyous reunion with meat eating. I would have been just as happy eating a vegetable curry. I couldn’t help but feel that it was a bit wasteful and that I was going to have to figure out a better system. I took stock of the thoughts floating around in my head, and came up with a system based on these axioms:

The core axioms:

1) Eating meat is not necessary for survival
2) Eating meat requires the death of an animal.
3) Killing for no reason is bad. (Killing something is not the worst thing you can do to it, but should not be done lightly; and being killed probably isn’t exactly a pleasant experience)
4) For a large proportion of our nutritional needs, a vegetarian diet is more efficient than a diet including meat. In other words, it would be possible to feed more people if we ate less meat. This is quite important given the rising global population.

The lesser axioms:

5) Eating meat occasionally is nutritionally beneficial
6) The moral choices of an individual should not be forced upon others in such a way as to override their own moral choices. As a guest, one should not bend in one’s moral system, but should ensure not to impose one’s morality on the host.
7) It’s good to be able to vary nutritional intake in times of illness, to help recovery.

The lazy axiom:
8 ) I eat a main meal with my parents twice a week, and my mum always cooks a meat dish. Laziness discourages me from cooking something separate.

These eight axioms have led me to adopt the following dietary system:

1) I eat two meals a week which contain meat.

2) I can eat gelatine-containing products on a day in which I eat a meal containing meat.

3) If I am staying as a guest in a meat-eating household, I will only refrain from eating meat where this can be achieved without causing the host to alter catering plans.

I don’t have a background in ethics, or in nutrition, so would be interested to see what people make of the above. If someone could challenge axiom 5) about nutritional benefit, you might be able to make a full-blown vegetarian out of me. Conversely, if someone can challenge the second axiom and fourth axioms (in other words, if we can efficiently create artificial meat), I will happily return to full-time meat eating.

I’ve been on this system for two years now, and am fit and healthy and happy with what I eat. When I do eat meat, I genuinely appreciate the experience. I have not found myself trying to circumnavigate the provisions that I’ve set out.

When recovering from a nasty illness in early 2010, I briefly returned to meat eating to build up my strength, but was keen to stop as soon as possible. I am very aware of the risk of diluting my principles to meet certain expediencies, such as illness or being a good guest, but feel that I have accommodated these in a way that does not undermine the core of what I’m trying to do. Most importantly, I remain firm in my conviction, and in my desire to only eat meat twice a week.

This flexibility has probably been a strength, allowing me to adapt to circumstances as I find them, staying true to the core convictions without having to worry about occasional practicalities derailing things. Because I have not made an absolute moral commitment to not eat meat, I am able to more sustainably refrain from doing so.

What do you think of this system I’ve devised? Is there something in it, or is it, in fact, based on hesitancy and a refusal to carry things through to their conclusions? Are the ‘lesser axioms’ and the ‘lazy axiom’, as I have classified them here, weak baggage that must be jettisoned? Is this ‘flexibility’, as I call it, actually a sign of weakness? Should I, in fact, adopt a more challenging system of absolute values (ie adopt the axiom: eating any meat is bad), which demands more from me? If my motivation is about the immorality of unnecessary killing, then surely this is the only way? But if my motivation also comes from an environmental standpoint, surely my sustained reduction in meat eating is sufficient? My motivation behind my reduction in meat eating is a blend of factors, so, in a way, sticking on the current system of 2 meals a week allows me to indulge all these motivations, without having to narrow myself down to one main factor.

I’m really keen to get a discussion going here, as I’m interested to see what people make of this, and excited to see if there are any suggestions for improvements to the above.

What do you make of it all? What are your own opinions on the morality of meat eating? Is meat eating a live moral question for you? If not, why not? Have you ever tried to devise your own moral system around a set of beliefs and actions, and, if so, how did you do it, and did it work?

Orphaned Land – The Unification

Orphaned Land are better than John Lennon. This Israeli metal band completely subverts conflict in the Middle East.

