Where does progress come from?

Jan 28 2008 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

WHERE does progress come from? Several hundreds of years ago, Francis Bacon wrote that “The benefits inventors confer extend to the whole human race”.

Meanwhile, economists have always described science as a public good, in other words, an accumulation of a good of general benefit which cannot be charged for.

A new book Sex, Science and Profits – How People Evolved to Make Money, by Terence Kealey, a biochemist at the University of Buckingham, tries to do away with the belief that scientific progress is based on government interference, for good or bad.

Kealey uses some highly entertaining examples to prove his point. While governments across the globe spend huge amounts of money trying to raise crop yields, the illegal marijuana industry, without any grants, has managed to develop ever stronger and more disease- resistant strains of the drug to its present level of great potency.

His whole theory is an extension of that proposed by economist Adam Smith, who, in the Wealth of Nations, claimed that the public interest was best served when the Government stopped trying to direct the economy.

We’re now in an age when the multi-national corporations rule, and technological globalisation has given some intellectual property rights holders like Bill Gates mind-boggling wealth and power.

Instead of science powering technology, Kealey thinks the opposite is true. Technological breakthroughs usually lead science.

It was the need for merchants to keep accounts in Babylonian times that led to the invention of writing and mathematics.

Renaissance Italy’s merchants took this further, with the desire for more sophisticated banking which gave birth to double-entry book keeping, paper money and the banking system.

Britain’s industrial revolution was based on the work of uneducated illiterates like George Stephenson, Thomas Newcomen and Richard Trevithick. They were employed in embryonic industries, such as coal or tin mining, and used their natural ability to solve problems. Such was their spectacular success in this matter that they laid the foundations that propelled Britain into becoming the world’s top industrial nation. Kealey says that, when property rights are protected (which in Britain occurred in the Glorious Revolution of 1688) and markets are unchecked, then science and technology will march forward together.

The free market means that companies will devise ways of making their products different from their competitors and that in itself will spur innovation. This is why Kealey is dismissive of patents, which he says block copying and innovation. This therefore stalls competition and stagnates innovation. Neither Philips, the Dutch giant electronics corporation, or Swiss chocolate manufacturers were protected by patents, he says.

In contrast to the engineers named above, steam engine pioneer James Watt hated the application of his ideas to a moving vehicle (the steam locomotive). By zealously protecting his patents, he halted development for 25 years.

Kealey underpins this argument by saying that the US government withdrew the aeronautical patents held by the Wright brothers after their first successful flight. Instead the aircraft industry pooled all their patents.

Henry Ford succeeded by simply breaching patents filed by a rival car making consortium.

Pushing the digital music revolution to new heights, Apple took the idea for one of the main features of its iPod from a competing company’s product.

Neither does Kealey like the government funding of pure science, which he also thinks is a false category. This is because large technology-based companies advance science by simply being in a position to do so and discover numerous other useful things along the way.

For example, IBM is second only to Harvard University in publishing scientific papers. Scientists moaning about the lack of government funds goes back almost to the dawn of science.

The much-celebrated father of the computer, Charles Babbage, published the Decline of Science in Britain – and that was back in 1830. Yet, as Kealey notes, this was the time when Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic conduction and Charles Darwin was researching the Origin of the Species.

Bizarrely, more funding can lead to less research. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher cut British science grants, but private companies took up the slack and the result was scientific development rose in this country.

* SEX, Science and Profits – How People Evolved to Make Money, by Terence Kealey, Heinemann, £20

peter.elson@dailypost.co.uk