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A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy
During the late eighteenth century, innovations in Europe triggered the Industrial Revolution and the sustained economic progress that spread across the globe. While much has been made of the details of the Industrial Revolution, what remains a mystery is why it took place at all. Why did this revolution begin in the West and not elsewhere, and why did it continue, leading to today's unprecedented prosperity? In this groundbreaking book, celebrated economic historian Joel Mokyr argues that a culture of growth specific to early modern Europe and the European Enlightenment laid the foundations for the scientific advances and pioneering inventions that would instigate explosive technological and economic development. Bringing together economics, the history of science and technology, and models of cultural evolution, Mokyr demonstrates that culture--the beliefs, values, and preferences in society that are capable of changing behavior--was a deciding factor in societal transformations.
Mokyr looks at the period 1500-1700 to show that a politically fragmented Europe fostered a competitive "market for ideas" and a willingness to investigate the secrets of nature. At the same time, a transnational community of brilliant thinkers known as the "Republic of Letters" freely circulated and distributed ideas and writings. This political fragmentation and the supportive intellectual environment explain how the Industrial Revolution happened in Europe but not China, despite similar levels of technology and intellectual activity. In Europe, heterodox and creative thinkers could find sanctuary in other countries and spread their thinking across borders. In contrast, China's version of the Enlightenment remained controlled by the ruling elite.
Combining ideas from economics and cultural evolution, A Culture of Growth provides startling reasons for why the foundations of our modern economy were laid in the mere two centuries between Columbus and Newton.
Mokyr looks at the period 1500-1700 to show that a politically fragmented Europe fostered a competitive "market for ideas" and a willingness to investigate the secrets of nature. At the same time, a transnational community of brilliant thinkers known as the "Republic of Letters" freely circulated and distributed ideas and writings. This political fragmentation and the supportive intellectual environment explain how the Industrial Revolution happened in Europe but not China, despite similar levels of technology and intellectual activity. In Europe, heterodox and creative thinkers could find sanctuary in other countries and spread their thinking across borders. In contrast, China's version of the Enlightenment remained controlled by the ruling elite.
Combining ideas from economics and cultural evolution, A Culture of Growth provides startling reasons for why the foundations of our modern economy were laid in the mere two centuries between Columbus and Newton.
403 pages, Hardcover
First published November 15, 2016
About the author
Joel Mokyr
33 books94 followersJoel Mokyr is a Netherlands-born American-Israeli economic historian. He is the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences and professor of economics and history at Northwestern University, and Sackler Professor at the Eitan Berglas School of Economics at the University of Tel Aviv.
Joel Mokyr conducts research on the economic history of Europe, and specializes in the period 1750-1914. His current research is concerned with the understanding of the economic and intellectual roots of technological progress and the growth of useful knowledge in European societies, as well as the impact that industrialization and economic progress have had on economic welfare. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, and the Cliometric Society as well as the British Academy, the Italian Accademia dei Lincei and the Dutch Royal Academy. He has been the President of the Economic History Association, editor in chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History, and a co-editor of the Journal of Economic History. He is currently co-editor of a book series, the Princeton University Press Economic History of the World. He was the 2006 winner of the biennial Heineken Award for History offered by the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and the winner of the 2015 Balzan International Prize for economic history. His latest book is A Culture of Growth: Origins of the Modern Economy, to be published by Princeton University Press in 2016. He has supervised over forty doctoral dissertations in the departments of Economics and History.
Joel Mokyr conducts research on the economic history of Europe, and specializes in the period 1750-1914. His current research is concerned with the understanding of the economic and intellectual roots of technological progress and the growth of useful knowledge in European societies, as well as the impact that industrialization and economic progress have had on economic welfare. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, and the Cliometric Society as well as the British Academy, the Italian Accademia dei Lincei and the Dutch Royal Academy. He has been the President of the Economic History Association, editor in chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History, and a co-editor of the Journal of Economic History. He is currently co-editor of a book series, the Princeton University Press Economic History of the World. He was the 2006 winner of the biennial Heineken Award for History offered by the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and the winner of the 2015 Balzan International Prize for economic history. His latest book is A Culture of Growth: Origins of the Modern Economy, to be published by Princeton University Press in 2016. He has supervised over forty doctoral dissertations in the departments of Economics and History.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 38 reviews
December 26, 2016
Hadrian's review (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) does the book far more justice than I can, so just some brief thoughts.
