(^458) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
branches, the industrial countries began together, and the high sci
ence content of these innovations ensured that knowledge and tech
nique would spread rapidly. Britain's chances were as good as or better
than the next country's. Nor was Britain backward in science—no
more than France in the eighteenth century. But like France earlier, the
Britain of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries cared more for
pure science than its applications.^42 Part of the difficulty lay in British
schooling: the Continental countries had created technical and scien
tific institutions as a matter of policy, whereas Britain had let this kind
of education grow like a weed and had treated it, once grown, like a
poor relation of "proper" schools and universities.*
Some have explained the shortcoming by exogenous factors, no
tably culture. They have sought to explain Britain's retreat from hege
mony by the triumph of an antibusiness, antimaterialist outlook and its
negative consequences for recruitment.^43 The teachers, poets, men and
women of letters, and intellectuals—the people who set the tone and
orchestrated the values—nurtured a sense of scorn for the shop and the
office. The point was to rise above the material to higher things. Such
pretensions found particular resonance among those older elites who
found themselves josded by grubby newcomers, and of course among
the grubby newcomers who wanted to degrub themselves.^44 Snobbery
is the revenge of the haughty and the humbug of the ambitious.
Others have countered by pointing to similar attitudes in other
countries. Surely Germany nursed antibourgeois prejudices. All of Eu
rope did. If anything, Britain was freer from these outworn biases than
countries round. One could argue, however, that as industry lagged,
Britain proved more vulnerable and succumbed more easily, its resis
tance sapped by its disappointments.
For twentieth-century Britain to stay with the rest, nothing less than a
new industrial revolution would do: innovation and enterprise in elec
tronics, pharmaceuticals, optics and glass, engines and motors. Some
few firms did make a start and gains along these lines. One thinks of
- One aspect of this semispontaneous, pluralistic approach was the appearance of
evening classes, many of them for workers desirous of improving knowledge and skills.
These courses harked back to the itinerant lecturers of the eighteenth century and were
intended as a response to the shortcomings of the regular school system. Some have
argued that they were substantial, even adequate compensation. I do not agree: vol
untary evening classes for tired laborers are no substitute for full-time, professional, lab-
centered, exam-monitored, sequential curricula.