"Forward not back" was Labour's slogan at the last election, and how we sophisticates sniggered! But the concept of progress—that history might have direction, that things might get better or knowledge advance—is a surprisingly recent one. It was formulated exactly 400 years ago, in 1605, when Francis Bacon wrote The Advancement of Learning.
Bacon was a lawyer and politician. He was born in London in 1561 to a prosperous family, his father being lord keeper of the great seal. Following the custom of the day, Francis was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, at the age of 12, but he left after two years, dismissing Trinity as a ghastly college of Aristotelian pedants mired in the three "distempers of learning"—"vain imaginations," "vain altercations" and "vain affectations." "Why," Bacon asked in The Advancement of Learning, "should a few received authors stand up like Hercules columns, beyond which there should be no sailing or discovering?"
For some years Bacon left his own question unanswered because he had a career to pursue. Following his father into the law and politics, he was soon a barrister and an MP, and then successively solicitor general, attorney general, lord keeper of the great seal himself and lord chancellor. A worldly, ambitious, greedy man who collected a knighthood, barony, viscountcy and many bribes, Bacon's lodestar was power and he amassed as much as he could. But it was his interest in power that was to direct his philosophy, because the formative event of his intellectual life was not Trinity but the Spanish armada.
Bacon was 27 in 1588 when the Spanish launched their attack on England, and though the English—helped by the weather and the Dutch—beat them back, he never forgot the fear they induced. Indeed, so frightened was all of England by the threat of Spanish conquest that Bacon's future secretary, Thomas Hobbes, was born prematurely when his mother was shocked into labour on hearing of the sighting of the Spanish fleet.
Spain in Bacon's day was stunningly powerful. Its monarchs ruled much of Europe and, more importantly, much of the globe too. From America in the west to the Philippines in the east, via much of Africa and parts of India, the king of Spain ruled the world. But how had Spain grown so powerful? It was to answer this question that Bacon coined his famous aphorism: "knowledge is power."
Bacon read the histories of Portuguese and Spanish discovery, including Gomes de Azurara's 1450 Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea and Antonio Galvano's 1555 Summary of the Discoveries of the World, and he concluded: "The West Indies [would] never have been discovered if the use of the mariner's needle had not been first discovered." Bacon also wrote: "Gunpowder, the magnetic compass and printing were the magic trio that have changed the whole face and state of things." Technology (Bacon's "knowledge") was indeed power.
Prince Henry "the Navigator," who had launched Europe's programme of discovery and conquest, was in fact Portuguese. He had anticipated Bacon's challenge of "sailing or discovering" beyond the Hercules columns of received authors in 1434 when his sailors rounded Cape Bojador on the northwest African coast. Since Roman times, people had supposed the Canaries to represent the edge of the world and the "bulging cape" to their south to be unroundable. But Henry's men succeeded and the Portuguese proceeded to chart the whole African coastline, eventually reaching India and the spice islands of the far east. Portugal gorged itself on the lucrative trades in slaves, gold, ivory and spices. Spain conquered vast and equally rich tracts of America, and in 1588—by when the two countries were united—their wealth and power under the Spanish crown were vast.
But if technology is power, how is it acquired? By science, replied Bacon. During the 1420s, on an isolated promontory in western Portugal called Sagres, Henry had collected a group of geographers, astronomers, cartographers and shipbuilders to plan a programme of scientific exploration. Henry's college, Bacon said, improved the compass, improved the caravelle (especially its rudder) and constructed novel star maps and other innovative navigational aids, creating the knowledge that powered the Portuguese and Spanish to global dominance.
In so doing, Bacon believed that Henry had copied the Athenians, Ptolomies and other ancients. In their academies, libraries and other institutions of scholarship 2,000 or more years earlier, they had fostered the greatest science of their eras and thus the greatest power: "For both in Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Graecia, and Rome, the same times that are most renowned for arms, are likewise most admired for learning."
