The emergence of engineers offers one potential explanation for the sustained technological progress of the 18th and 19th centuries. 

Written by W. Walker Hanlon – Associate Professor, Northwestern University. This article was taken from the October 2025 edition of the RES Quarterly Newsletter.

This article is also based on and adapted from W. Walker Hanlon’s research originally published in The Economic Journal (135/670): “Engineering the Industrial Revolution: The Emergence of Engineers and Modern Economic Growth”. 

The onset of the Industrial Revolution marked the beginning of modern economic growth, first in Britain, then in Europe, then spreading to much of the rest of the world. The beginning of sustained economic growth — at rates that were modest by current standards but unimaginable in the pre-modern period — put humankind on the path to the economic prosperity and technological sophistication we experience today.

Generations of economists have sought to understand exactly what led to this crucial turning point in human history. Despite these efforts, the nature and causes of the transition to modern economic growth and why it began in Britain remain shrouded in mystery.

One facet of the Industrial Revolution on which there is broad agreement is the central role played by technological progress. Of course, many important inventions predated the Industrial Revolution. But never before had technological progress been so sustained. “The true miracle,” in the words of Professor Joel Mokyr, “is not that the classical Industrial Revolution happened, but that it did not peter out like so many earlier waves of innovation”.

Why did technological progress become the rule rather than the exception? One explanation is that the process through which new inventions were created changed in important ways during the Industrial Revolution. Alfred North Whitehead, for example, argued that “the great invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention”. Did such a fundamental shift in the innovation process take place during the Industrial Revolution? If so, what was the nature of it?

A natural starting point for addressing these questions is to look at the people who actually developed new technology. This is the approach I take in a recent article in The Economic Journal. Using a variety of sources, including data on patented inventions and inventor biographies, I study how the invention process changed in Britain in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution.

What I document is the emergence of a new type of specialised inventor and designer — a role that came to be called “engineer” — that appeared exactly as industrialisation was getting underway. As shown in the upper panel of the figure opposite, prior to the onset of the Industrial Revolution (typically dated to the third quarter of the 18th century), engineers were almost completely absent from the patent record.

However, starting in the late 1700s, the share of new inventions produced by people calling themselves engineers increased substantially. By the middle of the 19th century, engineers were by far the most important group of inventors. The same pattern holds if we look at the appearance of engineers among the inventors listed in biographical sources, specifically the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (as shown in the lower panel).

While these patterns are suggestive, it is natural to wonder whether the emergence of engineers represented a substantive change in how invention was done, or whether instead it was merely a relabelling of more or less the same work.

Both contemporary engineers and modern historians of the profession have argued that this group represented a new way of doing things. Garth Watson, for example, in his history of the Society of Civil Engineers, describes “a new profession” combining “the craftsman’s fund of knowledge, based on natural genius and practical experience… with the assimilation of scientific principles”. When I evaluate this claim empirically I find that, indeed, engineers differed in important ways from other patenting inventors: they were more productive, filing both more and higher-quality patents; they were also more versatile, patenting across a broader range of technologies.

Unlike manufacturer-inventors — the primary type of inventor before the emergence of the engineer — engineers specialised in invention and design work. As Adam Smith suggested, specialisation offered productivity advantages. Among these was the ability to form teams. Patents produced by teams, while still rare during this period, tended to be of higher quality than those produced by individual inventors, particularly if one of the team members was an engineer. Moreover, engineers were more likely to harness scientific insights. I show they were more likely to publish academic papers than other patenting inventors, and also more likely to produce inventions than other scientific article authors.

What caused the emergence of the engineering profession during the Industrial Revolution? Several factors were likely important. One factor, highlighted by Douglass North and more recently in the work of Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson, was the institutional environment. Property rights made invention profitable and allowed inventors to monetise their discoveries without becoming managers. This could be done through partnership — such as the famous one between James Watt, an important early engineer, and Matthew Boulton, a business owner — as well as through the licensing and sale of patented inventions.

Another important factor was a growing scientific knowledge base, which, together with training in crafts, provided engineers with knowledge and skills.

