so Ken it's been really now 10 years and you have listened to most of the debates and I'm wondering how you would be writing now if you were writing these book which of these points of really undermined or shaken or severely qualified any of the general theses that you've put forward at that time I mean I think the most important point that has held up relatively well is the claim that the divergence and living standards is pretty late that it's not 16th century it's not even 17th century that it's probably post 1750 and I think the reason why that's an important point is that if that's true certain very broad brush explanations that we've had of why the West rather than China just don't hold up so for instance if as some people claimed the Chinese state crushed property rights and therefore you had no incentive to be productive well if that were true then the divergence would have appeared much earlier than 1750 or some of the other explanations you know such as that Confucianism did not encourage you to try to tinker with nature encourage you to accept it again that's a very broad brush explanation and if that had been true it would be hard to explain why as late as 1750 the standard of living difference is I think still quite small and that part I think has held up and I think what that does then is push us towards first of all towards narrower explanations and there I think some of the narrower explanations I've proposed have held up better than others but we can get to that in a minute but the other thing I think it does which is really quite important is to suggest that we rethink the dichotomy in which we say the West succeeded China failed and here I mean it's a funny funny thing that I think in certain ways I was subconsciously influenced by some of Patrick's work without quite realizing it because part of what Patrick had done in an earlier phase of his career along with people like Ana crowds was to look at the comparison of England and France which in an earlier generation had been phrased very much in that England succeeded why did France fail and essentially to say but let's reframe this okay France industrialize is a few decades later it's agriculture takes a little bit longer to become productive etc but in the great scheme of things France follows England into modern sustained growth reasonably quickly so rather than always asking what was wrong with France you know maybe we should see it as part of a Europe that did reasonably well and I think in some sense though it took me a while to realize I was doing this I was saying the same thing not about all of China but at least about coastal China and also I could say about even more affirmative ly about Japan so that it's part of it becomes a question of scale if you look on a certain scale being a few decades later to do something he's a huge retardation if you look on a different time scale or a different spatial scale right I mean I was very struck when we had a meeting about the great divergence at Oxford a few years ago and after we'd spent the whole day talking about China versus Europe back and forth in various ways David washe Brooke that distinguished South Asian has had one of the last comments and he said you know I've been listening to this all day and part of what strikes me is how from the perspective of South Asia the two ends of Eurasia look much more like each other than either of them looks like the place I study and I think in some ways that kind of reframing was as important to what I was trying to do as the specific you know that's the specific arguments but of course it hinges on the empirical detail because if you don't accept the claim that living standards are still pretty close in 1750 mm then it's harder to make the case that as viewed over the long haul or as viewed from a third perspective China and Europe are less different than we've been trained to think but what do you both say both of you because you're both involved with this that there is now quite a fundamental critique which says that living standards between trainer and and England are still very wide apart between North Western Europe they're much closer to the poorest parts of Europe I mean that's where the that's where the empirical debate is now gone is it not well I think does that just does that undermine your views at all or do you know the Yangtze Delta and easily okay we'll buy that one that the Yangtze Delta and England no we won't buy that one I think in living standards actually it still is reasonably persuasive is it I mean where I think we've seen a difference is that wages move ahead in northwestern Europe much sooner than they do in the lower yawns oh but remember the wage earning population is probably close to half of the English population by the 18th century you know it's barely ten percent of the population of the lower Young's and tenant farmers are earning you know two and a half to three times as much as wage laborers and smallholders still more than tenant farmers so I would say that I think in terms of living standards things are still pretty close now clearly that wage difference doesn't matter and it causes us to think about things like well maybe the average Chinese is keeping up with Europeans in part because he's giving up less of his product to the wealthy right so there might be a difference at the top of society that we need to look at more and my book is very much looking you know trying to look mostly at the world at the bottom you know so that I think is an important critique and I think some of the work that people like Phil Hoffman and Peter Linder have done suggesting that well maybe the poor aren't that far apart but that the European rich are a good deal richer I think is persuasive for the middle class in Europe is much larger as a proportion of the population in that I'm not as sure of another proper means I think the previous scholarship based on the and sufficient studies of living standards of China or Europe they're not very deep in particular China even in the eastern part of China so far we have not have very detailed research about about the consumption of food across so if we just conclude the China's living standards may be just equal some parts of Europe I think this conclusion is not very solid if we don't have the research for example after professor tan months apart me published is a book of great divergence he's the first person who makes a comparison of living standards of China Europe I followed I did a case study of food consumption and cross consumption of the some part of China when the conclusion is surprising the nutrition situation but better than we thought and reach modern standards of course we mentioned it's just a part of China child in China is the content side country and divergence within China even greater but the first thing we should take each region of China and make a very then we can make study of whole country then we can make a comparison with a whole Europe the that conclusion will be much more convincing I think that's a very important point we have to remember the enormous divergences within both China and Europe and the Yangtze Delta looks more like the Netherlands were England Gansu looks more like the Balkans so we have to be very very careful not to just take the national state as a unit and immediately assume that that's what we should be comparing ours the problem is the data tends to come in national units that makes things hard actually not just living standards just follow professor cone Pomerance many years ago I published