Bacon believed that power—economic and military—flowed out of technology and first proposed the "linear model" for economic growth: science leads to technology which leads to wealth. But who paid for science? Bacon thought it no coincidence that Henry was a prince, the Ptolomies were pharaohs and that men like Aristotle had been funded by their rulers (Philip of Macedon in Aristotle's case). Science needed to be funded by the state because it was, in modern parlance, a "public good." Bacon said: "The benefits inventors confer extend to the whole human race," not any particular individual—which is why he described science as a "universality."
But who pays for universalities? Markets supply only private goods: a compass is a private good because the purchaser owns it, so he will pay for the cost of its production. But the concept of the magnet cannot be owned; it is universal. Markets will not pay for its development because it will be used largely by others, including competitors and enemies. Bacon concluded that for pure science beneficial to everyone, "there is no ready money" and, therefore, that governments must fund it. His full linear model was: government money leads to science leads to technology leads to wealth.
Bacon is best remembered today not for his economics of science but for his description of what science actually is. The discipline he invented that we now call the philosophy of science was so influential that much of the Enlightenment paid tribute to him. Diderot and d'Alembert described him as the father of their Encyclopédie, Voltaire called him the father of experimental philosophy, and Kant dedicated his Critique of Pure Reason to him. The Royal Society was modelled on his prescriptions.
In Bacon's day, the church and universities taught that all knowledge had already been revealed, and that further scientific truths were to be uncovered only by deduction from existing principles. An investigator seeking to uncover a particular fact—how far can this arrow fly?—would be told to deduce it from Aristotle's laws. And scientists who deviated from deduction were persecuted. So the first great Bacon, Roger of Oxford, who had written in his 1267 Opus maius that "arguments are not enough, it is necessary to check all things through experience," was imprisoned between 1277 and 1291 for "suspected novelties." In 1600, Bruno was burned at the stake for speculating about multiple universes (the earth could not be at the centre of all of them) and in 1633, Galileo was shown the instruments of torture by Pope Urban VIII for believing the sun to be at the centre of the universe. Protestantism was no more liberal, and in 1553 Calvin burned Servetus, who had discovered the circulation of the blood through the lungs, for questioning doctrines of the trinity.
To placate the church, medieval scientists resorted to a lasting euphemism, pretending that "search" was only "research," "discovery" was only "recovery" and that as in "renaissance" they were only uncovering the old learning. But, as Bacon knew, they were doing no such thing. In De revolutionibis (1530), Copernicus put the sun, not the earth, at the centre of the universe, so contradicting Aristotle. In De humani corporis fabricia (1543), Vesalius drew on his own dissections to disprove Galen's version of anatomy. And in De magnete (1600), William Gilbert from Col-chester invented the sciences of magnetism and electricity (he coined "electron" and "electric").
Bacon honoured induction—the creation of new theories and principles out of personal observation and experiment—as the highest of achievements: "Those who determine not to conjecture and guess but to find out and know… must consult only things themselves." And he wrote The Advancement of Learning to propagate a new description of science as a four-stage process of observation, induction, deduction and experimentation.
We all now accept the idea of progress, but 400 years is a long time, and much of Bacon's thinking has since required revision. We have modified Bacon's philosophy of science because we now recognise the problem of induction (you can induce from observing every native British swan that all the world's swans are white, and you would be wrong). Karl Popper showed us how to address that problem, by treating all scientific laws as provisional, but the postmodernists, such as Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend, have exposed how the observations we make as scientists are selective rather than systematic (we live with the postmodern insights by ignoring them in practice while acknowledging them in theory).