Their third album, Mabool, focused on the underlying unity of the three Arbrahamic religions, and The Never Ending Way of ORwarriOR continues this exploration.
Prior to releasing Mabool, the band had been dormant for seven years; so what encouraged them to end this hiatus?

Vocalist Kobi Farhi was driven to resurrect the band after receiving photos of three Arab fans adorned with Orphaned Land tattoos. This took him by surprise as Orphaned Land had never toured in these countries – indeed, listening to metal music of any sort in the Arab world is “underground in a way you never imagined”, as Kobi puts it. Some Arab fans of Orphaned Land have been jailed for listening to metal music. Kobi realised that his band’s music was communicating something powerful despite – and perhaps in powerful subversion of – these political and apparent cultural and religious boundaries.

So how does it work? How does an Israeli metal band have such a devout following across the Middle East and beyond? In short, they make amazing music by combining influences from a range of different cultures and religions. By bringing these all together in a coherent, beautiful package, they utterly refute any suggestion that conflict is the necessary state of affairs. The elegance of Orphaned Land’s music makes it clear that divinity is not sided with division and dischord.

The act of combining cultures and religions in one place creates music that transcends each of its components. You might not understand each element – I can’t follow the Arabic, Hebrew or Yemenite lyrics, for example – indeed, they may be distinctly foreign to you, but that’s the point. Some of the components are familiar, others are thoroughly alien and beyond your understanding and comfort zone; but what you do know is that it all fits together and that the end result is one of rare beauty.

This is an order of magnitude more powerful than John Lennon’s Imagine. In that track, the vision of unity is evoked, but nothing is created, nothing is solved. In Orphaned Land’s music, the united reality they seek to achieve is created and its majesty is conveyed directly to the listener. When you listen to Orphaned Land you don’t have to Imagine a better world because it’s right there. As Kobi Farhi puts it: “We always look to combine as much as we can. We want to show to people: look what happens when you take so many conflicts, and you combine them together. If you find the right channel to combine them together, the result is peace. It’s rich. It’s harmony.” The album uses a wide range of instruments, and features The Arabic Orchestra of Nazareth, vocals in English, Hebrew, Arabic, Yemenite, and other Oriental [sic] instruments such as the saz, santu, arabian flutes, middle-eastern percussion, cumbus, bouzouki, violins, guitars and piano. The same bringing together of different influences is apparent in the calligraphy in the album sleeve: “the main idea was to take words in Hebrew and Arabic and to combine them all together in harmony”.

Of course, different listeners will have different understandings of Orphaned Land’s music depending on their own background. To me, the harmony between the different components seems completely natural, but to someone more strongly rooted in Arab or Israeli culture, hearing the intertwining of influences that they have for so long been taught are irreconcilable must be an incredibly powerful experience.

Orphaned Land have made sure that their music is available to those in Arab countries where their music is banned. The Metal Army International website allows free download of the latest Orphaned Land album to people in these countries.

Of course, this art leads Kobi to visionary thinking – “Imagine how rich you can be if you have friends from all religions and cultures. Imagine the types of food that you get to eat, the types of music that you get to listen to, the types of girls that you will get to meet. You will be a rich person. Why should you close yourself only with your own community?” – but it is crucial to remember that these are not idle daydreams but hard facts articulated through music. Give Orphaned Land a listen and reconsider whether there is any cultural or religious necessity to conflict in the Middle East.

Unemployment and Mental Health in young people

The initial findings of the Understanding Society study make for interesting reading. The evidence that “unemployment is associated with worse mental well-being” fits with earlier studies, and the wide scale of this study will provide us with a range of insights in the years to come. Certainly this ongoing project will form an important parallel to any attempt by the Office for National Statistics to measure national wellbeing and be a useful tool for assessing government policy. The first data and some preliminary findings have been published.