Joel Mokyr reminds us that the British Industrial Revolution from the late 18th Century "unleashed an phenomenon never before even remotely experienced by any society," namely sustained technological progress leading to worldwide economic growth.
In this book he looks not at the what, how and where of these events, but rather the why and argues that their origins lie in the European Enlightment in the period "roughly speaking between the first voyage to America by Columbus and the publication of Principia Mathematica by Newton."
His methodological innovation is to look at the importance of culture on economics and in particular his concept of the market place for ideas in Europe between 1500-1700 and the key role played by "cultural entrepreneurs" who transform beliefs and ultimately behaviours in the same way that today's tech entrepreneurs might hope to change our transport, shopping and communication systems.
Mokyr's two featured cultural entrepreneurs are Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon, and he places much emphasis on the latters inductive and empirical approach to science vs. the Hobbesian approach in the UK, and even the more top down deductive approach of the Cartesians, although his particular ire is reserved for the Jesuits and their opposition even to mathematical concept of infinitesimals (he cites Kingsley Amis's The Alteration as an example of an alternative history where the reformation didn't take place and the industrial revolution consequently failed to happen).
Mokyr's ideas are interesting and his treatment wide ranging but unfortunately his writing style doesn't match his erudition, the odd good line apart ("belief in predestination was doomed from the start"). In part this is he, as a good academic, avoids easy answers and gives a balanced and detailed view of what is a complex topic, but even allowing for that his arguments can feel rather tortuous and repetitive, and not at all well organised: for example, the existence of the Republic of Letters is key to his history from the outset but he only defines his view of the term on page 186.
Mokyr has little time for those who argue that scientific advances had little to do with the industrial revolution, arguing that even if the theories developed didn't lead directly to innovations in production, they provided an important cultural backdrop. But then it is inconsistent that he himself seems dismissive of any part of learning other than applied sciences. He argues somewhat convincingly that the relegation of studies of the Classics was a key advance (and a difference between Europe and China), as a by-product of replacing the veneration of the wisdom of the ancients for an optimistic view of scientific progress, but extends this, less compellingly to an implicit dismissal of music, literature and indeed even pure mathematics. Indeed he argues:
"In societies dominated by a small, wealthy, but unproductive and exploitative elite, the low social prestige of productive activity meant that creativity and innovation would be directed toward an agenda of interest to the elite. The educated and sophisticated elite focused on efforts supporting its power such as military prowess and administration, or on such topics of leisure as literature, games, the arts, and philosophy, and not so much on the mundane problems of the farmer in his field, the sailor on his ship. Or the artisan in his workshop. The agenda of the leisurely elite was of great importance to the lovers of music in the eighteenth century Hapsburg lands, but was not of much interest to their farmers and manufacturers. The Austrian Empire created Haydn and Mozart, but no Industrial Revolution."
Finally, and given the depressing change of political views on migration, multiculturalism and globalisation in 2016, it is notable that quoting Cipolla, he observes "throughout this centuries the countries in which intolerance and fanaticism prevailed lost to more tolerant countries the most precious of all possible forms of wealth: good human brains"
Joel Mokyr reminds us that the British Industrial Revolution from the late 18th Century "unleashed an phenomenon never before even remotely experienced by any society," namely sustained technological progress leading to worldwide economic growth.
In this book he looks not at the what, how and where of these events, but rather the why and argues that their origins lie in the European Enlightment in the period "roughly speaking between the first voyage to America by Columbus and the publication of Principia Mathematica by Newton."
His methodological innovation is to look at the importance of culture on economics and in particular his concept of the market place for ideas in Europe between 1500-1700 and the key role played by "cultural entrepreneurs" who transform beliefs and ultimately behaviours in the same way that today's tech entrepreneurs might hope to change our transport, shopping and communication systems.
Mokyr's two featured cultural entrepreneurs are Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon, and he places much emphasis on the latters inductive and empirical approach to science vs. the Hobbesian approach in the UK, and even the more top down deductive approach of the Cartesians, although his particular ire is reserved for the Jesuits and their opposition even to mathematical concept of infinitesimals (he cites Kingsley Amis's The Alteration as an example of an alternative history where the reformation didn't take place and the industrial revolution consequently failed to happen).
