The Philosophical Breakfast Club (22 page)

“Knowledge is power,” Babbage wrote, parroting Bacon and Herschel, but exemplifying the point in steel and steam: “Knowledge … is itself the generator of physical force. The discovery of the expansive power of steam, its condensation, and the doctrine of latent heat has already added to the population of this small island, millions of hands.” The government must fund efforts to generate scientific knowledge, because such knowledge was needed for the economic good of the nation. Even in his book on political economy, Babbage was canvassing the government for money to build his engine.

At the same time, he was giving the government free advice. Babbage recommended that Britain introduce the “penny post,” in which a letter’s postage was paid in advance by the sender, and a fixed amount was charged for any distance within Britain. Under the current system at the time, postage was paid by the recipient based on how far the letter had traveled. Babbage calculated that the cost of sorting the mail and determining the appropriate postage cost more than what the postal service earned by the extra postage. Eight years after Babbage’s book was published, Britain took up his suggestion and instituted the penny post.

Jones whispered to Whewell—just
“entre nous”
—that he was disappointed with the manuscript, which Babbage had sent to him for his comments. Although Babbage had described it to him as a book “like
Herschel’s”
Preliminary Discourse
, Jones believed it to be a mere “bagatelle,” “full of ingenuity, precision and acuteness, and a strange collection of facts taken from his common place book—some striking and valuable—some trivial and uninteresting.”
¹⁰²
A look at the chapter headings of Babbage’s book confirms Jones’s impression of a private commonplace book, chock-full of wide-ranging, unrelated facts: “Employment of materials of little value—Goldbeater’s skin—horny refuse—old tinware … Most advantageous load for a porter … Tags of bootlaces … Evaporation of water of brine springs … Bleaching linen … Deepening of rivers in America … Spinning cotton … separation of dense particles by fluid suspension.…” Whewell agreed with Jones’s assessment, telling him that when Babbage compared his book to Herschel’s, Whewell “could not quite suppress an internal smile.” But Whewell still believed that “there is a great deal of ingenuity in his speculations.”
¹⁰³

“YOU AUTHOR YOU!”
Whewell crowed with pride to Jones when his book finally appeared in February of 1831.
¹⁰⁴
Babbage was excited as well; recalling their discussions of economics during their philosophical breakfasts at Cambridge, he told Jones that he “recognize[d] the fruit and spirit of the undergraduate concerns of the good old set in every page.”
¹⁰⁵
Herschel praised Jones for finally making political economy “a rational enquiry … treated on broad inductive principles.”
¹⁰⁶

Jones opened his
Essay on the Distribution of Wealth
with a plea for an inductive method in political economy. Both Bacon and Herschel, true experts in the natural sciences, had given all men of science the proper method to use—Jones even printed excerpts from Herschel’s
Preliminary Discourse
in an appendix to the book. Yet political economists had diverged from this true path. Jones especially complained about Ricardo: “Mr. Ricardo was a man of talent, and he produced a system very ingeniously combined, of purely hypothetical truths; which, however, a single comprehensive glance at the world as it actually exists, is sufficient to shew to be utterly inconsistent with the past and present condition of mankind.”
¹⁰⁷
He did not take account of the way the world is, or how real, live human beings in the world actually do behave.

By ignoring the evidence, Ricardo was led into various absurdities, Jones insisted. Foremost was Ricardo’s claim that the rent relationship between a landowner and his tenant could be described by a single
definition covering all places, at all times. Jones had found that, on the contrary, throughout history and across the globe there had been five different kinds of rent relationships. This was important because Ricardo used his assumption of a single definition—that which actually applied only at that specific time, in England, Holland, and parts of the United States, but nowhere else—to conclude his “repulsive” doctrine that the interests of the wealthy landowner are
always
opposed to the interests of everyone else. Ricardo’s claim that only the landlord benefits when the price of corn is high did not apply to most countries at that time, or to any place in the past, where landlords and farmers had different arrangements. In systems where the farmer is paid by a share of the crop, for instance, he, too, benefits when the price of corn is high, and so the landlord and tenant farmer share an interest in expensive corn.

Further, even in England where Ricardo’s definition of the rent relation did apply, Jones argued, the facts did not bear out the conclusion that the interests of the landowner and the other classes of society were opposed. Jones claimed instead, using all the evidence that he and his friends had painstakingly gathered from old pamphlets, tracts, and their travels, that the interests of all classes of society are intertwined—so that it is always in the interest of the upper classes to improve the situation of the lower classes.
¹⁰⁸
Farm owners, for example, benefit when they provide education and medical care to their laborers. As Whewell would put it in his review of Jones’s book, “The moral and social elevation of the lowest orders are inseparable conditions for any considerable and permanent prosperity of the highest.”
¹⁰⁹

Malthus’s population principle was wrong as well, Jones pointed out. He had not taken account of new technologies that increased the amount of food that could be grown on a given amount of fertile land: the mechanized plough, the seed drill, the threshing machine. In countries like South America, where there were enormous tracts of untilled fertile land, “how long might they go on increasing their food in geometrical progression!”
¹¹⁰
Neither was the population principle an accurate description of England’s own history. Jones compared the present state of the population and food supply with that of pre-Elizabethan times in England, showing that it was not true that the population had grown geometrically while the food supply had grown only arithmetically.
¹¹¹