Taylor’s analysis of the first set of Understanding Society data, in Chapter 6 of the Early Findings report, draws the conclusion that “Being unemployed has no impact on mental wellbeing among young people, all else being equal.” This contradicts the findings of a 2010 Prince’s Trust report, which found that unemployment has serious negative consequences on young people. It also contradicts my own experience of unemployment, and the experiences of my peer group.

The Prince’s Trust’s 2010 Youth Index report highlighted the experiences of NEET (not in employment, education or training) young people, and found that their ‘economic inactivity’ (as the Understanding Society report puts it) had specific damaging effects on their mental health and on their life satisfaction. Professor D. Blanchflower noted that “Joblessness has a knock-on effect on a young person’s self-esteem, their emotional stability and overall wellbeing. The longer the period they are unemployed for, the more likely they are to experience this psychological scarring.” He also noted that “unemployed young people living in the UK today are already less happy with their friendships, family life and health than those in work. They are also more likely to feel ashamed, rejected and unloved.”

The two studies therefore seem to contradict each other. Is there anything in the methodology or aims of the Understanding Society project that might explain this? The project has a very wide age range and a wide range of themes of study, whereas the Prince’s Trust report was focused solely on the wellbeing of young people. There are a few areas of methodology that could perhaps be improved in the Understanding Society study.

The Understanding Society study would benefit from a more nuanced, precise and sustained examination of the interaction between employment status and wellbeing. At present, the study measures two outcomes (employment status and reported life satisfaction), amongst a host of other outcomes, and compares them to see how they correspond. We need a more robust analysis of the causal links between unemployment and (dis)satisfaction.

Perhaps respondents could be asked how strong they perceive to be the link between their employment status and their wellbeing. They could then be asked whether the link is positive or negative (“Does being ‘economically inactive’ make you feel better or worse?” being the crudest example). Comparing this information with the individuals’ overall self-reported life satisfaction would be interesting.

Taylor’s analysis focuses on reported life satisfaction (a scale from 1 to 7, with 1 equating to complete dissatisfaction and 7 equating to complete satisfaction). It might be helpful to utilize a wider range of measures in evaluating wellbeing and mental health. The General Health Questionnaire scores could be used, for example, to give a more precise picture of a person’s wellbeing. This would again allow us to contrast these specific responses with the person’s overall self-reported satisfaction measure. This information would help us to study people’s resilience.

Cohort analysis, rather than a blanket 16-25 age group analysis, would also be helpful. This would allow us to examine the changing perceptions of specific age groups over time (and subsets within these age groups, such as those leaving school without qualifications, or people becoming NEET). Hopefully the study’s data will be configured so that this will be possible.

As a caveat for those seeking to draw conclusions from this information, we must be aware of the time-scale of its collection. This first set of data (Wave 1) was collected between January 2009 and December 2010, which means that it is not well suited to describing the impact of changes in the last six months. If we want to track the optimism of people looking for work, it would be better to examine a narrower period than two years, to better allow us to see how this changes with the economic climate. Whilst the period January 2009 to December 2010 as a whole may have been one of optimism, was this the case for November or December 2010? Of course, further waves of information (Wave 2 runs from January 2010 to December 2011) will allow us to more precisely engage with the evidence from a chronological perspective.

These are early days for the study, and I hope that as more data is acquired and analysed, more nuanced analysis will yield interesting and powerful information on young people’s wellbeing.

Why Europe ruled the World

In the nineteenth century, Western Europe was the economic powerhouse of the world. Its productive power was unmatched. This dominance was achieved at some point between 1500 and 1800, but pinpointing exactly when is a difficult task. This is made clear when we try and compare Europe’s economic development with that of China. In the period before 1500, China was a strong economic power – probably the world’s most advanced economy at the time – but by the nineteenth century it had been thoroughly eclipsed by Western Europe. When exactly did Europe pull ahead, and why did this happen? How did Europe, rather than China, end up ruling the world?