The emergence of the engineering profession fundamentally changed how invention was done: it was akin to the introduction of a more productive technology for producing new technology. As I show in a final theoretical section of the paper, this type of change can shift an economy from a slow pre-modern growth regime into modern economic growth. Engineers, therefore, offer a potential explanation for how sustained technological progress emerged during the Industrial Revolution.

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The Royal Economic Society is pleased to announce that a judging panel has awarded this year’s RES Medal for Services to the Economics Profession to Prof Sir Richard Blundell. The medal recognises an individual who has made an outstanding and lasting contribution to the economics profession in one or more of three dimensions: promoting economics; supporting economists; improving diversity. Prof Sir Richard Blundell will receive his medal at this year’s RES Annual Conference in Newcastle.

Richard Blundell is Ricardo Professor of Political Economy at UCL and Founding Director of the ESRC Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy at the IFS. Blundell is a Fellow of the RES, and a Life Vice-President. He formed part of the panel discussion at the British Academy commemorating economic developments during the Her Late Majesty’s seventy-year reign. Blundell presented the Past Presidential address at the 2013 RES Annual Conference.  

RES President Prof Imran Rasul, who chaired this year’s award panel said:

 

“Richard Blundell represents the very best of academic economists – over four decades, he has made exceptional contributions to promoting economics and supporting economists in the UK. His research has impacted many core areas of economic policy – such as the design of the tax and benefit system, labour productivity and the causes and consequences of economic inequalities.

 

As a former President of the RES and other learned societies, he has shown a longstanding commitment to strengthen the institutional foundations of the discipline. He has been a PhD advisor to countless students, and played an instrumental role at IFS in creating a world leading research centre for applied economic policy analysis, establishing a deep culture of support for junior researchers. I congratulate Richard on this well-deserved prize and thank him for his tireless work over the years – few can match the breadth, depth and longevity of his contributions to UK economics.”

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A new virtual issue of The Economic Journal, ‘Lab Experiments’ is out now and can be read online for free for a limited time.

Laboratory experiments remain one of the discipline’s most powerful tools for uncovering how economic behaviour responds to structure. Their strength lies not in abstraction, but in engineering: in the ability to vary incentives, information, and institutional rules with maximal control. This controlled flexibility allows economists to identify mechanisms that are otherwise difficult to isolate — from the emotional forces that shape deviant acts to the strategic considerations that govern markets, cooperation, and exchange.

With an introduction by Editor Steffen Huck, this issue showcases 10 papers previously published in the Journal which illustrate the breadth of insights that emerge when behaviour is studied under clean, well-defined conditions.
 
The papers are divided into two groups and examine:

• Giving, Deviancy & Emotions: tracing how fairness concerns, aversion to exploitation, moral boundaries, and even thermal stress influence decisions; and
• Consumers, Firms & Institutions: showing how preferences, expectations, and strategic incentives operate in settings ranging from public goods to credence markets, merger environments, and tests of consumer theory.

 
Jointly, the studies demonstrate how laboratory experiments make it possible to adjust key elements of economic interactions in a disciplined way and trace the resulting behavioural responses with utmost precision. They also reflect the Journal’s long-standing and continuing commitment to experimental research.
 
Read the new virtual issue for free here.

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A new global economic history reveals that women have always been at the heart of the economy.

Written by Dr Victoria Bateman – Dr Victoria Bateman has taught at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge and is a Visiting Lecturer at Gresham College, London. This article was taken from the October 2025 edition of the RES Quarterly Newsletter.

From Henry Ford to JP Morgan, economic history is filled with men who have become household names. Women, by contrast, are commonly assumed to have spent most of history as housewives. Open almost any entry-level economics textbook and you will find a whole section that documents the rising labour force participation of married women over the 20th century, leaving the impression that, until relatively recently, women were economic dependants. But, as I show in Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth and Power, the economy is not, and never has been, “just for men”.

Economica weaves together the research findings of generations of historians and archaeologists to present a new economic history of the world — one that shines the spotlight on women.

