Are you a "skills sceptic" (see previous post by Sam Dimitriu); this pitches at the idea entrepreneurialism is essential and needs nurturing as a cultural concept:
We need to rediscover the frontier spirit that is keeping America rich
Fiddling with A-levels is the easy part: filling our kids with entrepreneurial zeal is the missing link
There was a period in the 18th and 19th centuries when Britain was arguably the most entrepreneurial nation on earth. The Victorians rightly celebrated the brilliant inventors and businessmen who pioneered the Industrial Revolution, men whose ideas propelled these islands to the top of the world in prosperity. Watt and Boulton, Clegg and Murdoch, Marshall and Murray, Cooke and Wheatstone: icons all.
But the explanation for this transformation — perhaps the most significant in the history of our species — wasn’t just about these great figures. Joel Mokyr, an American economist who has done much to illuminate the cultural foundations of economic growth, argues that the credit deserves to be spread much more widely: to small businessmen, shopkeepers and practical thinkers whose ingenuity is often left out of the headlines.
As he put it in a wonderful paper in 2006: “Beside the ‘heroic inventors’ ... who are immortalised in high-school textbooks, the Industrial Revolution could rely on a much larger army of less famous highly skilled craftsmen and instrument-makers who could turn original ideas into a physical reality and actually build the machines that their clever colleagues designed, not just once but over and over again. These mostly anonymous craftsmen and mechanics were the unsung foot soldiers of the Industrial Revolution.”
I love this paragraph because it hints at perhaps the most overlooked insight about growth — namely, that it emerges from the interplay of components in a complex ecosystem. It hints at something else, too: the role of culture. Britain in the 19th century didn’t just have people with good ideas but also those with the will, drive and ambition to convert them into practical reality. We were a nation of thinkers and doers and, very often, thinkers who could do.
And this, I believe, has tremendous relevance today in a world of ever faster technological change. You might have noticed that ministers often argue that we need an education and skills revolution, the intuitive idea that the success of a “knowledge economy” derives from the knowledge of its people. Rishi Sunak is an evangelist for this thesis: building on a proposal about maths a few months ago, he now wishes to replace A-levels with a baccalaureate, according to reports on Friday. And, on the face of it, he has an arguable case.
But the bigger picture is worth pondering, too. America has a productivity rate 38 per cent higher than ours, despite coming lower on the Pisa table of educational attainment, and Americans enjoy correspondingly higher wages. This means, as the economist Sam Bowman has pointed out, that a newly qualified nurse in the US earns £42,000, compared with only £27,000 here, and that a car wash manager at an Alabama Buc-ees (a chain of gas stations), earns more than $125,000. The average American could stop working each year on September 22 and still be richer than a Briton working for the whole year.
Why this gulf? One reason, I’d suggest, is that American society is more adept at translating knowledge into action. This nation — built by immigrants, people who were willing to risk everything to travel to the New World — retains its frontier spirit. Gross capital formation remains impressively high, as does the number of business failures. The latter may sound negative but it offers the most eloquent testimony to a people willing to take risks at all levels, from mega start-ups to craftsmen, small business owners to inventors. As one observer put it: “In most nations they ask: ‘What might go wrong?’ In America they ask, ‘When do we start?’”
It’s dangerous to extrapolate from personal anecdote, but my greatest educational experience was starting my first business. The concept was to stage TV sports events at prestigious venues like the Royal Albert Hall, and I quickly learnt about the gulf between ideas and action. I suddenly found myself having to raise capital, hire staff, rent office space, negotiate with TV firms — and that was just in the first week. I remember a period of cold-calling every marketing director in the FTSE 250 to raise commercial income, with a call-back rate of 1 per cent. I learnt a lot about failure but perhaps even more about resilience.
I know, I know. The idea that we can bring a spirit of entrepreneurialism into our classrooms may seem pie in the sky. It’s tough enough for teachers to sustain discipline in crumbling schools and equip kids with rudimentary English and maths. How are overworked staff supposed to wave a magic wand to shift something as mysterious and complex as a nation’s culture? All I’d say in response is that I am certain there is a critical mass of children with both the potential and willingness to benefit from the psychological research that emphatically demonstrates that entrepreneurship can be learnt.
If you are interested in the evidence, I’d direct you to the work of the psychologist Michael Frese, who has shown that courses on initiative (and on techniques for converting ideas into reality) cash out in the real world. Students become more agile, adaptive and proactive. As Frese told me: “We all know how to regurgitate ideas to answer an exam question. But we are not given enough encouragement to link them, powerfully and habitually, to action. This is the missing link.”
I am not saying America is perfect, by the way; we all know about the political dysfunction and inequality. But I do think it has a spirit that we would do well to ponder. Entrepreneurship, after all, isn’t merely about starting a business; it’s a state of mind. American professors are far more attuned to how to turn ideas into applications that change lives, often alongside commercial partners; in the UK brilliant ideas sit inert in academic papers. The same can be seen in crafts and trades (we desperately need to expand apprenticeship courses in the UK). In the US practical skills are constantly fused with new technology; in the UK, not so much.
The closing paragraphs of The Great Gatsby are, to my mind, the most beautifully ambiguous in western literature. To many they are mournful and fatalistic, but I’ve always been moved by how they capture the great mystery of human ambition, the magical ingredient that propelled our species from a small strip of Africa and out into the wider world. “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther ... And one fine morning — ”
Britain is in decline. Tweaks to A-levels won’t cut it. A new spirit of entrepreneurialism just might.
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