Bacon's "linear model" is now discredited. Although children at school are still taught that technology grows out of science, historians have shown that the converse seems to be the case. Radio astronomy and molecular biology both emerged from technology, not science. In 1932, Karl Jansky, an engineer studying the static that plagued long-distance radiotelephones, identified it as coming from the stars. Thereafter the development of radio astronomy was ordained. Molecular biology was born during the 1940s when Oswald Avery was studying pneumococcus, one of the bacteria that causes pneumonia. Pneumococcus comes in two forms, encapsulated and non-encapsulated. Avery discovered that if he injected DNA from the encapsulated into the non-encapsulated, he transformed it permanently into the encapsulated. His applied research showed that sugar DNA, not proteins as was then supposed, regulates inheritance.
Moreover, technology grows out of technology, not science. Between 1975 and 1985, the economist Edwin Mansfield of the University of Pennsylvania surveyed 76 American companies, between them accounting for a third of all sales in seven key manufacturing industries (information-processing, electrical equipment, chemicals, instruments, drugs, metals and oil). He discovered that 90 per cent of their advances emerged from pre-existing technology, not science. The 10 per cent of technological advances that had developed from recent academic research were economically marginal, accounting for only 3 per cent of sales and 1 per cent of savings or profits.
We now know that the basis for Bacon's reverence for pure science, his readings of contemporary chroniclers of Henry's life, were fantasy. Peter Russell's book Prince Henry "the Navigator": A Life (2000) is the latest demolition of the myth that Henry maintained at Sagres an academic college of disinterested researchers. In fact Henry was a soldier leading a bellicose collection of Muslim-haters who, worsted in battle with the Arabs, circumnavigated Africa to steal the Arab trade in gold, spices and slaves. Henry employed savants opportunistically, not systematically, and his involvement with science was negligible. Indeed, his "love of learning" was invented by the chroniclers to camouflage his thuggish nature. It is also now clear that in the ancient world of "Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Graecia, and Rome" the arms (such as Philip of Macedon's) came first and the learning (such as Aristotle's) second. As Philo of Byzantium wrote of Hellenic science: "Alexandrian scientists were heavily subsidised by kings anxious for fame." Money and power came first, knowledge second.
And contrary to Bacon's suggestion that science as a public good depends on public money, the private sector supports pure science generously. Radio astronomy emerged from Bell's industrial labs. Bell researchers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson won Nobel prizes for discovering the cosmic microwave background radiation that revealed the big bang. Molecular biology was also a product of the private sector: Avery was employed by the Rockefeller Institute.
The Science Policy Research unit (SPRU) at Sussex University has found that some 7 per cent of all industrial R&D worldwide is spent on pure science. SPRU has also shown that British companies such as ICI, SmithKline Beecham, Wellcome and AEA Tech-nology each publish more scientific papers than many universities. Genentech and Chiron produce some of the most cited papers in biology. Companies fund pure science because, contrary to Bacon's belief, it is profitable: the Harvard economist Zvi Griliches surveyed 911 large US companies from 1966-77, and found that the more basic research a company performed, the greater were its profits.
Moreover, the OECD recently reported that government funding of R&D actually seems to damage economies. Its 2003 book, The Sources of Economic Growth in OECD Countries, contains a regression analysis of the factors that contributed to the growth between 1971 and 1998 of the 21 leading economies in the world. The analysis showed that only private funding of R&D drove economic growth. Even worse, by displacing private funding, the public funding of R&D damaged economic growth. In the OECD's words: "Publicly performed R&D crowds out resources that could be alternatively used by the private sector, including private R&D."
Empirical surveys of economic growth show that governments need not fund science. Such surveys challenge the anecdotal myths of German, French or Soviet economic miracles powered by their governments' technische Hochschulen, écoles polytechniques or Sputniks. But it is impossible to persuade people that governments need not fund science, because, 400 years after he defined it, Bacon's concept of a public good has colonised every educated mind. To us it seems obvious that if "the benefits inventors confer extend to the whole human race" then markets will fail to provide them. Scholars may now be prepared to accept (as they were not a generation ago) that the relationship between pure and applied science is not linear as Bacon prescribed it, but not that markets will supply public goods. Empirical studies showing that markets do supply public goods are dismissed as necessarily flawed.
