The Creative Economy
Speech given by
Andrew G Haldane
Chief Economist
Bank of England
The Inaugural Glasgow School of Art Creative Engagement Lecture
The Glasgow School of Art
22 November 2018
The views expressed here are not necessarily those of the Bank of England or the Monetary Policy
Committee. I would like to thank Marilena Angeli and Shiv Chowla for their help in preparing the text.
I would like to thank Philip Bond, Clare Macallan and Mette Nielson for their comments and
contributions.
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It is a great pleasure to be at the Glasgow School of Art (GSA). For over 170 years, the GSA has been one
of the leading educational institutions in the creative arts in Europe. Today, the School continues to provide
a conveyor belt of talent that is fuelling the rise in the creative industries, a sector growing rapidly and one
where the UK can genuinely be said to be a world-leader.
It is creativity, and its role in improving incomes in the economy and well-being in society, that I will discuss
this evening. Now, there is a certain irony in me (a middle-aged career public servant) giving a lecture to you
(staff and students at one of Europe's creative hot-spots) about the determinants and benefits of creativity.
Don't worry, that irony is not lost on me.
Nonetheless, I hope that by analysing creativity through an economic and historical lens we can learn
something about its key ingredients. Developing those raw ingredients, and mixing them appropriately, has
been crucial for social and economic progress over the course of history. And what has been true of the past
is likely to become even more important for driving economic and societal improvement in future.
Like the GSA, the Bank of England is a public institution whose role is to serve the public good. We have
been doing so for 325 years. The issues I will discuss today - stability in our economies and societies,
economic and social progress, the impact of innovation and ideas, the role of education and insurance -
have remained central to public policy throughout that time. They will remain so in the period ahead.
To summarise up front my line of argument:
 Imagination and creativity are what set humans apart from other animals. They explain why human
evolution has been jet-propelled, while other animals have proceeded on foot. Through their
creativity, humans have followed a completely different evolutionary arc - so-called Life Version 2.0.
 Innovation and creativity are the wellspring of improvements in economies and societies. They
explain the secular, spectacular rises in global living standards and well-being now seen for several
centuries. Human imagination and intelligence has been the engine of progress and growth.
 Creativity and innovation can come at a cost. The US economist Joseph Schumpeter spoke of
"creative destruction". He was right. With innovation can come a loss of livelihood and a straining
of the social fabric. That has been true of every industrial revolution. Nowhere have these costs
been felt more acutely than here in Glasgow.
 These disruptive side-effects do not self-heal. They need to be managed if the fruits of innovation
are not to rot in the fields. That means social safety nets to protect the livelihoods of those disrupted
by innovation. And it means social institutions supporting the up-skilling of people. The GSA is a
social institution created precisely to meet the latter need.
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 The next 50 years may bring opportunities and challenges every bit as great as any in the past. The
Fourth Industrial Revolution will offer huge potential to individuals, economies and societies. But the
engine of growth may change, with artificial rather than human intelligence playing a much larger
role. Some have called this Life Version 3.0.
 The creative forces unleashed by the Fourth Industrial Revolution will need to be carefully managed
to avoid a tear in the social fabric. This is likely to require new sets of skills, with creative and social
skills at a greater premium. It may require new sets of social institutions and safety nets. And it may
require a reorientation of our approach to education, training and work.
 The "creative industries" are a thriving sector of the UK economy, generating £100 billion of
value-added each year. But, in future, we may need industry and worker to see
every every
themselves as creative. Knowledge will not be enough. We already have a knowledge economy. In
future we will need a creative one. That may call for a very different model of education and training.
The Great Fire
Let me illustrate some of these points with a very simple historical example. It is a particularly poignant one
here at the GSA, which has suffered not one but two devastating losses over the past four and a half years.
The example is fire.
The domestication of fire is, by many people's reckoning, one of the greatest-ever human discoveries. If you
type "greatest ever discoveries" into a search engine, fire typically comes close to the top. It usually ranks
alongside the wheel, gunpowder, the printing press, electricity and the internet in people's all-time top ten.
No-one of course knows quite when or where fire was first discovered or at least domesticated. But
historians believe the domestication of fire may have occurred around one million years ago, when
hunter-gatherer communities were first being formed. Indeed, it has been conjectured, plausibly, that fire
was a key factor in allowing those communities to grow and develop. It is not difficult to see why.