Mokyr's ideas are interesting and his treatment wide ranging but unfortunately his writing style doesn't match his erudition, the odd good line apart ("belief in predestination was doomed from the start"). In part this is he, as a good academic, avoids easy answers and gives a balanced and detailed view of what is a complex topic, but even allowing for that his arguments can feel rather tortuous and repetitive, and not at all well organised: for example, the existence of the Republic of Letters is key to his history from the outset but he only defines his view of the term on page 186.
Mokyr has little time for those who argue that scientific advances had little to do with the industrial revolution, arguing that even if the theories developed didn't lead directly to innovations in production, they provided an important cultural backdrop. But then it is inconsistent that he himself seems dismissive of any part of learning other than applied sciences. He argues somewhat convincingly that the relegation of studies of the Classics was a key advance (and a difference between Europe and China), as a by-product of replacing the veneration of the wisdom of the ancients for an optimistic view of scientific progress, but extends this, less compellingly to an implicit dismissal of music, literature and indeed even pure mathematics. Indeed he argues:
"In societies dominated by a small, wealthy, but unproductive and exploitative elite, the low social prestige of productive activity meant that creativity and innovation would be directed toward an agenda of interest to the elite. The educated and sophisticated elite focused on efforts supporting its power such as military prowess and administration, or on such topics of leisure as literature, games, the arts, and philosophy, and not so much on the mundane problems of the farmer in his field, the sailor on his ship. Or the artisan in his workshop. The agenda of the leisurely elite was of great importance to the lovers of music in the eighteenth century Hapsburg lands, but was not of much interest to their farmers and manufacturers. The Austrian Empire created Haydn and Mozart, but no Industrial Revolution."
Finally, and given the depressing change of political views on migration, multiculturalism and globalisation in 2016, it is notable that quoting Cipolla, he observes "throughout this centuries the countries in which intolerance and fanaticism prevailed lost to more tolerant countries the most precious of all possible forms of wealth: good human brains"
September 15, 2019
Few questions are more important in economic history than the origins of the Great Divergence: why did the Industrial Revolution start in, of all places, Europe (and Great Brittain, to be more precise) in the second half of the 18th century, to set off the first period of sustained economic growth per capita in world history. After all, certainly until the end of the 18th century, there were no notable differences in living standards between Europe on the one hand, and China and India on the other hand. However, by the end of the 19th century, this difference had become huge.
There are several competing, but not mutually exclusive, explanations.
The first important line of thought emphasizes institutions that stimulate economic activity, such as the rule of the law, the protection of property rights (including intellectual ones), doubly entry bookkeeping, joint stock companies, etc. A typical example of this approach is "Why Nations Fail" by Acemoglu and Robertson.
The second approach emphasizes cultural factors, and argues that a unique combination of mindsets and values explains the emergence of Europe. A prominent representative of this approach is the late David Landes.
Joel Mokyr's book can be situated in the second strand of literature.
According to Mokyr, the Industrial Revolution was the result of a revolution in the approach to knowledge, that can be traced back to Francis Bacon. Bacon was the first to emphasize the importance of a science that was grounded in the critical examination of observed facts, and to argue that the application of science must yield practical improvements in the quality of life. Although Mokyr acknowledges that, in the century after Bacon, big scientific advances had very limited impact on technology, he argues that it is the changes in attitudes that were key. Although they were initially limited to a small elite ("the Republic of Letters"), those attittudes would eventually permeate European society.
Mokyr also admits that, in the same period, there was also a lot of intellectual activity on China, but that this was more focused on the analysis of the past than on the development of genuinely new knowledge. A key element according to Mokyr is that, due to the political fragmentation of Europe, it was impossoble for even the most retrograde and reactionary forces to stop the development of new ideas; in a centralised country such as China, censorship didn't need to be repressive to be much more effective.
As Mokyr points out himself, the idea that the political fragmentation of Europe stimulated its development, is not new: it was already formulated by Hume. Nevertheless, the thesis developed in this book is extremely important.
My main point of criticism against it is that Mokyr never explains what type of evidence would enable one to chose between the cultural approach and the institutional approach as having the more predictive power/
Also, the book is too long. It is based on a series of guest lectures, and this shows. In order to have a book length treatment, Mokyr is extremely repetitive, with the exception of the two final chapters 'on China, which also happen to be the most surprising ones.
