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.

18 of 20 found the following review helpful:


Fine Overview and Critical Analysis  Apr 08, 2001 By R. Albin
This very interesting but relatively brief book is devoted to the role of technological innovation in economic history. In a series of well written and very well referenced chapters, Mokyr discusses the role of technological innovation as a motor of economic growth and social transformation. Topics covered include a general discussion of technological innovation and growth, narrative chapters on technological innovation in the Classical world, Medieval Europe, Renaissance Europe, and the Modern world up to about 1850, discussions of why China and Classical civilization failed to develop an industrial civilization, and a discussion of the analogy between technological innovation and organic evolution. This is a work of synthesis; Mokyr presents little novel information and draws heavily on an impressive body of existing scholarship. Mokyr presents some interesting and important conclusions. Technological innovation is not driven primarily by ordinary market forces. The Industrial Revolution was the culmination in many centuries of technological innovation dating back to the Middle Ages. The failure of China to develop an Industrial Revolution remains a persistent puzzle. By about 1400, Chinese civilization was the world leader in many key technologies but then slides back and is eventually overtaken and then explosively surpassed by Europe. An important point made by Mokyr is that no nation or culture was a perpetual locus of technological innovation. In Europe, innovations were most common in Italy during the Renaissance, followed by major sites in the Low Countries and Germany, followed by the British explosion. Europe, with its divided polities, may have been more conducive to the development of industrial technology. European intellectual and scientific traditions may also have favored the emergence of industrial technology. Whatever factors responsible, Mokyr concludes that the emergence of industrial technology was probably an unusual and highly contingent event. This is similar to the conclusion reached by Kenneth Pomerantz in his recent book, The Great Divergence, an explicit comparison of economic development in China, Japan, and Europe. These conclusions and analyses completely undermine the common and facile notions of European capitalism leading automatically to the success of European culture.

21 of 24 found the following review helpful:


Of shoulder collars, waterwheels and the Chinese mystery  Nov 06, 2000 By David Walker
The fall of the Berlin Wall did more than free Eastern Europe; it also freed historians from the somewhat chilling influence of Marxism and post-modernism. By the late 1990s, a new flowering of grand economic history had brought us David Landes's "the Wealth and Poverty of Nations" and Jared Diamond's sublime "Guns, Germs and Steel". But before them came 1990's "The Lever Of Riches", with Joel Mokyr setting out in wonderful detail the notorious economic mystery story called technological progress.

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.

8 of 8 found the following review helpful:


Good overview of technological progress  Apr 23, 2004 By J. Andreas
It is a good book and surprisingly maligned by a couple of the other reviewers.

h0td0gsh0p complains that Mokyr does not understand physics. However, the passage he quotes is entirely correct. The verge-and-foliot escapement mechanism was invented precisely because a falling object exerted a variable force on clock mechanisms due to differences in temperature, humidity, etc, which made earlier clocks highly imprecise.

The reader from Bath complains that Mokry says that waterwheels were invented in Medival Europe. However, what Mokry actually says is that, "The waterwheel may NOT have been invented in Medieval Europe, but it was there that its use spread far beyond anything seen in earlier times." He points out that in 1086, the Domesday Book lists roughly 1 waterwheel for every 50 households! The Romans were capable of producing fairly advanced overshot waterwheels (as the one near Arles France), but there are very few examples (about 3 places?) that are known.

Overall, I found the book very well researched.

7 of 7 found the following review helpful:


The Economics of Progress  Mar 30, 2006 By Hiram Caton

This is an important book about the historical process that not so long ago was unashamedly called "progress." Mokyr is professor of economics at Northwestern and author of The Economics of the Industrial Revolution. The present work undertakes a systematic cross-cultural, longitudinal study of the causes and conditions of economic growth. A central contention is that contemporary microeconomics lacks the conceptual equipment to elucidate the increment to economic growth supplied by technological change. This is a startling claim: can a science founded in industrialising Scotland to explain the causes of the wealth of nations fail to explicate what everyone knows is the mainspring of economic growth? Mokyr aligns with economists who believe that this is so. They call their heterodoxy "Schumpeterian economics." In the Theory of Economic Development (1912), Joseph Schumpeter emphasized that innovation is the fundamental impulse of capitalist production. Innovation is all-sided. Production, product, resource procurement, efficiency, and marketing are all drawn into the kinetic performance. The key to this dynamism was the relentless, aggressive drive of entrepreneurs. His contemporary heirs replace the entrepreneur by the inventor as the chief wealth-producing agent. While this assessment of the critical role of technology may seem obvious to the layman, it's scandalous in microeconomics.

Readers are alerted to heterodoxy on the first page when Mokyr signals that his findings are at odds with "one of the most pervasive half-truths that economists teach their students, . . . that there is no such thing as a free lunch." We are apprised that it is the specific achievement of technology to deliver banquets for millions. It does so thanks to transactions between creative minds and nature that result in tapping natural powers and harnessing them to productive output. The wheel, the sail, the water mill, the wind mill (a wheel-sail), and the steam engine exemplify ways by which ingenuity coaxes nature into delivering disposable power at a precise point. These transactions occur outside the domain of market exchange, although they may and often do intersect with exchange. But it is not obvious to orthodox economics, whose doctrine is that technological innovation can be calculated as a response to market demand or else as a production cost. Mokyr answers that technological input is supply-led in the double sense that technology creates products and services unimagined by consumers, and that technology creates the incomes that make a demand for technology possible.