Fire would have been a truly transformative technology for these communities. It served as a source of heat
as well as light. Equally vital then, if less so now, fire served as protection against marauding peoples and
animals. Hunter-gatherer communities typically comprised around 150 people.1 This meant they faced
existential threat on an almost daily basis. At a stroke, fire reduced significantly that existential threat.
These benefits meant fire quickly became one of the first and most important examples of what economists
would these days call a GPT - a General Purpose Technology.2 This is a technology that can be used
1
Dunbar (1993).
2
Bresnahan and Trajtenberg (1995).
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across a wide variety of settings to a wide variety of tasks in a wide variety of places. Fire was the formative
GPT for the human species, providing many of the everyday essentials of heat, light and protection.
As with many GPTs, however, perhaps the greatest benefit of domesticating fire may have come indirectly
and inadvertently. It was not a benefit primitive humans could remotely have foreseen at the time. Yet it was
a benefit that, in time, would transform not just human bodies but human brains, not just human lives but
human evolution. That elusive, transformational benefit was
cooking.
Fire transformed what humans ate. Cooking made edible the inedible, in particular protein-rich staples such
as rice, wheat and potatoes. Cooking reduced the chances of illness from eating, by killing germs and
parasites commonplace in foodstuffs. And cooking made it quicker and easier for human bodies to digest all
foodstuffs, causing humans' intestinal track (the part responsible for digestion) to shorten dramatically.3
Together, these had a transformative impact on the human body. Cooking meant far less of our bodies'
energies were devoted to gathering, eating and digesting food. The intestinal tract is one of the body's most
energy-intensive parts. As its energy-usage fell, large amounts of energy were released to support growth
elsewhere in the body. And where in the body did this unleashed energy go?
It headed north to what would in time become human's most energy-intensive organ of all - the brain. This
energy surge caused the brain to grow and its neural connections to multiply. The result was an organ
which, despite being only 2-3% of our body mass, today accounts for 25% of its energy consumption. This
may have been one of the key evolutionary steps in human history.
It is the brain, above all other organs, that distinguishes humans from other animals. Our closest biological
cousin, the primates, have physiologies which are 99%-identical to ours. Where they differ most significantly
is the brain. In primates, the brain uses only 8% of the body's energies - a third of humans. It is our
energy-intensive brains that put humans of an entirely different evolutionary trajectory to all other animals.
To see why, note that the pace of evolutionary progress in all animals, other than humans, is determined by
biology. It occurs through a sequence of slow-moving, biological mutations. This can take millions of years
to bring about recognisable change. That is why almost-all animals live in an almost-identical environment
for an almost-identical lifespan doing near-identical tasks to their ancient ancestors.
Human biologies are no different. The appendix is a biological artefact. It was essential for digestion at a
time when humans' diet consisted mainly of grass and vegetation in our hunter-gatherer past. But such is
the sedate pace of biological evolution, the appendix is still with us, and causing us grief, hundreds of
thousands of years later.4 This is evidence of slow biological evolution of the type that constrains all animals.
3
Harari (2014).
4
Looking across all its forms across species, the appendix probably evolved more than 30 times (Smith (2013)).
et al
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Except, that is, humans. Many millennia ago, humans found a way of breaking free from their biological
chains. The reason we know this is because the pace of human evolution has radically outstripped that of all
other animals. Human environments, lifespans and tasks are unrecognisable from a hundred years ago, let
alone a million. Something other than our bodies put humans on the evolutionary fast-track.5
That something was the brain. In particular, the energies released from digestion allowed a particular part of
the brain to expand and connect - the pre-frontal cortex. This is located where our foreheads now sit.
Indeed, our bodies may have adapted to meet this neurological need with the flat brow ridges of Neanderthal
skulls in time replaced by the Tefal foreheads of today's
homo sapiens.
And what exactly did this newly-installed pre-frontal cortex do? Modern Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)
can now tell us. Among other things, this part of the brain is responsible for That might sound
imagination.
like a rather niche characteristic, like having a good sense of humour or an upbeat personality. But in fact
imagination appears to have been foundational for humans and transformational for their evolution. How so?