The traditional explanation given is a cultural one. It argues that Europeans have (or had) a way of engaging with the world that was better suited to economic growth, conquest and dynamism. Landes, for example, has asserted that ‘the Chinese lacked range, focus, and above all, curiosity’, and that ‘Unlike the Europeans, they were not motivated by greed and passion.’ Braudel asserted that the Chinese ‘only half-heartedly shared the capitalist mentality of the West.’ Weber, argued that the ‘Protestant work ethic’ was ideally suited to economic success.

But there are serious problems with this argument. For one, it is rather brash to assume that everyone on an entire subcontinent thinks and acts in the same way. Secondly, there is evidence that the Chinese were just as enterprising and driven by greed and passion as  Europeans. The seventeenth-century Zheng family trade empire, for example, operated ruthlessly and with fierce commercial passion. They captured Taiwan from the Dutch, and drove the Dutch out of many south-east Asian markets. Nor was a desire for luxury the sole preserve of Europeans: Chinese guidebooks on conspicuous consumption actually appeared before those in Europe.

As Rosenbery and Birdzell have lamented, ‘The great difficulty of identifying the sources of Western economic growth has led to some psychological explanations which are little short of desperate.’ They would be justified in using stronger words than ‘desperate’. This is a lazy, un-analytical assertion of Western cultural supremacy. It’s not just the Chinese who suffer in these accounts: those Europeans who were not at the forefront also have their failings attributed to unsubstantiated cultural inadequacies. Kindleberger’s history of world economic growth has attributed Spanish economic underachievement to a host of factors, including the Spanish ‘disdain for work’, ‘strong hatreds’, and ‘the Inquisition’, but does not explain how each of them would have hindered economic growth. His list of crude national stereotypes reads more like inane racial prejudice than insightful economic and historical reasoning. These lazy prejudices, masquerading as ‘cultural explanations’ lack evidence and even the most perfunctory explanatory framework to support them. Our brief survey of the ramshackle evidence for Chinese cultural inferiority suggests that cultural differences alone – real or imagined – are not enough to explain the differences that emerged between Europe and China.

Let’s take a step back and look at the underlying economic frameworks at play. Before the European rise to dominance, the basic rules of the economic game were the same for both Europe and China. Both economies were limited by the productivity of the land. The economist Lavoisier noted that ‘Commerce and industry can only use the material which it (agriculture) has provided; so that it is the original source, the almost unique source, of all national wealth.’ Adam Smith noted that ‘The town, in which there neither is nor can be any reproduction of substances, may very properly be said to gain its whole wealth and subsistence from the country.’ In both Europe and China, photosynthesis was the sole source of food and fuel. But photosynthesis is inefficient at capturing solar energy, meaning that there was little stored energy that could be accessed later on, except in trees.

With a finite area of land, if more of its area is devoted to one productive endeavour, inevitably, less land can be devoted to others. Ricardo observed that this led to diminishing marginal returns, and stated that ‘the land being limited in quantity, … with every increased portion of of capital employed on it there will be a decreased rate of production.’ This meant that economic growth was inherently limited – this is known as negative feedback. This type of economy has been called an ‘organic economy’. An organic economy is dependent for its energy needs upon flows of energy from photosynthesis, without significant access to stocks of energy. (For a thorough and concise explanation of the nature of organic and inorganic economies, see Wrigley’s ‘The Divergence of England‘) For as long as Europe and China were both organic economies, neither was going to achieve economic dominance, given the negative feedback inherent in this system.

