Pod Insights Conversations with Tyler Sheilagh Ogilvie on Epidemics, Guilds, and the Persistence of Bad Institutions About this episode Sheilagh Ogilvie has spent decades examining the institutional structures that shaped European economic history, challenging conventional wisdom about everything from guilds to marriage patterns. In her conversation with Tyler, she reveals how studying pandemic responses from the Black Death to COVID-19 provides a unique lens for understanding deeper truths about institutional effectiveness and social constraints.
Tyler and Sheilagh discuss the economic impacts of historical pandemics, the "happy story" of the Black Death and why it doesn't stand up to scrutiny, the history of variolation and how entrepreneurs created vaccination franchises in 18th-century England, why local communities typically managed epidemics better than central authorities, the dastardly nature of medieval guilds, the European marriage pattern and its disputed contribution to economic growth, when sustained economic growth truly began in England, why the Dutch Republic stagnated despite its early success, whether she agrees with Greg Clark's social mobility hypothesis, her experience and conducting "anthropological fieldwork" on English social customs, the communitarian norms she encountered while living in Germany, her upcoming research project on European serfdom, and more.
Read a full transcript https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/sheilagh-ogilvie/ enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video https://youtu.be/J5wW1Tlwhto.
Recorded February 27th, 2025.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Tyler Cowen? Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com.
0:25 Tyler Cowen? Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm chatting with Sheila Ogilvie, who is a historian and an economic historian. She is currently at All Souls College of Oxford, formerly of Cambridge University, originally hails from, I believe, Western Canada. She has a new book out, which is excellent, and the title is Controlling Contagion: Epidemics and Institutions From the Black Death to COVID. Sheila, welcome.
0:53 Speaker 01 It's a pleasure to be here.
0:56 Tyler Cowen? The history of epidemics. When there were earlier pandemics, how large would a GDP decline typically be? Like, how bad were they for economies?
1:04 Speaker 01 They were really bad for economies. So first, they were bad because people were really frightened because there was nothing they felt that they could do about it personally. So they withdrew from the market voluntarily, as it were. And then on top of that, there were all sorts of measures to try to limit the spread of contagion, and that also, of course, had an impact on the economy. So it was a sort of double whammy as far as people in the past was concerned.
1:33 Tyler Cowen? Do you have a sense of the relative importance of those two factors?
1:37 Speaker 01 So I have a table in the book where I try to put together probably 15 or 16 quantitative examples that we have from, you know, shortly after the Black Death, straight through to the present day. And it varied hugely. So on the whole, it seems as if voluntary market withdrawal was pretty high in the medieval and early modern period, but then people were poorer then. And so the implication- Of withdrawing from the market were really big for them because a lot of them didn't have any cushion of savings until the late medieval period.
2:19 Speaker 01 There was no tendency for the local community or the state to provide support for people who observed lockdown. And so there was, I think there were really big differences compared to nowadays. But on the whole, it looks like voluntary market withdrawal was really higher in past epidemics than it was, for instance, during influenza in the 20th, early 20th century or COVID in the early 21st.
2:47 Tyler Cowen? And the range of GDP declines, what, what would those numbers be?
2:52 Speaker 01 I think that's a question that should be answered, but we can't answer right now. So we, what all we can observe is the degree to which people stopped buying beer in a particular tavern in a Middle Eastern city in the 15th century. So we can't generalize that to the whole of the economy. You know, we're in a sense, we're just trying to have good macroeconomic estimates of what GDP was for a lot of these economies. But let's say 50 to 60, sometimes 90% withdrawal of, from the market of individuals.
3:35 Speaker 01 For instance, the merchant use of the postal system in 17th century Italian cities during plagues went down 90% during the plague compared to what it normally was.
3:50 Tyler Cowen? Why did the 1969 pandemic not have bigger economic effects?
3:54 Speaker 01 The 69 flu pandemic.
3:56 Tyler Cowen? Right. It just wasn't that bad a flu or people ignored it or what happened?
4:01 Speaker 01 That's a good question. We thought we didn't even need to, to study these things until recently. So looking at how people responded to different pandemics is, I remember I was a kid at the time and you know, the, the, that pandemic was going on, but you know, we didn't really pay attention to it.
4:20 Tyler Cowen? Same here. I remember 1969, but I don't remember there was a pandemic.
4:25 Speaker 01 No, I remember, was it called the Spanish flu or the Hong Kong flu?
4:29 Tyler Cowen? Hong Kong flu, I believe.
4:31 Speaker 01 It's always blamed on foreigners. That is something that goes right back to the back then.
4:37 Tyler Cowen? Now, one commonly hears the claim that, you know, the Black Death, of course, it was terrible for society, terrible for those who died, but that in some ways, medium term, longer term, it had positive effects, that wages went up, that spurred labor-saving innovation, helped Europe grow. Is there any truth to that? Or is that a just-so story that's fabricated?