Despite its flaws, the book is highly recommended to anyone with an interest in economic history.
There are several competing, but not mutually exclusive, explanations.
The first important line of thought emphasizes institutions that stimulate economic activity, such as the rule of the law, the protection of property rights (including intellectual ones), doubly entry bookkeeping, joint stock companies, etc. A typical example of this approach is "Why Nations Fail" by Acemoglu and Robertson.
The second approach emphasizes cultural factors, and argues that a unique combination of mindsets and values explains the emergence of Europe. A prominent representative of this approach is the late David Landes.
Joel Mokyr's book can be situated in the second strand of literature.
According to Mokyr, the Industrial Revolution was the result of a revolution in the approach to knowledge, that can be traced back to Francis Bacon. Bacon was the first to emphasize the importance of a science that was grounded in the critical examination of observed facts, and to argue that the application of science must yield practical improvements in the quality of life. Although Mokyr acknowledges that, in the century after Bacon, big scientific advances had very limited impact on technology, he argues that it is the changes in attitudes that were key. Although they were initially limited to a small elite ("the Republic of Letters"), those attittudes would eventually permeate European society.
Mokyr also admits that, in the same period, there was also a lot of intellectual activity on China, but that this was more focused on the analysis of the past than on the development of genuinely new knowledge. A key element according to Mokyr is that, due to the political fragmentation of Europe, it was impossoble for even the most retrograde and reactionary forces to stop the development of new ideas; in a centralised country such as China, censorship didn't need to be repressive to be much more effective.
As Mokyr points out himself, the idea that the political fragmentation of Europe stimulated its development, is not new: it was already formulated by Hume. Nevertheless, the thesis developed in this book is extremely important.
My main point of criticism against it is that Mokyr never explains what type of evidence would enable one to chose between the cultural approach and the institutional approach as having the more predictive power/
Also, the book is too long. It is based on a series of guest lectures, and this shows. In order to have a book length treatment, Mokyr is extremely repetitive, with the exception of the two final chapters 'on China, which also happen to be the most surprising ones.
Despite its flaws, the book is highly recommended to anyone with an interest in economic history.
August 16, 2020
Very interesting thesis (in need of an editor)
This is ultimately a 100-page book that somehow ended up as 300 pages. Mokyr sets out his stall well, although I think the list of biases he tells on when discussing the transfer of knowledge is perhaps too loose to be useful. He also finishes the book strongly, with a contrast of Europe and China. But the middle is a muddle, with meandering and repetitive chapters. It's a pity, as it takes away from what is otherwise a strong argument - that Europe's Enlightenment was unique but not planned or due to some inherent advantage and that its irreverence for 'The Ancients' sparked the idea of progress that humans could control. Worth a read.
This is ultimately a 100-page book that somehow ended up as 300 pages. Mokyr sets out his stall well, although I think the list of biases he tells on when discussing the transfer of knowledge is perhaps too loose to be useful. He also finishes the book strongly, with a contrast of Europe and China. But the middle is a muddle, with meandering and repetitive chapters. It's a pity, as it takes away from what is otherwise a strong argument - that Europe's Enlightenment was unique but not planned or due to some inherent advantage and that its irreverence for 'The Ancients' sparked the idea of progress that humans could control. Worth a read.
February 1, 2017
Outstanding history of the Enlightenment and its impact on Europe. I found the insights about the Republic of Letters particularly valuable.
September 21, 2020
This book sits at such a precise intersection of things I've been interested in for so long that I still can't quite believe I only happened across it by chance, in a random general "economic history" recs twitter thread. I remember a moment in my freshman dorm room, speculating naively over a yawning pit of ignorance I was barely aware of at all about whether there was any place not just for individual "agency" but for individual creative and intellectual products to influence the course of history. The conventional wisdom that took this for granted, and the obvious examples--Marx, various religions, etc--that seemed to clearly disprove it, were, I presumed, somehow mere epiphenomena explained on some deeper level by ecological processes. I had read Guns Germs and Steel and similar works, and simply took this for granted. What other causal process was there?