So what do we make of the ‘discovery’ of the Americas? Was this as important as academics like Pomerantz have asserted? (Whilst I disagree with Pomerantz on this count, his book ‘The Great Divergence‘ is one of the strongest in the field.) The discovery of the Americas increased European wealth, but it didn’t change these fundamental constraints. The Americas provided an historically unprecedented abundance of resources to Europe. Europeans cultivated land-intensive crops, such as sugar, cotton and timber, allowing them to supply products that were increasingly expensive to produce domestically. This access to resources made it profitable to expand, increasing production and volumes of shipping, driving down transaction costs per unit and making further expansion worthwhile. But the economic exploitation of overseas land areas could not solve the fundamental limitations of the economy. Whilst New World silver and resources may have indeed sharpened European Smithian dynamics and given a boost to growth, they could not challenge the limitations of the pre-industrial economy, constrained by the land. On its own the New World simply enlarged the board, rather than changing the rules of the game.

For most of the period between 1500 and 1850, European and Chinese economies were both locked into this framework of limited growth. The organic economy could not provide sufficient access to energy to perpetuate industrial processes and growth. This is exemplified by experience in both regions. The Dolgyne blast furnace in Wales, built in 1717, only operated for an average of fifteen weeks a year due to a lack of fuel; by the start of the seventeenth century, Danish iron production had halted because of a lack of available energy. In China, by the mid-Ming period, timber supplies neared depletion, leading to the change in salt boiling techniques to use less wood and (arguably) the development of the wok. In the eighteenth century, much of the junk construction trade moved away from the Yangzi Delta, and grasses and dung were burned to avoid using scarce timber. These examples illustrate the fundamental limitations on energy utilisation, and therefore on economic growth, in both economies while they remained almost entirely subservient to the yearly productivity of the land for their energy supplies. By the early eighteenth century, areas in both continents were clearly advanced enough to feel the pinch of environmental limitations, yet neither was able to transcend them. In short, up until the eighteenth century, neither Europe nor China had pulled ahead.

This still leaves us with three large questions: how was economic dominance to be obtained? How were the limitations of the organic economy to be overcome? How did Europe achieve dominance, and how early can we see the wheels turning?

To enable the economy to move beyond organic limitations, a stock of energy was required. The use of fossil fuels, and access to their stocks of energy, represented a move from reliance upon inherently limited flows of energy (dependent upon annual photosynthesis) to partial dependence on stocks of energy. This represented a fundamental break with all past economic experience. This new type of economy is the ‘mineral economy’. The economy had previously been constrained by the productivity of the land, but this was no longer a restraint upon growth because energy could be obtained from fossil fuels as well. These stocks of energy also rendered negative feedback, and the limits to the gains of division of labour, less important: the power they granted allowed output per worker to increase, affording near-unlimited potential gains, at least for as long as the coal lasted. They also facilitated energy-intensive industrial processes which would not have been possible without such an energy source. The organic economy had been transcended, and this transformation happened in Europe first.

Before getting into the complex task of exploring why, let’s quickly have a look at some of the truly awe-inspiring statistics of European economic dominance in the nineteenth century, to see just how powerful these stocks of energy were. By 1810 British coal output was 20 million tons, which provided an amount of energy which Wrigley asserts was ‘roughly equivalent to the quantity of energy theoretically available for capture by the sun’s rays by photosynthesis each year.’ The economic dominance that this afforded was indicated by the massive and sustained, previously inconceivable, increases in output over the course of the nineteenth century. ‘European production of pig iron increased 16-fold between 1800 and 1870, coal output 14-fold, raw cotton consumption 21-fold and railway mileage between 1840 and 1870 some 36-fold… European exports in constant prices rose twelvefold in 1800-1870.’ The ability of European nations to interfere in China’s political and economic affairs in the nineteenth century was clear consequence of this rise to leadership.

So why did Europe achieve economic dominance? Or, to be more precise, why did Western Europe begin using coal on a wide scale whilst China did not? I argue that this happened because the Western European agricultural sector freed up workers for use elsewhere in a way that China’s did not, because Western Europe had not experienced China’s geopolitical handicap, and, more importantly, because of the dynamic European engagement with supply problems that led to a self-perpetuating progression down the path to the mineral economy. China, whilst impressively innovative, was focused more on the perfection of the organic economy than on transcending it.