4:59 Speaker 01 I think my personal view is that it is mostly a sort of happy story, a sort of takeaway from something that we all intuitively know was terrible. I think the sheer scale of the human suffering or death, thirty to sixty percent of the European and Middle Eastern population died. So compared to modern pandemics, it's the worst pandemic we have any information about. So just, you know, a lot of people died. Walking through villages and towns after the Black Death would have been way worse than Dresden after the Second World War, or Altadena
5:43 Speaker 01 after the fires a month ago. So even the survivors, in the longer term, maybe their wages went up and in some cases, their bargaining ability vis-à-vis employers went up. But for the time being, you know, their employers were dead, their villages were deserted. You know, they were basically walking around having lost, you know, one to two-thirds of their of their neighbors. It took a while for the beneficial redistributional effects to kick in. So it wasn't until the later fourteenth or even the early fifteenth century that the sort of wage effects really started redistributing
6:24 Speaker 01 towards the workers and away from the owners of land and capital. And the other thing is that The effects were really different in different societies. So the happy story is one that we tell ourselves about Western Europe, where there was a comparatively free bargain that went on between workers and employers. In Eastern Europe, the shortage of labor after the Black Death actually created an incentive for the major employers, who were the feudal landlords, to strengthen their controls, their restrictions, over their serfs, over their unfree peasants. So you actually get something called the Second Serfdom coming into effect,
7:09 Speaker 01 where the incentives for landlords to coerce unfree labor become really strong when you have very little labor. So Eastern Europe goes into serfdom. Western Europe frees itself from serfdom. So even the happy story is regionally very various.
7:27 Tyler Cowen? But just from a theory point of view, I've never understood the happy story. So I see that the supply of labor goes down, but one would think the demand for labor and the products of labor would go down more or less proportionally. So is there any reason to expect real wages to go up in that scenario?
7:44 Speaker 01 Well, the wage evidence actually does suggest that gradually, as the economy recovered after the Black Death in Western Europe, wages went up. And so employers actually immediately start complaining to the government, "Oh, you know, you have to suppress wages. You know, there aren't enough servants. There aren't enough laborers." And even in Western Europe, the rulers tried to do that. So there was a perception, at any rate, that workers were felt that they were able to demand higher wages. And in particular, females were demanding higher wages. And this was seen as really outrageous because, you know, women were supposed to be, you know, sort of obedient, disciplined workers.
8:29 Speaker 01 And here they were saying, "I'm going to leave the village unless you increase my wages." So I think that although your reasoning is right, I think the balance of the effect really was to increase wage pressure. But how the society responded to it depended a lot on whether the employers could get the state on their side to help suppress the wage demands.
8:53 Tyler Cowen? Let's say we send you back in time, let's say to southwestern Germany. It's an area you know a lot about during the Black Death. And you can give people advice, what they should do to cope. What do you tell them?
9:06 Speaker 01 That's a very good question. I think maybe the first thing I would say is don't believe what your priest says. Because, because one of the things, I mean, one of the things I do in the book is I try to assess the effect of different social institutions. One of them is religion. And although religion did provide consolation and a certain amount of charitable support, one of the very, very salient things it did during the Black Death was that most religious figures admonished people in order to induce God to take away the plague.
9:45 Speaker 01 It was essential for them to get together in processions and church services, not observe social distancing, but engage in super-spreader events. So I think, perhaps I was joking slightly to say, "Don't listen to your parish priest." But I think that would, in the short term, I would, I would definitely have said that.
10:06 Speaker 01 The question about what to do in the longer term is a good one, because just allowing people to decide for themselves about whether to withdraw from the market or whether to keep away from their neighbors is one partial solution. We know that people withdraw from the market spontaneously, even, you know, nowadays, and in most historical societies. But they probably don't withdraw as much as they would if they were taking into account the effect of their actions on other people. And so although I would be advising the villagers to, you know, sort of keep your market transactions going, it's the thing that's going to generate enough resources
10:51 Speaker 01 for you to, you know, pay for recovery and invest in health inputs and, and so on. I would be saying, "You might want to get together within your community to think about observing some sanitation, some social distancing in a coordinated way, not just as individuals."
11:11 Tyler Cowen? Are there any fictional depictions of pandemics that you find persuasive? Manzoni, Camus, Pamuk, anything? Even Boccaccio, who you think, oh, this captures it?
11:24 Speaker 01 Actually, I do think Boccaccio captures it. When I was writing the book, I kept on finding that there were passages in Boccaccio, which exactly described what the historical sources were showing. So he would describe how people in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death, they were, the family, you know, to some extent, broke down. People were abandoning their family members. They weren't helping their neighbors. So it was casting a sort of dark light on the ability of family and community to cope by itself during such a huge crisis. So probably Boccaccio would be my favorite, maybe because he himself had experienced it.
12:09 Speaker 01 The later fictional accounts, I mean, they're great literature, but I somehow felt that they convinced me less than a guy who actually went through it.
12:22 Tyler Cowen? Who or what invented variolation?
12:25 Speaker 01 We don't know. It was a spontaneous invention, as far as we know, in all sorts of societies across the world, lost in the mists of time. The first documents we have suggest that it was widely practiced in China in the 1560s. And they, you know, got integrated both into Chinese religion, but also they had commercial variolators. There was a dynasty of commercial variolators operating in China in the 16th century. We in Europe learned about it. I mean, not we, but my ancestors, I guess, mostly came from Europe, as far as I know, learned about it not until the 18th century.
