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Past economic growth is crucial to the material aspects of our existence: the best predictor of the living standard that a newborn baby can expect to enjoy is the accident of where he or she is born Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
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And so, this is a book of history. Indeed, the creation of wealth is more than the economic decision to put so many people with so many tools at work, in order to produce so much output. After history went its course, it turns out that some people can produce many, many times over what other people can do during a similar period of time.
The question is why, and that answer is easy: technology. Having, and being able to use it, technology is the difference between eking out a living at the margin of subsistence, or breaking through age-old Malthusian constraints. The hard question is why some people do, and others do not, have the use of this technology.
The history part shows in a very clear way, and into some modest detail, how many societies of the past at some point stagnated, while a few, including medieval Europe did not. But apart from learning history, we also learn to think *about* history. What influence have factors like, say, climate? Or religion? Can we learn something by borrowing models from evolutionary theory?
Apart from theoretical considerations, there is also a good deal of more practical history. How does Roman Europe compare with medieval Europe? Why did Europe see progress at an age and a stage where China did not, or at least much less? And why did England take off in a way that turned the rest of Europe into a bunch of followers?
The picture that emerges is one where a multitude of necessary conditions have to combine into a long story of increasing capability and efficiency. Only if and when those conditions are met, societies make the kind of progress that allows them to follow the road to improving material life. And though the book thereby confirms this road is not necessarily an easy one for those who didn't find it yet, it also yields some thoughts about how to hand over our own lever of riches to those who still need it so much.
As I would reserve 5 stars for those truly outstanding books you should read as a masterpiece of art, even if you couldn't care less about the topic, I will quote this book four stars. Highly recommneded if you're interested in this subject.
In Chapter 12 ("Epilogue"), he further develops what is assuredly an invaluable frame-of-reference within which to understand our own time. Why does technological creativity occur? There are two components in the invention-innovation sequence: "technical problems involve a struggle between mind and matter, that is, they involve control of the physical environment." The other component is social: "For a new technique to be implemented, the innovator has to react with a human environment comprised of competitors, customers, suppliers, the authorities, neighbors, possibly the priest."
This brief commentary has only inadequately suggested the scope and depth of Mokyr's rigorous inquiry into technological creativity and its contributions to economic progress. In weeks and months to come, there will be new "levers" which help to create new "riches." The historical context within which Joel Mokyr places these opportunities is a contribution of incalculable value.
Mokyr starts with the technologies of Greek and Roman antiquity, then moves on to the neglected breakthroughs of Western Europe's Dark Ages (the horseshoe, the horse collar, the waterwheel) and the Islamic Golden Age. But his history naturally centres on the Western European technological flowering that began around 1400.
He caps this narrative with an ambitious discussion of an issue he regards as central to the mystery of technological development: the relative decline of China, the pre-eminent technological power of the centuries up to 1400.
Mokyr, writing before the upsurge of interest in complex adaptive systems, ends the book comparing technological progress with biological evolution. The attempt is only partially successful, but you feel he's opening a new chapter of debate. "A society that has ceased to concern itself with the progress of the past will soon lose belief in its capacity to progress in the future," he concludes. And he's right.
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