Starting in the Stone Age, a time when 40 per cent of big-game hunters in the Americas were women, it journeys through all the major economic revolutions in human history. Exactly who planted the first crops at the advent of agriculture cannot be known with certainty.
But archaeological evidence reveals that women were typically responsible for grinding the resultant grain, shown by the wear and tear found on their bodily remains. During the subsequent Bronze Age, cloth produced by women formed the basis of our first global
currencies, filling the side-packs of camels and mules as they travelled across deserts and highlands in search of copper and tin. 

Ancient Athens had a distaste for both business and women. But in the far more economically successful Roman world, women not only owned shops and ships but also one-third of the clay beds supplying bricks to the city. And, according to the names etched on ancient Roman pipes, around 10 per cent of “plumbers” were women — four times the proportion today. 

While the break-up of the Roman Empire — which led Europe down a path of separate competing mini-states — ushered in a system of serfdom, by the 14th century women were picking up pitchforks to protest their lack of rights and freedoms, playing a leading but overlooked role in the Peasants’ Revolt. As economic power shifted away from elites and ordinary people could afford to treat themselves to a night out, London’s women were at the ready to quench the thirst of pub-goers, comprising 40 per cent of the membership of the city’s first brewers’ guild.

In the 16th century, the silver “discovered” by Europeans in South America — which both
women and men mined and traded — lifted the lid on global trade, providing Europe with something of immense value to exchange with the much wealthier Asian continent. The resultant expansion in Chinese and Indian imports of products such as tea, hot chocolate, silk and chintz fuelled consumer culture, being introduced to a wider audience by the women-owned shops and market stalls of northwestern Europe. At the end of the 17th century, almost half the retail space in London’s Royal Exchange — home to the city’s most upmarket shops — was rented by women.

During the 18th century, women were supercharging the original “creative industry”. Between 1780 and 1830, 10 of the 12 top-selling novels in the UK were written by women. Away from the printing presses, as “dark satanic mills” spread across the north of England and New England alike, women formed the majority of the workforce in the cotton industry. Even in male-dominated mining women were present: in 1842, at least one-quarter of the adult mining workforce in Pembrokeshire and the Midlothians was female.

As Economica shows, economies have always depended on women’s hard labour. However,
the difference between a flourishing economy and one that flounders is women’s freedom to
make their own choices about work (and to keep the associated rewards). Many a great “civilisation” has stumbled precisely because it believed it would be better off if women diverted more efforts towards reproduction. This includes ancient Rome.

Much as in the present day, social conservatives in ancient Rome were in a moral panic about dwindling fertility rates and young people’s reluctance to marry. The empire, they thought, risked falling not because it was becoming increasingly exploitative — with an economy dependent on slaves — but because women were too free.

As part of a programme of social reform, Emperor Augustus enacted laws that punished those who did not marry and procreate. The baby boom he engineered was welcomed
by all who felt Rome was becoming too cosmopolitan. According to Augustus himself, it was “neither right nor creditable that our race should cease, and the name of Romans be blotted out with us, and the city given over to foreigners — Greeks or even Barbarians”. This approach failed — both for women and the Roman economy.

If today’s civilizations want to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, they have a great deal
to learn from studying economic history. And even more so once we include the missing half of the population: women.

Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth & Power (Hachette / Basic Books), is out now.

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The RES was deeply saddened to learn of the death of Dr Jonathan Temple earlier this month. 

From 2001-2019 Jon was a Professor of Economics at the University of Bristol, and since that time had been working as a freelance economist, including as the RES Newsletter Editor from 2021-2025. Jon was a much-valued friend to the Royal Economic Society, serving as a Council member from 2006-2011, Conference Programme Chair in 2008, and Associate Editor of The Economic Journal.

Those who wish to are most welcome to send their memories of Jon and condolences to Liza@res.org.uk; these will be passed to his loved ones and used for an obituary that will be published in due course.

The thoughts of all at the RES are with Jon’s loved ones at this difficult time.

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Feelings are central to our lives, so feelings data is of foundational importance to economists. It is common sense, and scientifically important, for economists to study happiness and mental wellbeing.

Written by Andrew Oswald, Professor of Economics and Behavioural Science, University of Warwick. This article is a complement to an RES masterclass given by Andrew Oswald in the autumn of 2025, and was taken from the October 2025 edition of the RES Quarterly Newsletter.