Mokyr's strategy for supplementing economics with a theory of technological innovation is to accept the half-truth that growth can be understood within economics of commercial expansion, size and scale effects, and investment. This will capture "microinnovation," that is, efficiency improvements and other changes that are made more or less spontaneously in the course of production. But then he passes on to macroinnovationm, which "involves an attack . . . on a constraint that everyone else takes as given" (9). Macroinnovators are mavericks who would change the givens. Market reward doesn't come easy. The strategy is to focus micro- and macroinnovation simultaneously in selected time-slices, and to examine their cross-fertilisation as well as the intersections between macroinnovation and the market.

The study is divided into historical narrative and systematics. The narrative covers classical antiquity, the middle ages, and the development of technology in western Europe from 1500 to 1914. The systematics is assisted by three comparative studies, of classical antiquity and medieval Europe, of China and Europe, and of Britain and Europe. Each study develops a theme meant to elucidate why macroinnovations occur and the circumstances that influence their uptake into production. They illustrate of the book's centrepiece, an analytical chapter entitled "Understanding Technological Progress." The second part of the author's systematics attempts to forge links between the dynamics of technological change and the Darwinian analysis of evolutionary change. This is a very ambitious undertaking, not easily understandable without specialist knowledge of evolutionary thought.

Here are some of Mokyr's results:

* Opposition to technological innovation is culturally pandemic. Often it's income- and market-related. Labour combinations and tariffs, over many centuries, document attempts to protect inefficient productive methods. There's also a syndrome of technology aversion. Islam and China after 1400 A.D. exhibit this syndrome after having passed through a long period of technology development. These cultures became progressively more risk-averse and xenophobic to the point of stigmatizing the imitation of foreign innovations. His description of the closure of these cultures helps understand the values and institutional prescriptions that arrest innovation; but what occasioned this turn-about? Mokyr believes that it expressed conservatism or risk-aversion at the power centers of society, that is, anxiety about loss of social control.

* Status values and the structure of preferences in a culture may assign low status to commerce or technology or both. This well-known diagnosis of Greek and Roman antiquity is confirmed by the author's investigations. He reminds us that this preference structure was nuanced. The Greeks discovered the science of mechanics and developed metallurgy and machine construction to a high pitch. But in the Greco-Roman world machines of war and building construction were the only areas in which sustained applications were made.

* Governments do not figure in Mokyr's study as significant promoters of technological innovation. The positive role of the mandarins prior to the onset of risk-aversion is emphasised, as is the strong affirmation of technology development in revolutionary and Bonapartist France. But these are exceptions; the author is more impressed by the tendency of governments to discourage innovation. The optimum recipe was the circumstance of early modern Europe, where a diversity of competing states and domestic institutions removed the option of risk-aversion taken in China and Islam. This diagnosis is confirmed by those cases where monarchs successfully imposed risk-aversion-Spain and Hapsburg went into economic decline. Since the author's history stops at 1914, we are left wondering whether the strong involvement of governments in R & D since 1945 marks a fundamental enhancement of the institutional capacity to promote technological innovation. The Soviet Union developed its technology entirely under government auspices, with mixed success. Perhaps Mokyr will explore this experience in a subsequent publication.

* The influence of ambient attitudes is discussed episodically throughout the study. The prevailing thought is that technological development is fostered best by an environment open to new ideas and new practices, which is not risk-averse and not intolerant, and which accords dignity to inventors and inventions. Religions are reckoned to be endogenous variables expressing a society's preference structure; Mokyr observes wryly that "every society . . . gets the religion it deserves" (171). The social rigidity of the Hindu religion strongly discouraged innovation, whereas the Judeo-Christian affirmation of man's dominion over nature provided support for technological intervention. Lynn White's fine studies of the Benedictine order are cited to substantiate this claim. The Protestant ethic is not mentioned as a relevant consideration.

Coming now to innovation and invention themselves, Mokyr treats them as aggregates and seeks to discern their properties. He stipulates that growth through invention and innovation is "any change in the application of information to the production process in such a way as to increase efficiency, resulting either in the production of a given output with fewer resources (i.e., lower costs) or the production of better or new products" (6). An invention is an increment in the set of total knowledge of a society, which is in turn the union of sets of individual technical knowledge. Since an invention that isn't utilized is without economic effect, the on-going synchronization of invention and innovation are critical to sustaining economic growth. The absence of this synchronisation is the reason why few societies have been technologically creative.

Space doesn't permit a discussion of Mokyr's extended analogy between organic evolution and the cultural evolution of technology. Let it be said that he endorses the punctuated equilibrium model of evolution because it incorporates macroevolution. As for the underlying psychology that microeconomics never elucidates, Mokyr's thinking is convergence with my own elucidation of "polytechnic rationality" which I developed in The Politics of Progress: The Origins and Development of the Commercial Republic.




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