EMM—History and Methodological Approach
Babbage’s EMM was first published in 1832 to great popular if not critical acclaim.[1] A total of 3,000 copies were sold within two months and three more editions were published by 1835. American editions and French, German, Italian, and Spanish translations soon followed. The book had its origins in a long article which Babbage wrote for the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana.[2] As Babbage informs us in the Preface to EMM, the encyclopaedia article contains the ‘substance of a considerable portion’ of the present work (Babbage 1832 [1835]: iii). A perusal of the encyclopaedia article bears this out. However, the book contains a far greater number of examples, including some from reports by committees of the House of Commons Commons (ibid.: vi). These reports enabled Babbage to support the principles he had arrived at based on his own observations with the observations of others, thereby providing greater confidence in the correctness of his inductions.
It will be evident from this that Babbage’s approach to economic questions was based in the first instance on inductions from observation. This allowed the derivation of general principles from which consequences might then be deduced. Two of Babbage’s associates from his Cambridge days, Whewell and
Jones, were engaged in conscious efforts to create an inductive political economy in opposition to the deductive approach of Ricardo and Mill (Henderson 1996; Rashid 1979; de Marchi and Sturges 1973). Babbage appears to have been sympathetic to their efforts and had a prominent role in the statistical societies that they promoted but he himself made no overt attack on the Ricardians and does not appear to have shared Whewell and Jones’s anti-utilitarian sentiments.[3] Having noted that political economists were often ‘reproached with too small a use of facts and too large an employment of theory’, Babbage acknowledged that these ‘closet-philosopher[s]’ knew very little about ‘the admirable arrangements of the factory’. However, he argued that the situation could be rectified if manufacturers and merchants supplied the necessary factual data. Babbage recognised that ‘erroneous deductions’ could be made from recorded facts but he insisted that ‘the errors which arise from the absence of facts are far more numerous and more durable than those which result from unsound reasoning respecting true data’ (Babbage 1864: 156).
Babbage also had some useful things to say about survey methods. He emphasised the importance of recording survey information either during a factory visit or immediately afterwards. To minimise disruption during the course of a visit, he advocated the use of a list of questions with blanks for the answers, ideally to be drawn up after a first visit to an establishment. Babbage divided his suggested questions into two groups: general inquiries and inquiries relating to specific processes. Under general inquiries, information was to be sought on the composition of output; the number of processes involved in production; the nature and cost of inputs; defects, waste, and quality assurance procedures; the wholesale and retail prices of the final output; the nature, expense, and maintenance of machinery and whether it was constructed in-house or obtained from specialist suppliers; the size of the capital normally required; the main seats of the industry whether in Britain or abroad; the quality of imports compared with local production; the sources of export demand; any duties, excise, or bounties; and whether the manufacturer sold directly to the merchant or to a middleman. Under processes, besides a description of the process itself, Babbage proposed to collect information on the number of operatives required to attend a machine; the skill level, years of apprenticeship, and rates of pay of each; working hours; whether payment was by the piece or the day; whether masters or men provided and repaired tools; and the proportion of output which was defective, what was done with defects and who bore the cost of them. He also sought information on total hours in which the process was in operation and the number of times the process was repeated in any given time period and the effect of this, if any, on output and defects. Babbage showed an awareness that being under observation could affect the speed at which workmen carried out operations and recommended the use of cross-checks. More generally, he suggested that questions be shaped so that the answers to some questions served as an internal check on the answers to others (ibid.: 114-118).
As with the original encyclopaedia article, the first part of EMM is devoted to a discussion of the advantages arising from machinery. Each advantage, together with appropriate examples, is discussed in a separate chapter. There is also a long chapter on copying, which covers processes such as printing, casting, moulding, and stamping—processes in which a large fixed cost lays the basis for low per unit costs, something which was typical of the mass production technologies which were beginning to emerge in Babbage’s time (Rosenberg 1994).
Having discussed the advantages arising from the use of machinery in Part I of EMM, Babbage turned to the economic aspects. In addition to data on the internal economy of ‘manufactories’, he emphasised the importance of data on the responsiveness of demand to changes in price. He also noted that even if a manufacturer was not initially motivated by the need to reduce costs, competition would force him to attend to the ‘principles of the domestic economy of manufactures’ (Babbage 1832 [1835]: 121-122). Babbage’s notion of competition was what would now be described as Schumpeterian. Manufacturers were forced to innovate in order to undersell their rivals. A manufacturer who successfully innovated would for a time reap the benefit of his ingenuity but the successful innovation would become generally adopted until it in turn was superseded by more economical methods (ibid.).
- [1] Richard Jones, who read the draft manuscript, thought it ‘a strange collection of facts taken from his[Babbage’s] commonplace book’ (Schaffer 2003: 284—285). McCulloch’s (1833) review in the EdinburghReview can be best described as lukewarm.
- [2] The first version entitled ‘An Essay on the General Principles which Regulate the Application ofMachinery to Manufactures and the Mechanical Arts’ was published in 1827 and did not include anymaterial on the domestic and political economy of manufactures. An expanded version, including theeconomic material, was published in 1829 (see Babbage 1829).
- [3] Babbage had friends and associates amongst the reform-minded Benthamites. He even sent his childrento a school founded on utilitarian principles (Hyman 1982).