 First, happiness is ultimately what matters. 

Second, it is politically dangerous for a society not to do so. Various forms of evidence suggest that US President Donald Trump, say, was elected because of growing discontent within his nation. Unhappiness got him elected. The same is true for populist leaders in a dozen countries. Now, too late, liberal observers are troubled by what is happening to democracy in the world.

I would be surprised, I am sorry to say, if the current global trend reverses before there has been large-scale violence of some sort. Yet what we have seen was predictable. The data plainly revealed ever-rising levels of extreme mental distress, especially among low-skilled white Americans, for two decades before Trump’s second election victory. Sadly, because of their conventional training, economists and most other analysts were not looking at feelings data.

Third, if we focus on the measurement of human happiness, it reminds us of the difference between means and ends. I imagine most economics students, at both the undergraduate and graduate level, gradually forget what they knew when they arrived at university — that what matters are human feelings — because they are distracted by an array of interesting but ultimately means-to-an-end influences, such as GDP, unemployment, inflation, national debt, and so on. 

Fourth, we must engage with the Easterlin Paradox. It states, and was forcibly repeated by Professor Richard Easterlin until his death in late 2024, that countries do not grow happier as they become richer. He argued that human beings are fundamentally creatures of comparison: we look over our shoulders at our neighbours and, when the tide of economic progress lifts all boats, it depresses us that they also get fast BMWs. Thus, there is a giant neutralisation of feeling.

Whether the paradox is true is an empirical matter. Certainly, the broad statistical facts suggest it holds in OECD nations. (I am more doubtful of it for countries with low GDP and poor health systems.)

As readers will know, in 2025 the paradox is currently ignored by almost every president, prime minister and finance secretary of state in the world. One reason why is that political leaders tend to have not been shown their nation’s happiness data. Another is that the ones who have find the concept too psychologically disturbing to think through it calmly.

The Easterlin Paradox dismantles the foundations of the average politician’s framework for thinking. In my judgment, political speeches will eventually refer to the late professor’s ideas. But that is unlikely to be in my lifetime. The only occasion I have seen it done was in a stunning speech by the prime minister of Iceland, Kristrún Frostadóttir. Perhaps that is both a marker for the future and a hopeful reminder about the nature of youth. (She was, and still is, in her 30s.) 

Fifth, happier people are more productive. (We know this from lab and field experiments.) So there is likely a virtuous circle of emotional and material prosperity to be studied and appreciated. 

Sixth, happier people are healthier, so there may also be a beneficial cycle in that sphere. 

Seventh, some governments are starting to incorporate happiness and wellbeing data into official national statistics. The UK’s Office for National Statistics has for the last 14 years collected annual data on citizens’ feelings of life satisfaction, happiness, anxiety and perceived worthwhileness of life. At this very moment, the UN has a set of distinguished expert panels that are debating how to “move beyond GDP”, as the jargon goes. Wellbeing measures are being actively discussed. The OECD launched its own version in proposal form more than a decade ago; it is about to release an updated report. 

Eighth, and finally, it is necessary to bear in mind the scientific complications in measuring human feelings. There are (currently) no units of measurement. Yet we have now learnt that humans behave in a systematic way, as though they comprehend and infer a psychological scale. We can, as researchers and policy analysts, build on that remarkable fact. A vast cross-disciplinary scientific literature has already started doing so.

If there is a more important topic within economics and quantitative social science, it is hard for me to think what it would be. Feelings are central to our lives. Feelings data is thus of foundational importance.

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The RES was pleased to see a number of distinguished economists recognised in the New Year Honours List.

Prof Wendy Carlin (University College London) has been awarded a DBE. Dame Wendy was the inaugural winner of the RES Medal for Services to the Economics Profession in 2023. A former RES Council member, Dame Wendy delivered the Society’s Annual Public Lecture in 2023. She was made a Fellow of the RES in 2025.

Prof Andrew Scott (London Business School) and Prof Jonathan Wadsworth (Royal Holloway) were both awarded CBEs. An OBE was awarded to Prof Paul Mizen (King’s College London),

We warmly congratulate Wendy, Paul, Andrew, Jonathan and all others who have received honours.