13:08 Speaker 01 So it had been being practiced in China, in Northern Africa, in the Middle East, possibly in India, since the 16th or 17th century. It was Introduced into England in the first couple of decades of the 18th century, simultaneously by an English East India Company surgeon writing a letter back to the Royal Society in London, and by Lady Mary Wortley Montague, who was the ambassador's wife in Istanbul, Constantinople as it then was, who learned that there was this amazing practice, which the women of Constantinople practiced in order to prevent both themselves and their children
13:51 Speaker 01 from getting smallpox. And she actually got an English doctor in Istanbul to do it to her son, her two-year-old son. And then she got it, when she went back to England, she got it done. It was probably the first variolation in England. She got it done by the same doctor. She dragged him out of retirement, said, "Do my daughter," and he did it. And because she was a member of the aristocracy, she made it the cool thing to do. Like, so she was an early 18th century influencer. And, you know, it was, it became the sort of fashionable thing for aristocratic ladies and then sort of upwardly mobile people to do. And it happened that it was a really good way of spreading it,
14:37 Speaker 01 because we even know nowadays that mothers, women are often the decision-makers as far as vaccination and health decisions in the family are concerned. So the fact that she was such a great influencer, and she kind of modeled this behavior as being, you know, very cool. And what rich, you know, upper-class ladies did meant that it spread very quickly in England. But sadly, very much not on the continent of Europe.
15:06 Tyler Cowen? But how well did it work back then? Was it a no-brainer that you should do it? Or was it highly risky? Or what do we know?
15:12 Speaker 01 It was a little bit risky. So if you carried out a cost-benefit analysis, you would do it. So variolation, for those of our listeners who don't know about it, it was like vaccination before vaccination. So what you did in order to be variolated was that it wasn't That you got injected with cowpox, which is not a disease that kills you. You got injected with a weakened version of smallpox itself. And because it was weakened, it normally didn't kill you. It gave you a mild attack of the disease. But 1.6% of people who got varulated died of it.
15:56 Speaker 01 On the other hand, the risk of actually catching smallpox and dying of it was something between 10 and 20%. And so you get these merchants, or not merchants, but doctors in both China and England saying, well, you know, you should just think about it as a merchant would do, costs and benefits. The cost, the risk is really high that you will get natural smallpox. And the risk that you will die of variolation is only 1.6%. And therefore you should do it. So they're kind of using the calculus of capitalism to decide whether to get varulated or whether to get it done to their children. And lots of people did.
16:36 Tyler Cowen? So should we have done that in 2020, as Robin Hanson suggested? If it passes the cost benefit test?
16:44 Speaker 01 I don't know if variolation would work for COVID is the problem. It's a virus, not a bacteria. So it's not a herd immunity argument. It's an actual medical immunization argument. But clearly, normal people understood it very well in the 18th century. So if you were a teenager in an English village in the 18th century, and you were deciding, okay, I'm going to move to London and get a job. You and all, like your group, friendship group from the village would all go into the nearest town, pay a commercial variulator. You'd all get smallpox together. You'd go back to your village.
17:29 Speaker 01 You'd suffer through this mild case of smallpox. And then you would be immunized for life, assuming that you hadn't died. And you would go off to London and and seek your fortune. So it became. Like it was very much a normal teenage thing to do. And there was this incredible franchising setup in England. So that was kind of like a McDonald's, but to get variated. So there were these entrepreneurs who figured out, you know, who advertised themselves as having lower risk ways of getting immunized and cheaper ways of getting immunized. And so, you know, there was this famous family of the Suttons that started a franchise in 18th century England, in the 1750s.
18:14 Speaker 01 And then they spread into the continent of Europe and actually into North America.
18:19 Tyler Cowen? So you would have done it back then?
18:20 Speaker 01 Oh, definitely.
18:22 Tyler Cowen? With enthusiasm?
18:23 Speaker 01 I'm a counter. I look at 1.6%, 1.6% and compare it to 10 or 20%. I know which way I'd go.
18:32 Tyler Cowen? The earlier history of pandemics. If you had to say in general, did local autonomy or centralized control do better? What is your view?
18:40 Speaker 01 Local autonomy, definitely. So one of the big theories that economists have developed in recent years about, you know, how to get nearly every good outcome in economics is to have lots of state capacity. And one component of the theory of state capacity is that you want state centralization. Well, I'm not really totally convinced about that for any outcome, but certainly the historical evidence suggests that local government was a lot more effective than central government at dealing with contagion control.
19:21 Tyler Cowen? And what were they better at? How did that play out?
19:24 Speaker 01 So they were better in lots of ways. They were not so good in a couple of ways, but they were better in knowing what the local preference was of the cost benefit analysis between economic effects and epidemiological effects. They were good at. Liaising with informal, community-level, neighborly effects. So, monitoring of neighbors by one another, altruism among neighbors and so on. So, they were really highly informed about who was keeping the well clean, who was getting variegated or vaccinated, that you know, the sort of sharp-eyed neighbor, the curtain-twisting effect. So, they were highly informed.
20:09 Speaker 01 It probably wasn't that fun if you were not keeping your latrine clean and you weren't getting vaccinated, but your neighbors were watching you. And they were pretty good at running, at least in some parts of Europe, running a local-level welfare system where they could observe which villagers were going through difficulties and provide them with some welfare support that would enable them to observe lockdown or get variegated or, you know, would provide them with some food if they needed to quarantine. And that often works well on the local level because the deserving poor are very easily identified locally.