my book about agriculture unions data and years ago some scholars I read your book if you take all names places or persons and a change in a touch one we can see it's a new dance what China so the similarity is so rich but we didn't know recently I and my and my colleagues in Netherlands we try to use the same methods same kinds of materials - we chopped the GDP in the beginning of 19th century and there's a conclusion also very close and the economic structure and urbanization and the employment the wealth description quite similar so professor - free since millions can be seen the first modern economy in the world why not so I think all thing if we post the country from within the framework I think one of the other things that comes out of that is that it's very different to be a prosperous reasonably successful early modern economy and to become an industrial economy and I think both in the Marxist tradition and in the sort of modernization theory tradition in the West there was an assumption that once you had the institutions in place and you were accumulating capital etc somehow the transition to the industrial world would just happen and I think something that we all share is the sense that actually that's a very problematic transition right and it's not just that if you have the markets everything will follow in some ways the interesting question is not so much why did certain certain places fail to ingest realize but why did any place industrialize I mean it's a very peculiar thing to have made this transition to a radically different way of living radically different levels of energy use people doing different things for a living like people moving out of agriculture which have been the primary human occupation for millennia and that one shouldn't expect that to follow smoothly simply from the fact that you were doing the things that Adam Smith says you should do right in getting an increasingly sophisticated division of labor etc and of course Smith himself never said that if you do this can I just move this on a bit and ask you both when do you think there is a very very clear and discernible divergence between the east of the China or in Europe all the best parts of China and the best parts of Europe however we want to frame in geographically when does that actually occur and why if the Chinese were up on this roughly on the same plateau do they not see that the West is moving to a peak that they could emulate import technology learn from the West and catch up much quicker than they have so the catch up is long delay yes I mean the anglo-french comparison is the point I was making is the catch up is not long great but one would say about wood I don't know whether you'd say this that the the catch art for China considering where it was in your Vista in the middle of the 18th century has been long delayed is that something endogenous to China which was already there before 1750 and implicit or is it something that happens after 1750 a series of endogenous or exogenous shocks which holds the economy from really converging in the way that the French and the Germans converge on the English other words why is the convergence so slow um I would argue that it is a seer it is a series of shocks some of them that they're both endogenous and exogenous and then the the Nexus that really where it all happens is actually the intersection between the state and the environment yes then in the early 19th century or in some parts of China by the late 18th century you're getting increasingly pressing ecological problems the state is doing reasonably well for a pre-modern state and managing these things but they are increasingly difficult so for instance the costs simply of keeping the Yellow River from flooding is over 10% of the entire Qing government budget by the early 19th century it was a huge problem but it has a very low budget it does have a pair with the West it does mount it manages to extract is small these two producers apply public goods to converge to deal with famines riots the Taipings all of these things the budget that it has looks to me it because I'm very interested in what you're saying about the stage the budget that it has to cope with these problems looks rather pathetic right westernized and I think that's well there are two things that are going on there that are important I think at least two one is that the budget isn't quite as pathetic as it looks because the line between state and society is different so a Qin magistrate who wants to see a bridge repaired particularly in a real wealthy part of the country doesn't tax people and then appropriate the money to build a bridge he makes a symbolic donation it covers maybe one twentieth of the cost of the project and then essentially asks the local gentry to put up the rest and he's largely able to do that now there are certain things in it for the local gentry in doing this this isn't purely something out of the goodness of their heart but there's also a different relationship between state and society right you would have a very hard time in western terms classifying that is either clearly public or clearly private Span so I think that's one thing that the the the state isn't quite as pathetic as it looks because it can actually through moral suasion leverage a whole bunch of extra money but the second thing and this is something that Ben Wong who isn't in this conversation but was certainly part of this emerging field has emphasized is that the Chinese state faces fundamentally different problems than the European States every European state from you know at least the late 15th century on looks across its borders and sees equals or near equals that it has to fight frequently Torrio's and the perpetual warfare is a big deal and the main security threat comes without from without and that involves you in this endless upward ratcheting of government spending of creating a public debt of creating all these instruments which had the world ended in 1800 we might have said my those Europeans were so clever they came up with all these really interesting ways to spend next year's revenue now etc etc it's a shame they only used it to kill each other now then of course what happens in the 19th century is that they begin to use that fiscal power for a whole bunch of other things as well and that's a huge difference the Chinese state basically doesn't borrow and a part of the reason it doesn't borrow is it does not look across the border and see equals its main security threats are internal right it's much more likely to be overthrown by rebellion than by invasion which it was of course mmm-hmm yeah I think another different faiths different tradition governments some people see a ruling class have changed Confucian fundamentalists they follow the Confucius princesa very well according this principle a good government the GU state cannot tax people more so during the first two centuries the Qing government did not increase any taxes they did have the capacity but they didn't so and the result of course you can see the ordinary people could enjoy more their earning but bad things the state didn't have a big ability to produce more paprika goose but I want to thank you both very much I think I want to thank Ken having written a great book and leave for having provided so much of the really good data behind this wonderful thesis of divergence it was given what was 10 years ago a rather moribund professionally in economic history something really big and global to talk about thank you both very much thank you thank you