I've learned in the past couple years that there is an enormous other process missing in this view, one that is crucial to explain practically anything any human has ever done: cultural evolution. I am ultimately still approaching history with the same lens; I've just learned how to integrate the most important ecological process of all (evolution) at a relevant timescale. So I've been reading about cultural evolution, but it's mostly studied in very narrow settings (the "grist" of the mill like folklore, technology, or scientific paradigms) or very wide ones (the evolution of the psychological "mills" themselves). On the other hand, I've been learning about economic growth for my overpopulation essay, thinking about the processes that made the Industrial Revolution possible/inevitable and why they emerged when and where they did. This book uses medium-term, society-scale cultural evolution to answer that exact question. As soon as I realized exactly what it was, I got quite excited to read it.
But the book itself tempered that enthusiasm. It's not badly written, but it's not especially engaging either. The biggest issue is that it opens with 100 pages of discussion of cultural evolution theory before even reaching its subject. It's a strange choice that I think even most academic books wouldn't make; this is certainly an academic book, but it is also popular one at least to some extent. That accounts for only some of its trouble, though. There's I think a sort of fundamental problem with what Mokyr is trying to do here. He establishes in the intro, and I already came in believing, that cultural evolution is inevitably the broad-strokes answer to this question. He doesn't ever seriously consider alternative hypotheses. The question is really *how* cultural evolution came to spark the Industrial Revolution. IE, what were the traits a culture needed to have to make this leap and why did those traits emerge, together, in Europe by the 1800s, and at no other moment in human history.
In my overpopulation piece, I focus on the broadest aspect of these preconditions: a large population, connected by at least a moderate volume of international travel and trade. Mokyr takes these totally for granted. They're necessary at some level but not sufficient at any level. You need innovation, and for that you need a certain set of beliefs. The problem is that it's difficult to prove even in biology which genes were adaptive and which were just along for the ride (or even detrimental). Culture is even more complex because adaptations are under selection from intermediate cultural elements as well as the environment and niche construction. It's very difficult to imagine what kind of quantitative studies you might conduct to test this question. What Mokyr does instead is essentially tell a plausible story and make reasonable inferences along the way.
The book's narrative is so uncontroversial it almost comes around to being controversial again. There's something odd about it, actually, because for years as an anti-civ ideologue I held the belief that there was some kind of destructive spirit to capitalism that motivated endless growth at the expense of the environment. And more recently, I've moved away from that view because it felt hard to justify ecologically. But Mokyr's hypothesis is in a sense just that this view is correct. The thing that made economic growth take off in Europe was the belief that it was okay to impose human dominance on the natural world. This belief, expressed as a conscious imperative to understand the "rules" of the world and apply that understanding to human well-being, motivated a process of mutually reinforcing scientific and technical discoveries (a new environment of mutation, combination, and niches for the grist of cultural evolution) that enabled economic growth to become exponential. It's a faith in the possibility and desirability of technological progress, in the desirability of private property and individual rights and the mutual benefit of trade, and a support for the social institutions (state, business, unviersity) that bring these about. Exactly the sorts of things the radicals had identified. After that, most of it involves intermediate-level norms that are sort of obvious adaptations to the selection imposed by the prior steps--norms about answering correspondence, giving credit, accepting testimony, etc, that make the process accelerate once it's begun.
You could separate Mokyr's argument into two fundamental parts: Baconian knowledge norms and political permissiveness. There is (inevitably) a bit of a chicken-egg issue at play here. Culture needs to be motivated to explore useful knowledge, but it also needs to be able to escape repression by the status quo. It's not entirely clear how Mokyr understands the relationship between the two. Are they two independent conditions that need to arise at the same time? Or are these preconditions somehow linked? Anyway, Europe had them both, whereas China (the only counterexample discussed) did not, despite having a large population, an integrated market, a high degree of specialization, education, literacy, printing press, etc. One critical difference was that Europe was politically fragmented, often antagonistically so, but still united by a shared language (latin) and culture (Christianity) endowed with institutional power. Chinese people came up with many of the ideas necessary for the IR at one point or another, but were stifled by the power of the united state, which funneled intellectual talent and activity into civil service exams that was conservative and focused on past texts.