20:52 Speaker 01 So, I'm talking up local government. The problem is that pandemics, epidemics, often spill out beyond the village walls. And when that was the case, you actually sometimes needed higher levels of government to bang a few local heads together. Because the problem with villages, small towns, is that they only care about what's going on inside the community. And sometimes, we know, there are cross-border externalities, you know? None of us are safe until we're all safe. And so, looking at the spillover effects beyond the local community,
21:32 Speaker 01 I think having higher levels of government to do a bit of local head-banging was a useful thing. But on the whole, it was local governments that did most of the heavy lifting. And the central government, at best, was just permitting the local government to do its thing, rather than actually taking initiatives.
21:54 Tyler Cowen? Now, you were living in England during the COVID pandemic, right?
21:57 Speaker 01 I was.
21:58 Tyler Cowen? Given all the history you know, what struck you as standing out or surprising or unusual? Or how do you see the British response differently from how less-informed people might?
22:10 Speaker 01 I was not that happy with the British response while I was living here. There were aspects of it that I continued to be unhappy with until fairly recently, such as, for instance, I mean, there were things I was very proud of in the sense that the Oxford Covid vaccine got developed really quickly and rolled out really quickly, and I had it, and that was wonderful. And of course, I had just moved to Oxford at the beginning of Covid. I taught for thirty years in Cambridge before I moved to All Souls College. So I was starting a new job at the exact time that Covid was starting. So I was very, I was, you know, very pleased that science was kicking in.
22:54 Speaker 01 I think that was something that Britain did fairly well. Some other countries had more delay in approving the early vaccines. On the other hand, one thing I didn't like was that there were some government initiatives that actually paid people to go out and go to restaurants while the pandemic was still going on. So our then Chancellor of the Exchequer had a programme called Help Out to Eat Out, and he was actually subsidising people to go out to restaurants while the pandemic was still going on to help business. And a very nice piece of econometric analysis was carried out by an economist at Warwick,
23:38 Speaker 01 which showed that immediately after the Eat Out to Help Out initiative was put into place, there were massive increases in Covid infections and deaths in the affected places. So that was, I think that was shocking. The other thing that I didn't like about living here was that it was actually not possible to get a Covid vaccination on the market until last year. So you had to wait to come up in the queue. Of the government deciding whether your age group was allowed to be vaccinated.
24:16 Speaker 01 Whereas not just in Canada and the United States, but in Germany, in France, all over Europe, you just, I mean, I had a former postdoc who was saying, yeah, I'm going on holiday next week. So I've made an appointment with my GP, this was in Essen in Germany, to get my COVID vaccination. So he was just free to do it. Whereas the rest of us were waiting for our government permission to get our vaccination. And I thought it was a reversal of Britain's precocious status as the world center of variolation in the 18th century. Why was it being like this? It had a really highly, highly market provided variolation
24:57 Speaker 01 system in the 18th century. And why was it not mobilizing market provision of vaccination in the 21st? So, you know, I think everyone, you probably have things you remember from living in the US during the COVID pandemic that perhaps weren't quite the way you might have liked them to be.
25:16 Tyler Cowen? I drove to North Carolina to get my vaccine a month early and that worked out great. It was totally legal, to be clear. But federalism has some advantages, referring back to local autonomy.
25:28 Speaker 01 So you know what you were like? You were like diplomats from the Netherlands and Spain and France in the 18th century, where at home it was illegal to get variolated. And so they would make sure that they got a posting to London and they would take all their kids with them so they could all get variolated in London. So they were sort of, you know, jurisdiction shopping as well.
25:53 Tyler Cowen? Given your long knowledge of the history, opposition to variolation, opposition to vaccination, when you see so much opposition today, especially in my country, where does that come from? What insight do you have as to the persistence of these crazy views?
26:12 Speaker 01 Nowadays, its sources are partly historical, and you can see their roots in history, because one of the sources of opposition to both variolation and vaccination was religion, not mainstream religion, but extreme, so dissenting religion. So if you like the religious left, and extreme authoritarian religion. So if you like the super orthodox Catholics, for instance, in France, were very anti-variolation, as were the super Protestant dissenter types in, for instance, Germany and various parts of Scandinavia.
26:57 Speaker 01 It was the religious extremes.
26:59 Tyler Cowen? How do you model that? Why are those the people who oppose it? Is it rebelliousness? Or they don't trust authority?
27:06 Speaker 01 Well, I don't think it can be not trusting authority, because they certainly believe in their own authority. And the religious right, I mean, the sort of Jansenist Catholics in France certainly were not anti-authoritarian. I think... So I was talking to a colleague who was writing a book about the economics of religion while I was writing my book, and it was during COVID. And we were talking about how religion is sort of a platform, if you like. I mean, it's sort of like Amazon, in the sense that you get a bunch of different services from it. And one reason why people sign up
27:49 Speaker 01 to anti-variolation or anti-vax sentiment is that they want other things which their particular religious platform is offering. So it might be offering consolation, spiritual consolation, might be offering charitable relief, it might be offering social networking, but in order to...