But are they? Consider the lighthouse. What good could be more public? How could a passing ship pay for a lighthouse? Obviously, like their prototype in Alexandria (c290 BC) lighthouses must be supplied by the state. Except that empirical surveys show not. Nobel-prize winning economist Ronald Coase, in his 1974 paper "The Lighthouse in Economics," demonstrated that, long before governments intervened, harbours, port authorities and private entrepreneurs in Britain were building and maintaining lighthouses out of the fees that they charged ships on docking. The market supported lighthouses; they were nationalised for military and mercantile reasons, not navigational ones, because government fretted, in the language of the day, over foreign bottoms.
Or consider lifesaving at sea. What good could be more public than that? Obviously only government would support such a service, especially when it is free at the point of use. Except that the best lifesaving service in the world is British and is supplied by a charity that accepts no government money. The Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) is the 12th largest charity in the UK with an annual income of £128m. It maintains 320 lifeboats and rescues 6,000 people a year. Since its foundation in 1824 it has saved 135,000 lives.
The RNLI got into financial difficulties in 1854, and it negotiated an annual government subsidy of £2,000. That rose over time, but the RNLI found that with every pound it raised from the government, the rate of voluntary donations fell by more than a pound; the government subsidies crowded out private money. The bureaucracy and regulation that the government imposed also damaged the actual service of lifesaving. In 1869 the RNLI cut loose from its subsidies—to flourish gloriously ever since.
In a series of books ranging from Arthur Seldon's Capitalism (1990) to James Bartholomew's Welfare State We're In (2004) libertarians have argued that most empirical studies in education, health and welfare as well as in science and lifesaving disprove Bacon's view that the state must provide sustainable public goods. In Bacon's day the state was often a prime mover because it monopolised most activities, but today we live in a civil society of companies, charitable foundations and personal freedom. The evidence shows that the nationalisation during the 19th and 20th centuries of health, education and welfare seems neither to have increased total spending on those services nor their equitable distribution. Yet ideas are more powerful than facts and Bacon's view of human nature—that we are a selfish and a short-sightedly rational species—still holds. Modern views of human nature—that we are also a species moulded by ideas of non-zero-sum game theory, which have led us to embrace trust and philanthropy—have yet to inform public thinking on public goods.
Science is a tacit, gift-relationship good, not a public one, and it is characterised by the free exchange of information through conferences, publication and patents. Even industrial scientists co-operate with competitors. In a survey of 11 US steel companies, Eric von Hippel of MIT's Sloan School of Management found that ten of them regularly swapped proprietary information with their rivals. In an international survey of 102 firms, Thomas Allen, also of Sloan, found that no fewer than 23 per cent of their innovations came from swapping information with rivals: "Managers approached apparently competing firms in other countries directly and were provided with surprisingly free access to their technology." Industrial as well as academic scientists swap information because they benefit from the trade.
Yet we ignore the actual practice of science in favour of Bacon's ideas. In Britain we have witnessed a doubling of government science budgets under Labour, from £1.3bn in 1997 to £3bn today, because Gordon Brown subscribes to "neoclassical endogenous growth theory" (a grand way of saying that science is a public good).
But science activists are casuists: we were told that only government would fund research as abstruse as the mapping of the human genome, but when Craig Venter's Celera threatened to do just that, we were told that government should fund such science specifically to crowd out or displace the private sector from researching something as sensitive and important as the human genome.
By today's standards, Bacon was an unusually unpleasant man. As attorney general, he personally supervised the torture of subjects, and he projected his private predilection for S&M into science. Here is his advice for experimenters: "Nature exposes herself more readily when she is tortured than when she is free… Nature needs to be constrained, tortured, forced out of her natural state by the hand of man, squeezed and moulded." In 1621 this flawed man was found guilty of corruption, fined £40,000 and denied further public office.
Bacon was right about progress but he wrongly assumed we were all created in his power-crazed image. Why should his outdated views on human nature still dominate public economics?