Malthus was also wrong to suggest that population growth could not be controlled.
¹¹²
Jones claimed that the desire for luxuries inevitably
tends to lead men and women to limit the size of their families by sexual abstinence even within marriage—they realize that they must have fewer mouths to feed if they want excess money to spend on consumer goods. Although Jones allowed that the higher classes might exercise this restraint more often, he argued that the lower classes do so as well. (A recent book claims that during those years the poor actually limited the size of their families even more than the rich.)
¹¹³
Jones tested this hypothesis by examining different classes in Ireland: agricultural workers, small shopkeepers and tradesmen, professionals, and finally high society, finding that at all levels a voluntary restraint on family size was used to raise the standard of living.
¹¹⁴

The problem for Malthus and his followers was that things had changed since he first started thinking about the population problem. He had correctly diagnosed in his own day what economists now call the “Malthusian Trap”—that as population rose, personal income levels decreased. This was true in England, but only until about 1800. When Malthus wrote his
Essay on Population
in 1798, real wages had been stagnant or declining for generations. Farm workers in Malthus’s own parish had seen their wages drop significantly.
¹¹⁵
But after 1800 the facts told a different story. By the time they wrote their works on economics in the late 1820s and early 1830s, Babbage, Jones, and Whewell had divined correctly that personal income was increasing even as the population grew. As Babbage had predicted, the rise of manufacturing jobs meant that greater numbers of people had steady, year-round income. While now we think of factories in those days as dark, dank, dangerous places, the fact is that many people were better off working in them than engaging in back-breaking farm labor for part of the year, and hovering near starvation the rest of the time. With greater personal income came more discretionary spending—few people at the lower levels of the economic scale saved money in those days—leading to a greater need for other workers to make and sell consumer goods. Britain became, even more than before, a “nation of shopkeepers,” as Smith had described it, as well as a nation of shoppers. It was no longer the case that an increase in population meant more people living in poverty.
¹¹⁶
Using an inductive method, Jones was able to show that the evidence disconfirmed Malthus’s and Ricardo’s gloomy predictions for the future.

A
YEAR AFTER
his book appeared, Jones dejectedly told Whewell that he thought it had been a failure. Whewell disagreed a bit impatiently, guessing that it had probably sold more copies than the first editions of Smith’s and Malthus’s books. In any case, he remonstrated with Jones, “The discovery and promulgation of truth” is “a sufficient employment and reward in itself. I do not know what is the good of knowing and admiring people like Herschel, if we cannot learn this from them.”
¹¹⁷

Jones’s book did have an impact on economics, though it did not, as Poulett Scrope had optimistically predicted in his review of it, deal the “finishing stroke to the miserable theory of … Ricardo.”
¹¹⁸
John Stuart Mill—the youthful distributor of pamphlets describing birth-control methods, now a leading economist—revised his position on several fronts after reading it. Once a diehard Ricardian, who thought economic science could only proceed deductively, Mill began to see that some empirical data were necessary in order to draw economic conclusions. He jettisoned Ricardo’s universalist notion of rent, adopting Jones’s division of rent into different categories (though, as Whewell complained to Jones, Mill did not give proper credit for this schema to its author).
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Mill soon also began to incorporate issues of social policy into his economic theory, arguing famously that wealth was not the most important goal of a nation: more vital was the growth of leisure time, so that even the members of the lower classes could have occasion to read poetry, study history, and learn moral philosophy.
¹²⁰
Marx, too, later praised Jones for his historical approach. Unfortunately for the history of the twentieth century, Marx did not adopt Jones’s view that there was a common interest of all classes of society; rather, more in line with Ricardo’s theories, Marx developed his theory of class warfare. Jones’s book was an influence on the English and German “historical schools” of economics in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Ultimately, however, history was on the side of Ricardo: the economics of today, with its employment of the abstract “economic man,” and its use of mathematical deductive reasoning, much more closely resembles Ricardo’s political economy than Jones’s. Yet there has been a recent pendulum swing back toward the view of Jones and his friends. The Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen has argued that economics is “impoverished” by its enforced separation from ethics; he would like to see a return to the notion of economics as a moral science, one that takes into account not only how to make a nation wealthy, but how to create a just
and happy society.
¹²¹
And a number of economists—including another Nobel winner, Vernon Smith—are beginning to favor a more fact-based, empirical approach, bringing in insights from behavioral psychology and sociology to help make more-accurate predictions about people’s economic actions.

But whatever happens to the science of economics in the future, the writings of the Philosophical Breakfast Club on political economy were successful in a more immediate way. By linking their project of transforming science to political economy, a topic being talked about and worried over by nearly everyone at the time, Babbage, Jones, Herschel, and Whewell gained a broad audience for their inductive, Baconian view of scientific method—an audience that included the next generation of men of science.

E
VER SINCE
G
EORGIANA DIED
, B
ABBAGE’S FRIENDS COULD NOT
help noticing how cranky he was becoming. Formerly known as a cheerful family man, who had delighted his children by stringing wires between the drawing room and his workshop to send messages back and forth in little wheeled carriages, and who had created toys for them out of the leftover pieces of his engine, now Babbage was always, it seemed, irascible and on the verge of anger.
¹
Never one to accept criticism easily, it was becoming more and more difficult to speak to him without his taking offense.