28:10 Speaker 01 Get the linked goods within that that religious platform. You have to sign up to the epistemological craziness of, you know, the sort of anti-scientific views. So that was one reason historically, and I think that's still in operation. Historically, there was another reason, which was the medical guilds, the equivalent of the American Medical Association, only much, much worse, back in early modern Europe, did not like the idea of this new thing that they had not, this new technology that they had not approved, and that were also going to take away, challenge their business model
28:53 Speaker 01 and take away their fees from treating smallpox patients. So in France and in Spain, it was the medical guilds, together with the Catholic Church, that lobbied the state to make variolation illegal. So it was like this unholy alliance between the medical associations and religion. Fortunately, modern medical associations are not as bad as medical guilds. There may be some ways in which they're similar, but in that respect, they're not. And I think that that's, I mean, there are sort of renegade medics who, you know, go on, you know, go on the internet and say, you know, I'm a trained medic and I can tell you vaccination is bad.
29:35 Speaker 01 But in general, you know, medical guilds, medical associations aren't like that anymore.
29:41 Tyler Cowen? Now, you mentioned the guilds. One of the things you're best known for is your two books on the guilds and your articles. What's the best argument you can make on behalf of medieval and Renaissance guilds? Is there anything you can say for them?
29:55 Speaker 01 I might be sort of becoming soft-hearted in my old age, but I can see, I think there are examples of guild systems which operated effective professional training. I would say the Dutch and English guilds had a fairly good sort of vocational training system. It was good because
30:25 Speaker 01 It did provide a sort of training framework for young people to learn crafts and services. In England and the Netherlands, it was even possible for females, for girls, to sometimes get vocational training and not be excluded from the guild apprenticeship system. And the other amazing thing about the English guild system was that, once you had been apprenticed to any occupation in London, you could practise any other. So you just had to get membership of one guild, and then you could do any gilded occupation in London. This was unique. This was not the way guilds normally were. So I've finished saying my good things about the guilds.
31:10 Speaker 01 The bad things were that no other apprenticeship system in Europe was flexible like that. In fact, in most European societies, guilds fundamentally, in principle, did not let, not just, they didn't let women, girls, get any formal vocational training. They excluded Jews. They excluded poor boys who could not pay the several years of wages necessary to pay the training fees. They excluded migrants. They excluded people with the wrong colour of skin. So in 18th century Spain, a cobbler's guild in one Spanish city excluded all boys from
31:52 Speaker 01 apprenticeship whose skin was darker than the colour of quince jelly. So, you know, there was a literal colour bar to getting into a guild. Completely, even getting any training. So it was completely non-merit-based. So I think, in general, the problem with guilds is that they seek the benefits of their existing members, and restricting entry always enables you to raise prices. And so it was quite difficult to prevent a guild from behaving like a little mini cartel. So I would say guilds... Did operate training systems for those they let in, but they didn't let everyone in.
32:36 Speaker 01 And they did some quality control over goods and services. But they often imposed quality restrictions that meant that it was not possible to sell cheap and nasty products. They focused on the nastiness and they didn't focus on the fact that sometimes less well off people would like something nasty as long as it's a bit cheaper.
33:00 Tyler Cowen? Do you think the guilds improved the history of Western art or damaged it? If you look at Florence, there are some notable commissions. Arguably, Dutch municipal buildings may have benefited from guild investment. Like, were there any offshoot public goods? Or there was more damage done?
33:17 Speaker 01 I think definitively the damage greatly outweighed the benefits. But it's a bit like the German Hanseatic League. If you go to those amazing Hanseatic cities in northern Germany and Scandinavia, beautiful architecture, amazing, you know, just glorious, you know, use of the rents. It's sort of like you wouldn't want there to have been serfdom. But the beautiful palaces built by incredibly rich Eastern European aristocrats are an enduring legacy. And you could say it's something that the state does. Not everything the state does is good.
34:00 Speaker 01 But, you know, early modern princes built the Palace of Versailles. And we're happy that those monuments still exist. But I'm not sure that we would want to get back to that social framework.
34:13 Tyler Cowen? There's something called the European marriage pattern. You've written on this extensively. To what extent did it contribute to later European economic growth?
34:23 Speaker 01 This is a really big debate. My view of it is that the European marriage pattern is observable in a wide range of European countries in Central and Western and Northwestern Europe. And I think the idea that the European marriage pattern, which is, so just for our listeners, the European marriage pattern has three key characteristics: relatively late marriage for women, so in their mid to late twenties, a significant proportion of especially women, but of course also men, never marrying in their entire lives, so lifelong celibacy,
35:04 Speaker 01 so 10 to 15 percent, and primarily nuclear family households. And together, it has been argued that these things were good for subsequent economic growth. That's mainly based on the fact that England and the Netherlands had the European marriage pattern, and they had amazing economic growth. So the Dutch Golden Age between 1560 and 1670, and then England starts taking off after about 1650, and of course becomes the first country to industrialize. And so people who initially studied the European marriage pattern said, oh, this is something that existed in England and the Netherlands, it must have caused economic growth.
35:49 Speaker 01 And the problem is that the European marriage pattern also existed in extremely poor stagnant economies in the center and eastern Central Europe, Central Europe, Nordic Europe, Scandinavian countries, places that had serfdom, like Bohemia, the present day Czech Republic, places in Scandinavia that didn't industrialize until the late 19th century. Extreme versions of the European marriage pattern were strongly associated with economic stagnation.
36:23 Tyler Cowen? But all those places do industrialize, right? And even Eastern Europe, after communism, many decades of terrible policy, they catch up pretty well. Isn't there something enduring about that culture? Say if we look at Saheli in Africa, where there's a lot of polygamy. Woman might be married at age 14, have a lot of kids, the woman won't be well-educated, doesn't pass down a lot of human capital to her kids. Doesn't that continuing regularity show us there really is something to the European marriage pattern?