Imagination allows us to conceive of a future different to any seen previously. Humans' progress was now
as limitless as their imagination. But imagination alone is not sufficient. Imagination without action is
day-dreaming. What set humans apart was the ability to create their imagined future. The imagined was
made real. That is what is meant by creativity. Imagination action is creativity.
with
Knowledge and imagination are different creatures. To have knowledge is to know about things that exist.
To have imagination is to conceive of things that don't yet exist. And to be creative is to make real those
imagined things. Knowledge is vital for school exams and pub quizzes. Imagination is vital for ideas and
innovation. And creativity is vital for human progress. Einstein put it thus: "Knowledge is limited.
Imagination encircles the world. Logic will get you from A to Z. Imagination will get you everywhere".6
Animals possess plenty of knowledge, often genetically encoded, sometimes learned through experience.
The squirrel in my garden is genetically encoded to gather food for winter. It has also learned from
experience that an effective way of doing so is to befriend my daughter who provides a daily supply of nuts.
It is a knowledgeable squirrel, if not as knowledgeable as the squirrels in the remake of the film Charlie in the
that were taught by film-producer Tim Burton to crack nuts on demand.
Chocolate Factory
Yet squirrels live identically to their ancient ancestors. They have evolved at a snail's pace, as have snails.
That is because squirrels and snails lack imagination. Squirrels cannot imagine a world where nuts are
delivered courtesy of a complex international supply chain, much less set about creating that supply chain.
Nor are they likely to write a Roald Dahl novel involving oompa loompas or become the next Tim Burton.
5
Tegmark (2017).
6
What life means to Einstein, Saturday Evening Post October 26, 1929,
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/wpcontent/uploads/satevepost/what_life_means_to_einstein.pdf.
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Imagination is a uniquely human attribute. And it is an attribute that moved humans from the evolutionary
slow lane to the neurological superhighway. Human progress was no longer constrained by sinews but by
synapses, no longer tethered by biology but neurology. As my namesake (but no relation), the evolutionary
biologist J B S Haldane, put it: "the world shall not perish for lack of wonders, but for lack of wonder".7
It is not just evolutionary biologists that have recognised the importance of imagination in powering societies.
Economists have too. The heterodox British economist George Shackle placed imagination centre-stage in
explaining the evolution of economies.8 This gives rise to a model of economic progress that is subject to a
high degree of intrinsic, or radical, uncertainty. Shackle has his followers to this day.9
Humans are social animals. As humans grouped in larger numbers, ideas and imaginations were
collectivised and socialised. Individual intelligence gave way to collective intelligence. Many minds made for
light work of the world's most complex problems. This added heat to the creative crucible, enabling humans
to move at warp speed from their hunter-gatherer communities to today's hyper-connected super-cities.
Once, only around 150 people could be connected through hunter-gatherer conversations. Today, 4 billion
people can be instantly connected in conversation. That number grows by 750,000 globally each day.
Imaginative outpourings, good and bad, are instantly collectivised and socialised. Today, we have a societal
neural network that mirrors the human brain's. Today, imagination has fulfilled Einstein's prediction; it
encircles the world.
These days that troublesome biological relic, the appendix, is no longer quite so troublesome. Our brains
imagined a different future, with surgery and medication, and human's then set out creating it. When the first
appendectomy was carried out, in London in 1735, another biological barrier to human evolution was lifted.
Over the same period, squirrels made precious little progress towards mastering just-in-time technologies.
Imagination and creativity are what distinguish the human from the animal brain. They help explain the very
different pace of brain-propelled human evolution and body-propelled animal evolution. The brain rebooted
humans from Version 1.0 to Version 2.0. The rest is (human) history. Fire, for reasons unforeseeable at the
time, appeared to play an important supporting role in this extraordinary evolutionary story.
Creative Destruction
As it is creative, fire also has the potential to be destructive. No-one associated with this great institution
needs any reminding of that. Nor do the residents of Paradise, California where many people tragically
perished in the recent wildfires. These events are the latest in a long line of devastating and destructive fires
over the millennia.
7
Clark (1969).
8
Ford, J.L. (1994).
9
Beckert and Bronk (2018).