The path taken by Western European agriculture enabled its emergence from the limitations of the organic economy, whereas China’s did not. In Europe, increased labour productivity freed up workers to apply their labour to non-agrarian pursuits. Between 1600 and 1820, the number of surplus people fed by every hundred workers in agriculture increased in several Western European countries. In England and Wales it rose from 42 to 148, in the Netherlands from 119 (in 1670) to 177, and in France from 45 to 70.

Chinese agriculture, on the other hand, was focused on increasing land productivity (ie making each unit of land produce more) rather than increasing labour productivity (ie making each labourer produce more). This meant that Chinese agriculture remained strongly tied to the organic paradigm and its limitations. In the Yangzi, increased output from the land was obtained by diminishing returns to labour: from an index of 100 in 1700, output per capita fell to 74 by 1750 and 70 by 1800. As Brenner and Isett assert, ‘The trend to rising labor productivity in agriculture in England was the direct opposite of the trend to declining labor productivity that obtained in the Yangzi delta…’

The European agricultural advantage was not at feeding its people, as China was able to support a denser population than Europe through the eighteenth century. Rather, it was at allowing its people to move outside of agricultural work, and beyond a world limited by the restraints on agricultural output and photosynthesis. But whilst the agricultural differences were an essential prerequisite to Europe’s rise from the organic paradigm, they did not bring it about. To enter the mineral economy required not only workers to run its infrastructure but access to stocks of energy and the technology to use them.

Both China and Europe were well endowed with coal, but China’s was in the wrong place. China’s coal supply was located overwhelmingly in the north and west: 98 percent of China’s coal supplies were located to the north of the Yangzi, and the western areas held just under 90 percent of its coal. This coal was utilised by the iron industry that existed there until around 1100, but invasions, occupations, civil wars, flood and plague led to instability that halted the industry. By the time stability had returned, after 1420, the demographic and economic centre of the country had shifted to the south, to the Yangzi Delta. Transportation of the now-distant coal was a serious problem, one that the Chinese economy did not overcome. Even at the end of the nineteenth century, coal use was generally very localised: transporting coal from Qinghua to the Yellow River, 50 km away, led to a fivefold price rise, leading Wright to assert that ‘transport costs were the single most important constraint on the growth of coal consumption.’ Areas in the north Jiangsu could have potentially reached the Yangzi Delta, but in Qing times the cost of coal doubled before it reached the canal port. It therefore seems clear that whilst China had large reserves of coal, and had shown the capacity to utilise them long before Europe had begun to do so, unfavourable geopolitical circumstances led to coal’s potential being overshadowed by transport costs.

Europe had similar problems with coal supply. Britain was well-endowed with coal, but transport networks were so primitive that the price of coal could double for every ten miles transported over land. The distances that European coal had to travel were much smaller than those in China, but, nonetheless, the way that the European economy dealt with the problem of coal supply helps explain why Europe rose to economic leadership by the middle of the nineteenth century.

The close relationship between the market system, scientific tradition and invention in Europe was crucial to its rise to economic leadership. The market encouraged inventors to tackle certain technological or logistical problems, the solving of which led to an increase in technological capabilities that benefited the economy as a whole. In this way, the steam engine was conceived as a response to the problem of coal supply, allowing access to otherwise inaccessible coal by increasing the potential depth of mines by pumping out water. Similarly, entrepreneurs observed that given that transport links between mines and towns were poor and that coal was in demand, improving transport infrastructure could be profitable. This led them to focus on improving transport links, which further facilitated the expansion of coal production. As a result, between 1700 and 1750 British coal output rose by 70 percent; between 1750 and 1830 it rose by a further 500 percent. As steam engine technology improved it became more efficient and began to be put to other uses. This drove up the demand for coal and further encouraged improvements to steam technology. Thus the demand and supply of coal were locked in a positive cycle, powering the economy out of the organic paradigm as coal use and mineral energy-harnessing technologies spread. This was a powerful, self-reinforcing technological path that ended in the mineral economy. This was the true dynamic of European exceptionalism.