36:54 Speaker 01 I think the question is, do those patterns of low human capital investment, do they come from the family system as a sort of autonomous thing? Or do people have very early marriage and universal marriage and huge families partly to substitute for the absence of other institutions to get things done? You need to have, everyone needs to marry if there's no way of saving for your old age, or there's no pension system, or there's no welfare system. You may need to have a huge kinship group in order to protect you if the state can't protect property rights and personal security.
37:38 Tyler Cowen? But then it's a trap you're caught in. It might be initially effect, but then it becomes cause of future stagnation. And you can sit up and say, gee, I wish we had had all European marriage pattern for the last 400 years.
37:49 Speaker 01 Well, I think if I had a wish list, I'd be saying, gee, I wish we'd had markets and states. I don't care what kind of family system you have. I think the family is, let's say it's not necessarily just a response to other institutions, but it's the whole institutional framework. And those involve vigorous markets and effective and non-abusive, if you like, states and many other social institutions. And that once you have these effect of other institutions, often you do end up having later marriage and a nuclear family because the family doesn't have to do all the heavy lifting in society.
38:32 Speaker 01 So until we know what it is that keeps these bad equilibria in place, I don't think we should conclude that it's just the family. Somehow, you know, the family by itself, there's some culture that causes people to stay in that situation. I think. Policy, well, you know, it's a bit of a sad policy if in order to change the outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa, we have to completely change people's culture. Let's see what we can do with, you know, better institutions. And if there's a cultural component left over in the end, then we can start thinking about it.
39:12 Tyler Cowen? Both Greg Clark and Amy Nakamura, with co-authors, have good papers arguing sustained economic growth dates from England in the 1620s. Like, A, do you agree? And B, to the extent you agree, what happens? What is special behind that era causing that?
39:31 Speaker 01 I think the question of exactly when it starts in the 17th century is debated. So the per capita GDP figures, you know, it's sometime, it might be the mid 17th century. It might, some argue that it might be after 1690. Some, as you say, argue that it's a bit earlier in the 17th century. So I would be happy to go with the 17th century for now. Why? I think you're, you're probably going to get tired of me saying this. I think there was much livelier institution of the market emerging after about 1600. State capacity was increasing, but not becoming authoritarian.
40:16 Speaker 01 Guilds were weakening. The kind of state capacity you had in England was local level state capacity, local government, parish level, rather than centralized. The one thing that England had, it had a great legal system, but it was, it had hardly any bureaucrats. So, you know, there was, there was a tiny sort of customs service and army and navy, but they didn't have sort of paid local level bureaucrats the way they did in, in, in France or in Germany. So there were all sorts of things which came together in England in the 17th century, which had actually already begun, they'd come together in the Low Countries, in the Netherlands, in the 16th century. And it was
41:00 Speaker 01 A cluster of different institutional innovations, if you like, that first the Netherlands and then England enjoyed in the 16th and 17th centuries, which let the inherent entrepreneurial nature, I think of all cultures, not just of English culture, loose in the course of the 17th century.
41:23 Tyler Cowen? And when it comes to the Industrial Revolution proper, which comes, of course, to Britain, but not so much to what we now call the Netherlands, Dutch Republic, is coal the difference there? Or why did the Dutch Republic not continue on a good track? They stayed okay, right? But they didn't make the same progress.
41:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, they know they got stuck in a rich equilibrium, if you like. And it wasn't, you know, per capita GDP in England doesn't surpass that in the Dutch Republic until after 1800. So after there's been 40 years of industrial revolution. So the Dutch Republic is stagnating at a really high level. And so you probably wouldn't have complained had you been a Dutch burger in, you know, 1800. But you're right, it was an 18th century stagnation. In fact, after about 1670, the Dutch Republic stagnates at a high level. It's immensely debated by Dutch historians and by others.
42:19 Speaker 01 I think that some argue that it was that Dutch stagnation was caused by outside influences like wars with France. I'm a little not, I'm not an expert on the Dutch Republic, but I think that you can observe its internal domestic institutions getting ossified, petrifying in the course of the 18th century. After having greatly liberalized its guilds in the 16th century, they actually kick back in and become more restrictive in the 18th century. The Dutch East India Company, the VOC, gets these incredible monopolies.
43:00 Speaker 01 It starts sort of dominating the business system and the financial system to an extent that I think probably was not beneficial. And it became possible for entrenched groups of craft and commercial producers to exclude innovations. And it was a sort of reversal between the south and north of the Netherlands because Flanders had actually fallen behind, the Southern Netherlands, had fallen behind the North in the golden age, but it was actually the Southern Netherlands, what we now call Belgium, that was in the second wave of industrialization after England. So the strength, the underlying strength of the Low Countries in general, kicked in
43:45 Speaker 01 in the late 18th century, when Belgium and Northern France start to industrialize. So I think there were some really great fundamental strengths of the Low Countries, but I don't know exactly why the Dutch Republic, you know, entrenched oligarchies started to block further growth in the 18th century.
44:07 Tyler Cowen? What do you think of the Greg Clark hypothesis, that England basically has never had much real social mobility, and it just hasn't improved over the centuries? It depends who your parents were, it might be genetic, you just cycle through, the same families, the same surnames. Agree or disagree?