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Monument is a five-minute walk from the Bank of England and a minute's walk away from Pudding Lane,
where the Great Fire of London started on 2 September 1666. As destruction goes, this one takes some
beating. One-third of London was destroyed, including 80% of all churches. 100,000 people were made
homeless, around 25% of the city's population.10 The cost of the damage amounted to £10 million, or almost
a thousand times the annual income of London at the time.11
Yet the often untold part of this story is what happened next. The response to the destruction caused by the
Great Fire of London is every bit as much its legacy as the Monument that stands by the banks of the
Thames. It is a remarkable a story of individual imagination and collective action - the self-same ingredients
that first enabled humans to break free from their biological chains.
One response to the Great Fire was the introduction of new fire laws and regulations. The first-ever building
regulations were after soon put in place, specifying the materials to be used when building houses and the
minimum spacing between them. This may not sound transformational now, but at the time marked a
significant rewriting of the social contract between government, businesses and households.
A second response, this time from the private sector, was to create a market previously missing entirely. In
response to the devastation, a market for insuring people's homes was for the first time created. The first fire
insurance company, the "Insurance Office for Houses", was set up in 1681 at the back of Royal Exchange,
close to my office. It was the inspiration of (of all things) an economist, Nicholas Barbon.
The idea was simple enough. By pooling risks across a number of households, both the insurer and insured
were provided with an extra degree of financial protection against fire risk. A problem shared was a problem
halved. The newly-installed rules and regulations around house-building reduced this risk further, by
protecting individually-insured households, and collectively-at-risk insurance companies, from correlated
conflagrations.
This risk-pooling idea caught on. The home insurance industry grew rapidly, first in London, then Edinburgh,
then across the UK. In 17th century Britain, home insurance was very much a creative industry. It was the
Fintech of its day. On the back of this, markets for other types of insurance began to flourish, based on the
same risk-pooling principle. Lloyds of London emerged in 1688. In the space of a decade, London became
the pre-eminent insurance market in the world.
And so it has remained. That first-mover advantage has locked in London's dominance for 340 years.
Within a mile's radius of Monument today are hundreds of insurance companies writing billions of pounds of
insurance contracts each working day. The Bank of England keeps an eye on this industry in its role as
regulator. The impulse for that creative agglomeration came from the destruction of the Great Fire.
10
Museum of London and Demographia.
11
https://www.london-fire.gov.uk/museum/history-and-stories/the-great-fire-of-london/
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A third creative response came during the 18th century. Until then, there was no public fire service in the UK.
Companies hired private companies to fire-fight or had their own fire service. The Bank of England was in a
particularly vulnerable position at the time, as one of the world's largest paper factories. The Bank bought its
own fire engines and hired its own firemen to help protect it from going up in smoke.12
With time, it became clear it made no sense for everyone to self-insure against fire risk. This risk was best
collectivised through a municipal fire service - a "public good", like lampposts and lighthouses. A public fire
service was introduced in Scotland in 1824 and in England in 1833.13 The Bank's fire engines and firemen
were stood down. This particular public good also arose, with a lag, from the destruction of 1666.
From the ashes of the Great Fire emerged a new public infrastructure of laws, regulations and institutions.
That supported a new private infrastructure of contracts, companies and services. And this mass flourishing
created one of the world's leading financial centres, a position London retains. The regeneration spawned
by the Great Fire set the economy and society - as well as the Bank - on an entirely different course.
Enlightenment Now?
That is the story of fire. But it is a story repeated for most transformative innovation over the course of
human history: a spark of imagination; a flame of creativity as an imagined future is made real; periodic
destructive burn-outs; and an eventual mass flourishing.14 History tells us it is through this evolutionary
process of creative destruction that economies grow and societies improve.
But is the creative flame still burning? Prominent economists, such as Robert Gordon in the United States,
have recently argued that the world may be, in Haldane's terms, at risk of perishing for lack of wonder.15
This hypothesis has support, with falling returns on research and development spending. The low-hanging
fruit of creative innovation may already have been picked, leaving slimmer pickings for future generations.
These fears do need, though, to be set in some context. One important piece of context is that, viewed over
the long arc of history, humans have never had it so good. Stephen Pinker and Hans Rosling have recently
brought home this crucial point in clear, statistical terms. Just consider the last two hundred years.16
Over that period, each generation has a bit less than 50% better off financially than its predecessor. You are
almost 50% better-off than your parents and more than twice as well-off as your grandparents. Your living
standards today are around 16 times higher than your Glaswegian ancestors in the mid-18th century and 11
times better-off than when the GSA was founded. That is mass financial flourishing by anyone's reckoning.