China was also innovative, but in the wrong direction. The innovation-minded Chinese state aimed for static efficiency through the spread of agricultural best practice.  ‘The Chinese imperial government generated and diffused new technologies in rice cultivation, including better (drought-resistant) varieties… and encouraged the use of cotton, better implements, and hydraulic techniques… The authors of the great treatises on agriculture such as Wang Chen and Hsü Kuang Chhi, as well as the inventor of the use of mulberry tree bark in papermaking, were government bureaucrats.’ State measures to spread knowledge have led Maddison to even conclude that ‘the gap between best-practice and average practice was probably narrower than it was in the polycentric state system of Europe.’ In the seventeenth century, Champa rice was introduced, which ripened in three months rather than six or nine. This period was reduced to two months, and in the eighteenth century it was reduced to just forty days. In the early nineteenth century a thirty-day variety became available.  Clearly China remained innovative, but its developments were mainly agrarian, in stark contrast to the European experience. Europe alone took the self-reinforcing journey down the road to the mineral economy, which is why it rose to economic leadership by the mid-nineteenth century.

The imperial state need not have been an inhibitor of innovation leading to the mineral economy – indeed, China developed the compass, gunpowder and the blast furnace well before Europe – but by the eighteenth century, the rate of non-agrarian innovation in China had dried up.

What went wrong with Chinese innovation? Geography and inefficient markets seem to be the main culprits. Perhaps the blame should be cast on inefficient markets for not sending out adequate incentive signals, or on unfavourable geopolitical circumstances that meant that coal was an impractical distance from the economic core. Or perhaps the Chinese state, so concerned to promote agrarian development, should be censured for not having tried to promote industrial development. Whatever the reason we can certainly conclude that for China to have achieved the results that Europe did would have been even more exceptional than what came to pass in Europe.

In conclusion, we have seen that explanations of the European rise to economic leadership based around relative cultural values or mentalities are highly flawed and unsatisfactory, and that the European exploitation of overseas territories cannot explain Europe’s rise to leadership. Rather, economic leadership could only be achieved through the utilisation of mineral stores of energy, allowing a change in economic paradigm. For most of the period the Chinese and European economies operated within a shared organic paradigm, subject to the same limitations. Facilitated by Western European agricultural dynamics that differed to those in China, a combination of entrepreneurialism and science funnelled Europe down a route of self-reinforcing technological change that led to an escape from the limitations of the organic economy. China, on the other hand, tackled the organic economy’s problems head on rather than transcending them, and thus focused its efforts on land productivity. Europe was aided by geography, with coal within reach of its most developed areas, but even then, problems caused by the cost of transport needed to be overcome. That the Europeans achieved this, whereas the Chinese did not, is down to a combination of Chinese geographic bad luck and the entrepreneurial, inventive market system operating in Europe.

The answer to why Europe rather than China rose to economic leadership by the mid-nineteenth century therefore lies somewhere between European geographical good fortune, Chinese geo-political misfortune, and the focus of European inventiveness as compared to that of China, which led to a feedback loop that allowed some western European economies to escape the organic paradigm. However good a country’s institutions and however strong the market’s incentives, without a change of economic paradigm there could be no economic leadership. But it was through the functioning of incentives and the institutions of growth that this paradigm shift was achieved. That the European market had these incentives tied so closely to invention and innovation was the secret of its success. Without inorganic energy utilisation Europe could not have risen, but even with favourable coal supplies its rise was not guaranteed.

Europe therefore rose to economic leadership by the middle of the nineteenth century because of the powerful link between innovation and market incentives, which allowed it to realise the potential of energy stored in coal.

Comments encouraged.