44:23 Speaker 01 I think on the whole, mostly disagree, but I, you know, I think many societies are a bit like that. You know, you see certain countries who have presidential dynasties of various sorts. In fact, especially now that things like education matter so much, insofar as education is influenced by your parents, you can end up getting a sort of oligarchy of very educated people. So it's a big problem in any society. But I think we need cross-country comparisons of social mobility, because even if you observe
45:02 Speaker 01 England having quite a lot of immobility over the long period, the question, what's the counterfactual? Shouldn't you be looking at Germany? Shouldn't you be looking at France? Shouldn't you be looking at other comparable countries? And certainly, I mean, my main research has been on German-speaking Central Europe and Poyntz East, and I think when you compare social mobility...
45:29 Speaker 01 In those countries without in England, England looks like an incredibly mobile society. So, you know, I'm I'm not quite so gloomy about England when I look at what the alternatives were on the continent of Europe, which were even more immobile. And where legal social status was actually legally entrenched. So you know, there are famous, there's that famous scene in The Sorrows of Young Vauta, where Vauta, who's an educated man, but not a member of the gentry, has to leave the parlor before the dancing begins. He has to leave his lady that he that he would like to marry. He isn't allowed to stay there because he's the wrong legal social class. And that's the late 18th century. And I don't think that that would be happening in England at the time.
46:15 Tyler Cowen? You've now lived in England for well over 30 years. What's been your biggest surprise about the place? In anything?
46:22 Speaker 01 It keeps on surprising me. I've actually lived here for 46, more than 46. I moved here when I was, as an undergraduate. So I came here when I was 16. And I feel as if I'm still doing anthropological fieldwork on the behavioral patterns of these strange local tribes. So, you know, there are these these systematic things which are so, they're charming, but they're very strange. I mean, for instance, just to give one example, English people are very reserved. I get on with that because Canadians are fairly reserved as well. But it's okay to talk to people in your neighborhood if they have a dog with
47:07 Speaker 01 them. That's a sort of conversation mediator. Or if you're gardening in your front garden. But if you're in your back garden, you're not supposed to talk to people. And it's taken me a few decades to observe this as a as an empirical regularity. Nobody ever tells you that this is how you're supposed to behave. But if you keep, you know, if you keep your field notebooks going as an anthropologist, you begin to notice, you know, the the sort of tribal patterns of the English. And, you know, I must like them since here I still am after more than four decades. But it's an interesting experience of how
47:50 Speaker 01 You grow up, I grew up in Calgary, in Western Canada, and probably fundamentally, I'm still a girl from Calgary. So I'm enjoying my anthropological research. I think the other, the thing I really like about Britain is they're very open to, it's quite good to be a foreigner here, because if you behave in an eccentric way, they think it's just because you're foreign. They don't blame you for it. And I think that's quite a charming characteristic.
48:23 Tyler Cowen? Do you think English society tolerates its own eccentric well?
48:28 Speaker 01 I actually do think it does. I think especially, you know, after 30 years in Cambridge, and now five years in Oxford,
48:40 Speaker 01 some of my colleagues are even more eccentric than I am. And that's fine, you know? Not only do their colleagues kind of like it, but the students really like it. So the students totally get on with having, you know, supervisions in Cambridge, tutorials in Oxford, with people who are slightly odd. And I think that's an important part of one's education, is both having colleagues who are eccentric, and also teaching the next generation that it's okay to be weird. And that, I think, I think England's still like that.
49:14 Tyler Cowen? So let's say an 18-year-old, highly intelligent young woman comes to you. She's moving to England, she might want to be a professor. What advice do you give to her?
49:25 Speaker 01 I would say, are you, well, so-
49:28 Tyler Cowen? From America, let's say.
49:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, from America. So my academic advice would be the advice that, my, my younger sister came to study in England long after I did. And after her first year at the Institute of Archaeology in London, she said, Sheila, why didn't you tell me that the way the British edu-, university system works is that you aren't allowed to make up your own essay questions? You have to focus on the essay question they have set. And I thought, yes, that's the fundamental piece of wisdom I would pass on from an educational point of view, which is, you know, answer the essay question set. But in a more general framework, I would say-
50:11 Speaker 01 And this is actually not just England-specific, but changing cultures. Because when I was 20, I went to live in Germany. And I lived there actually for quite a long time while I was doing research for my doctorate. And when you initially go to a foreign place, whether it's Germany, or later I lived in the Czech Republic for a year, you are going to feel very... You won't have, you won't figure out right away what people in this culture do to feel comfortable and have fun. But you have to have the faith that they do have things that they do. And you need to learn what those things are, that they do in this culture,
50:56 Speaker 01 to be comfortable with one another and to have a great time. And the sooner you learn that, the happier you'll be fitting into a new culture. And I think that would be my general life advice to anyone who was moving to a new country is, find out what people do for fun and then start doing it.
51:14 Tyler Cowen? When you were living in Wurtemberg, what was the biggest puzzle for you?
51:19 Speaker 01 I think the biggest puzzle was the strength of the local community. So I moved there in the fall of 1979. And I was living in Stuttgart. And I realized that everyone was watching one another all the time. And there were lots of things that you had to do, like there was something... And, you know, Germans from other parts, I was living in Swabia, which is well-known as being very traditional and very communitarian. But you have to clean the sidewalk. It is your responsibility. And so within the building, if you share, if you're in a block of flats, you have a particular week during which you do the Kielwoche.