12
Murphy (2018).
13
http://www.firefighterfoundation.org.uk/history/
14
Phelps (2013).
15
Gordon (2012).
16
Pinker (2018), Rosling (2018).
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This flourishing was physiological as well as financial. Over the same period, rates of infant mortality have
fallen 40 percentage points. Lifespans have doubled. Although the average age of the population has never
been higher, their average life has also never been longer. Levels of global poverty have fallen
remaining
from over 90% to single figures today. Societal progress has become an entrenched social norm.
What explains these great leaps forward in economies and societies? As with any reading of history, there is
no universally-agreed account. My reading of economic and social history suggests the secret sauce of
economic and social progress has two essential ingredients - and It was these two "i"s
ideas institutions.
that were responsible for taking us from yesteryear's hunter-gatherer clans to today's super-cities.17
Let me start with the first "i" - ideas. These have their source in another, by now familiar, i - imagination.
Great leaps forward societally have always had innovation, ideas and imagination at their hub. While fire
provided the spark for early this was only the first in a sequence of technological fireworks.
homo sapiens,
In the mid-18th century, the Industrial Revolution was sparked by the firing of three ideas - James Watt's
steam engine, Richard Arkwright's water frame and James Hargreaves' spinning jenny. These inventions
occurred at almost exactly the same time (within a handful of years) and in almost exactly the same place
(within a few hundred miles of latitudes North of Stockport). This was remarkable, if not coincidental.
The second Industrial Revolution of the mid-19th century was sparked by a different set of innovations. This
time it was sanitation, electrification and internal combustion that lit the fuse on the mass-industrialisation of
countries and continents. The third Industrial Revolution of the mid-20th century brought a further wave of
innovation, with digitisation, computing and the internet generating a transformation of business and society.
Each of these inventions involved a creative leap of imagination. As adoption spread, each became in time
a GPT, applicable across sectors, industries and geographies. Like fire, these GPTs then transformed
industries, jobs and lifestyles in ways inconceivable to their creators. In each Industrial Revolution, a first
imaginative step resulted in a great leap forward for societal living standards, a mass flourishing.18
In that sense the three industrial revolutions of the past three centuries fit the longer-run evolutionary arc of
humankind. It is creativity and imagination, fuelled by big brains and nourished by cooked meals, that set
humans on their jet-propelled evolutionary path. The rapid, ideas-fuelled, progress made by societies over
recent centuries is a continuation of that ever-upward evolutionary arc.
Except, that is, for one small detail. The evolutionary arc of humans has not been ever-upward. The
historical path has not been a North-bound ascent. While human ingenuity and creativity have been ever-
17
Haldane (2018a).
18
Mokyr (2011).
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present, economies and societies have in fact spent protracted periods crabbing sideways. Prior to the first
Industrial Revolution, living standards appear to have been essentially static for several thousand years.19
Living standards in Glasgow in 1750 were little different than their ancestors constructing Hadrian's Wall.
Levels of poverty, nutrition, infant mortality, height and longevity would also have been indistinguishable.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, societies and economies stood still, financially and physiologically. There
was flat-lining, not mass flourishing. Societal progress was far from being a social norm.
What explains this great pause in living standards? It was not through lack of ideas and imagination. People
did not suddenly make like monkeys for millennia. To the contrary, innovation came thick and fast in the
pre-industrial era, from the windmill in the 12th century to the mechanical clock in the 13th, from the cannon in
the 14th to the printing press in the 15th, from the postal service in the 16th to the telescope in the 17th.20
It is clear pre-industrial innovation played an important role in fuelling subsequent growth. Shakespeare's
imaginative genius would not have been sparked without Guttenberg's 14th century invention. Einstein would
not have transformed our understanding of the world without Lippershey's 17th century creativity. Yet neither
great invention translated into consistently higher living standards for the great mass of society at the time.
