Here's Jason Crawford's interview with economist Deidre McCloskey for the Torch of Progress Series:
At about 18:23 she expresses at idea that's important to me, the difference between science and technology:
I would agree with him [Joel Mokyr] that after 1900 science really starts to matter. Artificial fertilizers, for example, are terribly important. The Green Revolution, to take another similar case, made India into a net grain exporter in really a very few years, in about 10 years or so. So science matters a lot. We couldn't have what we're on right now without science, I agree. But before that it's mainly technology. And the problem is if people put it all into one word and they say it fast. They say science-and-technology. So you get the idea that science is really what it is. Technology is just what these silly bourgeoisie were doing making it pay off. And that's not right.
Everything around you, look around your house. It's designed, for beauty and for profit, and everything you see around you is. And that has very little to do with science on the whole. So science is nice. ... I regard myself as a scientist, but it's the craftsperson, the engineer, applying the science.
I wrote a post on that a couple of years ago, Scienceandtechnology, or, Engineers Rule!. From the post:
Science is about analyzing and describing to arrive at theories and models of how things work. The end result of a course of scientific work is an account of how some phenomenon can be explained within a given framework of laws and models. Such frameworks are likely to be elegant and compact. Newton, for example, had three laws of motion, not 57.
Engineering is quite different. Engineers use laws and models to analyze situations so that they can design a device to perform a certain task. The output of a course of engineering work is the description of that device and plans for its construction. To have any value those plans must specify something that can be constructed with known materials using known methods.
Thus when I was on the faculty at the Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute I learned that the engineering curriculum had a design stem, a series of courses required of all engineers devoted specifically to design. That is, it was not assumed that engineering graduates would somehow magically figure out how to design buildable stuff once they’d graduated and taken jobs in the “real” world. They were taught, given practice in, designing and building things.
Science isn’t like that. Scientists may design experiments, but that’s mostly a matter of logic, not of constructing something piece by piece by piece, and so forth, for 10s, 100s, or 1000s or more pieces. And yes, scientists may construct apparatus. To the extent they are doing that, they are acting as engineers. For that matter, engineers will make observations and conduct tests as part of their design work. And so they will, on occasion, act as scientists. But the overall objectives and methods, the envelope, if you will, of a scientific enterprise is different from that of an engineering enterprise.
Here's McCloskey's website. Note, for example, the following book:
Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World. Vol. 3 of the trilogy “The Bourgeois Era,” University of Chicago Press, 2016, 787 + xlii pp.
The book explores the reputational rise of the bourgeoisie, that is, a Bourgeois Revaluation overtaking Holland and then Britain from Shakespeare’s time to Adam Smith. It made the modern world, by giving a reason for ordinary people to innovate. The material changes—empire, trade—were shown in Bourgeois Dignity (2010) to be wholly inadequate to explain the explosion of incomes 1800 to the present. What pushed the world into frenetic innovation were the slowly changing ideas 1600–1848 about the urban middle class and about their material and institutional innovations. A class long scorned by barons and bishops, and regulated into stagnation by its very own guilds and city councils and state-sponsored monopolies, came to be treasured—at least by the standard of earlier, implacable scorn—from 1600 to the present, first in Holland and then in Britain and then the wider world. And when the Amsterdamers after 1600 or so, and the Londoners and Bostonians after 1700 or so, commenced innovating, more people commenced admiring them. The new valuation of the bourgeoisie, a new dignity and liberty for ordinary people was a change peculiar to northwestern Europe in how people applied to economic behavior the seven old words of virtue—prudence, justice, courage, temperance, faith, hope, and love. With more or less good grace the people around the North Sea began to accept the outcome of trade-tested betterment. Then people did so in Europe generally and its offshoots, and finally in our own day in China and India. Most came for the first time to regard creative destruction as just, and were courageous about responding to it, and hopeful in promoting it. Most people, with the exception of the angry clerisy of artists and intellectuals (and even them only after 1848), stopped hating the bourgeoisie as much as their ancestors had for so very long before. Many started loving it. In consequence during a century or two the northwest Europeans became shockingly richer in goods and in spirit. That is, not economics but “humanomics” explains our riches.
University of Chicago Press page for the book.
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