52:04 Speaker 01 So you have to clean the sidewalk. And there's like, the other people in the street will watch to see if that bit of sidewalk has been cleaned, whether it's, you know, whether it's garbage in the summer or snow in the winter. And if it hasn't, they'll complain to your building. So within the building, there's a sort of collective monitoring system. Whose turn is it to do the sidewalk this week? That was really interesting thing to learn. And I think in general, people were very... Communitarian, you would one thing, one time in a train, I hadn't eaten, I had, I was doing, I was doing some computer research at a Max Planck Institute, hadn't had anything
52:45 Speaker 01 to eat for 24 hours. So on the train back to Stuttgart, I was eating an entire 100 gram chocolate bar. And the lady, the old lady sitting across from me in the compartment, she couldn't contain herself after a bit. And she said, you know, that's very unhealthy. You shouldn't be eating so much chocolate. And I thought, that would never happen in England, would never happen in Canada. They would assume that I knew that I had a good reason to be eating 100 grams of chocolate, which indeed I did. But in Germany, I think people at that time, I don't know if it's true anymore. I think they felt that it was their responsibility to express their moral views on what you had done. And, you know,
53:30 Speaker 01 that's why I, I think it was a good thing because I can really understand medieval and early modern village life in a way that I probably wouldn't have growing up in Western Canada.
53:42 Tyler Cowen? It would surprise me when I lived in Southern Germany, that if my shoelaces were untied, someone would tell me immediately, right?
53:49 Speaker 01 So you had that exact experience?
53:51 Tyler Cowen? This isn't Freiburg, not Stuttgart, but they're not so far apart.
53:55 Speaker 01 They're not so far apart, exactly. Yeah. But Freiburg is Catholic, Stuttgart's Protestant, but I think the fundamental institution of the local community is very similar between the two.
54:08 Tyler Cowen? Now, how much do you think that coming from Western Canada has shaped how you understand these histories? Because mostly it's Europeans doing these European histories, right? How has it made you different?
54:19 Speaker 01 I think it's been good because, it's been good in two ways. One is I have no Dog in the race. So, you know, I'm Canadian. I'm not trying, I don't have a sort of emotional attachment to the history of any particular society in Europe. So it, I hope, enables me to free myself of the desire either to criticize or to rehabilitate the past of a particular country that I'm looking at. And I think, maybe not, I mean, I'm not saying Canada doesn't have a history, but it doesn't have a long history. And so it means that I'm endlessly curious
55:04 Speaker 01 about these places with deep, very, very long histories. And, you know, I sort of wish I had a second life so that I could do Chinese economic history, which is the new frontier. And, you know, more than half my graduate students are brilliant young Chinese students who want to do for pre-modern China what, you know, a generation or more have done for medieval and early modern Europe. And they're busy comparing, you know, credit markets in Eastern Central Europe with credit markets in 19th century or early 20th century China. And, you know, the other completely uncharted frontier
55:49 Speaker 01 is, of course, Indian economic history. Often people will say, oh, no, we couldn't possibly go before the colonial period because there are no sources. There are sources for pre-colonial India. They just haven't been analyzed by economic historians. So in that, I mean, it's a long answer to your question. I think coming from a place with a short history has inspired me with a passion for understanding places with long histories.
56:19 Tyler Cowen? What's the future of Canada?
56:21 Speaker 01 Probably not as the 51st state.
56:26 Speaker 01 I think. People, I remember in the seventies, writers, Canadian literature writers and sort of pointy heads in Canada were always lamenting that there wasn't enough of a Canadian identity. I, as a teenager, felt I knew perfectly well what I and everyone else who was Canadian knew perfectly well what it meant to be Canadian. And we didn't really need to lament not having an identity. So I don't really feel that the Canadian identity is somehow at risk. I think there are ways in which Canada could improve. I think the trade barriers between the provinces are a bad thing. I think there are various cartels that aren't a great thing.
57:11 Speaker 01 But, you know, overall, I think I have a sense that Canada works pretty well. And I wouldn't defend to the death every single thing that, you know, every single way that Canada currently works. But I don't feel that it is about to dissolve in any way.
57:29 Tyler Cowen? Before my last question, let me just plug your new book again. It's called Controlling Contagion: Epidemics and Institutions from the Black Death to COVID. And I believe it is the very best book on those topics.
57:40 Speaker 01 Thank you, Tyler.
57:43 Tyler Cowen? Final question. What will you do next?
57:46 Speaker 01 I was a very lucky person. And a private foundation called the Leverhune Trust, and I'm giving it a plug here, has given me a gigantic project grant, which pays for three years for a young person to be me in Oxford, to do my teaching and my admin and so on, while I am a free woman. And I research and write a book about European serfdom from the year 1000 to 1861. So I'm looking at this hugely important social institution of serfdom, which I don't even talk about in that book you very kindly plugged. And, you know, watch the space.
58:30 Speaker 01 And in three or four years' time, there should be another gigantic book.
58:33 Tyler Cowen? Sheila Ogilvie, thank you very much.
58:36 Speaker 01 Thank you, Tyler. I really enjoyed it.
58:41 Tyler Cowen? Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm @TylerCowan, and the show is @TylerCowanConvos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.
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