What was the missing ingredient? A number of historians believe it was a second "i" - institutions.21 In the
words of economist Douglass North, institutions are "humanly devised constraints that structure political,
economic and social interactions".22 If ideas and imagination are the fuel and engine that drive economies
forward, rules and institutions are the bolts and chassis holding societies together.
Institutions, defined broadly, play two crucial roles. First, they provide the rules of the game that allow the
creative process to flourish. For example, the rule of law can help ensure property, physical and intellectual,
is not stolen and contracts are honoured. This provides private individuals and companies with the
foundations to flourish. Nation states without these rules of the game have been found, historically, not to
flourish but to fail.23 Without fire regulations and property rights, could a private market for home insurance
have flourished after the Great Fire?
Second, institutions cushion the adverse side-effects of technological disruption. Innovation brings
destruction for businesses and joblessness for workers. If those costs are not cushioned, the social fabric is
torn and new ideas risk being strangled at birth. Institutions can help protect those made redundant or
obsolescent by innovation, helping repair the social fabric. And they can retool and reskill workers to prepare
them to thrive, helping loom a new fabric.
19
Haldane (2015), Parliamentary Office of Science & Technology (2016).
20
Clark (2007).
21
Acemoglu and Robinson (2012).
22
North (1990).
23
Acemoglu and Robinson (2012).
10
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As much as ideas, the three Industrial Revolutions are a story of institutions. Institutions that provided
people with social insurance, such as public healthcare and public transport, social housing and social safety
nets, central banks and charities, credit unions and trade unions. And institutions that provided people with
the tools and infrastructure to reskill, such as guilds and professional associations, primary and secondary
schools, colleges and universities.
The Bank of England was founded before the Industrial Revolution. But it emerged as a public institution in
the 19th century. The public good provided was (and still is) monetary and financial stability. Some put the
date when the Bank became a genuinely central bank at 1844, with the passing of the Bank Charter Act
granting the Bank a monopoly over issuing legal tender. This was a year before the founding of the GSA.
A five minute walk from my office is St Paul's Cathedral. In the churchyard of St Paul's on 6 June 1844, the
same year as the Bank Charter Act, George Williams set up a shelter for young men who had come to
London in search of work as part of the first wave of industrialisation. These shelters offered a roof and food.
Their role spread quickly across the UK then globally, like home insurance after the Great Fire. The YMCA
was born.
170 years on, the YMCA is still offering food and shelter. But it now operates in 119 countries and has
helped millions of young men (and, through the YWCA, women) to improve their lives. It is one of the
millions of civic institutions providing social insurance to those in need. Many of these institutions, including
the GSA, YMCA and Bank of England, can trace their roots to the Industrial Revolution.
Institutions turned tragedy into triumph after the Great Fire and turned stagnation into success either side of
the Industrial Revolution. The lesson of history is clear. For societies to grow sustainably, we need the
imagination inside our heads to generate creativity, ideas, innovation. But we also need social institutions
that connect and curate these heads to generate collective intelligence and collective action.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution
From the past to the future. A new technological wave is breaking. On some accounts, this wave could be
as great as any seen previously. The so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution is associated with the
emergence of a whole new class of technologies with the potential to be tomorrow's GPT.24 These include
machine learning, Big Data, robotics, bio-technologies and Artificial Intelligence (AI). The rise of the robot
has well and truly begun.25
Machines, and indeed robots, are not of course new. Nor are fears of them rising up and taking jobs and
control. The Luddites had the same concerns in the 19th century. This time, though, seems a bit different.
24
Klingenberg (2017).
25
Ford (2015).
11
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These machines, unlike their predecessors during the first three industrial revolutions, are capable of
thinking
as well as doing. Although this might sound like a small step for humankind, it is a potential game-changer.
So far in human history, humans have kept one-step-ahead of the machine by gravitating towards tasks out
of robotic reach. That has meant cognitive tasks. This spawned the growth of educational institutions, with
universal primary and then secondary education and then the rapid expansion of colleges and universities.
In other words, humans used the self-same neurological advantage over machines as had earlier put them
on an entirely different evolutionary arc to other animals.
Except, unlike with animals, it is not clear humans will retain their cognitive lead over machines. If current
rates of machine advance were to continue, it is simply a matter of time before humans lose pole position.
And, once passed, what hope of humans ever catching up? As the evolutionary arc of humans split from
animal