What Brenner accurately specifies as capitalist social and property relations, A&R vaguely call inclusive institutions. Brenner suggests that what you get out of pre-capitalist social relations is cathedrals and weapons of repression. I think that this underestimates the kind of technological advance that did take place, especially in the Song Dynasty. You would have there what both B and A&R would describe as extractive institutions, but the result was not limited or simply extensive growth but a profound outburst of growth. And to the extent that you get even more astonishing growth in the West, it happens well after the establishment of what Brenner specifies as capitalist property relations and the reason for that explosive and productivity growth, relatively speaking across cultures and over time, is probably less a result of some special advantage in institutions but fortuitous factor price advantages that made industrialization economical in the UK, as Robert Allen has explained. My other concern is that to the extent that we see capitalist property relations as alone capable of making broad based technological progress possible, we end up as apologists for those relations. This is certainly where A&R end up.
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