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The Royal Economic Society (RES) is delighted to announce the appointment of our newest cohort of Fellows, as listed below in alphabetical order:

• Daron Acemoglu
• Philippe Aghion
• Walaa Bakry
• Oriana Bandiera
• Tim Besley
• David Blackaby
• Richard Blundell
• Graham Brownlow
• Wendy Carlin
• Anita Charlesworth
• Andrew Chesher
• Chiara Criscuolo
• Rachel Croson
• Partha Dasgupta
• Angus Deaton
• John Fingleton
• Stephanie Flanders
• Rachel Griffith
• Oliver Hart
• David Hendry
• Paul Johnson
• Simon Johnson

• Can Karaarslan
• Philip Lane
• Ming-Jen Lin
• Mariana Mazzucato
• Stephen Millard
• Mahmoud Mohieldin
• Mary Morgan
• Stephen Nickell
• Gus O’Donnell
• Andrew Oswald
• Carol Propper
• Sravya Rao
• Imran Rasul
• James Robinson
• Graeme Roy
• Nicholas Stern
• John Sutton
• Silvana Tenreyro
• Alex Trew
• Bertil Tungodden
• David Ulph
• John Vickers

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The rapid rise of transformative technologies like Generative AI (GenAI) is reshaping industries and academia across the economy. This shift presents a challenge – and an opportunity – for UK universities in both counts: to ensure graduates are equipped with the skills employers need and prepared for lifelong learning in a fast-changing world whilst protecting the academic value of economics degrees.

The Royal Economic Society (RES), founded in 1890 to promote the study of economics and which has emerged to be the most prominent organisation for professional and academic economists in the UK, has commissioned a new report: Rethinking Economics Assessments for a GenAI World. This report calls for action to uphold the integrity of economics degrees and ensure assessments remain fit for purpose. It recommends aligning with national standards, such as those from the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) and Degree Apprenticeship Standards, which highlight the value of varied assessment methods – including traditional unseen exams.

However, many universities have moved fully away from in-person, timed, closed-book exams, often replacing them with online assessments. While this shift offers flexibility, such assessments are essentially take-home coursework. Whether they are timed or not, their disproportionate use poses risks to academic integrity, especially within the context of widely accessible GenAI tools. This in turn may undermine the reliability of assessment outcomes. Such assessments add to the breadth of modes of assessments available to the discipline, but should be regarded as complementary to, rather than replacements for, in-person exams.

Economics graduates are expected to apply complex data analysis and quantitative methods to real-world problems. While some skills are best assessed through coursework or projects, some core foundational knowledge may best be assessed in a closed timed environment. Comparable disciplines, such as mathematics, face similar challenges, as noted by the London Mathematical Society, IMA, and Royal Statistical Society. And research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) shows that economics degrees significantly boost employability and lifetime earnings – benefits that depend on maintaining the credibility of the qualification.

The RES supports innovation in teaching and assessment and values a mix of methods tailored to learning outcomes, as laid out in the 2023 QAA Economics Subject Benchmark Statement. But it is concerned about the complete removal of in-person exams by some institutions. For technical subjects, timed and invigilated exams remain a fair and reliable way to assess essential skills as part of a mixed assessment strategy in economics degrees.

That’s why the RES is calling on university leaders and economics departments to use this new report as a guide to protect the full range of assessment tools. This includes ensuring access to in-person, timed, closed-book exams where appropriate. Only by doing so can we continue to deliver high-quality economics education that prepares students for the future – and maintains the integrity of the degree.

 

Download the statement.

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The RES Professional Development and Education Committee in conjunction with the ESRC are pleased to invite applications from advanced postgraduate students doing doctoral research, (but younger lecturers and postdoctoral researchers are also welcome) and economists in research and policymaking institutions, who have approximately three to five years’ experience since initial graduation, to attend the 2026 RES Easter Training School. The School is taking place from 15 – 17 April at the University of Birmingham.

The deadline for applications is Monday 5 January 2026. More information and application form.

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