In Europe, political fragmentation made this rebellion against conservatism unquashable, and eventually even fanned it. If rulers couldn't collude to stifle free-thinking together, some would instead encourage ideas dangerous to each other purely out of competition or spite. Mokyr spends much of the first half discussing Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton as "cultural entrepreneurs"--not "Great Men" who transformed history through their will and genius so much as people who successfully "sold" ideas that people were already prepared to accept, in such a way that made them dominant and influential in the way the next generation evaluated new ideas of their own. Mokyr is unapologetic about the fact that this process took place entirely among the elite--it was the "Republic of Letters" where these norms were adopted, perpetuated, and put to use. It's a premise of the hypothesis that while normal iterative cultural evolution can produce tremendous improvements in particular fields over time (something China benefited from earlier than Europe) and that technicians played an irreplaceable role in the IR, only the introduction of experimental knowledge of the rules of nature to the system can start exponential technological change. The sine qua nons had to come from scientists, not technicians.
It's certainly not an airtight proof, and a lot of it ends up being boring simply because it feels like Mokyr is just listing quotes and naming names to trace the path of the ideas spread by his "cultural entrpreneurs." Is this a convincing way to argue? Maybe, but not decisively. Still, I found the argument reasonable enough to accept overall. It is, again, sort of the least controversial imaginable version of this process we know must have occurred in some form or other. That also makes it maybe the least interesting! I'll be curious to see if anyone has advanced a meaningful challenge to it, and how they go about arguing their case. There are still plenty of intermediate steps Mokyr doesn't address that are waiting to be filled in here. It's a fairly broad picture. Why did European Republic of Letters come into being in the first place (the extent of correspondence seems hugely significant here and the absence of such a culture in China is conspicuously under-discussed in that section)? Why did it hold the ideas on evidence that made Bacon come up with his ideas and that caused his peers to accept them as they did? Etc. But those are minor points, perhaps, and the sort of thing that can always be traced one step back in evolutionary questions.
I've learned in the past couple years that there is an enormous other process missing in this view, one that is crucial to explain practically anything any human has ever done: cultural evolution. I am ultimately still approaching history with the same lens; I've just learned how to integrate the most important ecological process of all (evolution) at a relevant timescale. So I've been reading about cultural evolution, but it's mostly studied in very narrow settings (the "grist" of the mill like folklore, technology, or scientific paradigms) or very wide ones (the evolution of the psychological "mills" themselves). On the other hand, I've been learning about economic growth for my overpopulation essay, thinking about the processes that made the Industrial Revolution possible/inevitable and why they emerged when and where they did. This book uses medium-term, society-scale cultural evolution to answer that exact question. As soon as I realized exactly what it was, I got quite excited to read it.
But the book itself tempered that enthusiasm. It's not badly written, but it's not especially engaging either. The biggest issue is that it opens with 100 pages of discussion of cultural evolution theory before even reaching its subject. It's a strange choice that I think even most academic books wouldn't make; this is certainly an academic book, but it is also popular one at least to some extent. That accounts for only some of its trouble, though. There's I think a sort of fundamental problem with what Mokyr is trying to do here. He establishes in the intro, and I already came in believing, that cultural evolution is inevitably the broad-strokes answer to this question. He doesn't ever seriously consider alternative hypotheses. The question is really *how* cultural evolution came to spark the Industrial Revolution. IE, what were the traits a culture needed to have to make this leap and why did those traits emerge, together, in Europe by the 1800s, and at no other moment in human history.
In my overpopulation piece, I focus on the broadest aspect of these preconditions: a large population, connected by at least a moderate volume of international travel and trade. Mokyr takes these totally for granted. They're necessary at some level but not sufficient at any level. You need innovation, and for that you need a certain set of beliefs. The problem is that it's difficult to prove even in biology which genes were adaptive and which were just along for the ride (or even detrimental). Culture is even more complex because adaptations are under selection from intermediate cultural elements as well as the environment and niche construction. It's very difficult to imagine what kind of quantitative studies you might conduct to test this question. What Mokyr does instead is essentially tell a plausible story and make reasonable inferences along the way.
The book's narrative is so uncontroversial it almost comes around to being controversial again. There's something odd about it, actually, because for years as an anti-civ ideologue I held the belief that there was some kind of destructive spirit to capitalism that motivated endless growth at the expense of the environment. And more recently, I've moved away from that view because it felt hard to justify ecologically. But Mokyr's hypothesis is in a sense just that this view is correct. The thing that made economic growth take off in Europe was the belief that it was okay to impose human dominance on the natural world. This belief, expressed as a conscious imperative to understand the "rules" of the world and apply that understanding to human well-being, motivated a process of mutually reinforcing scientific and technical discoveries (a new environment of mutation, combination, and niches for the grist of cultural evolution) that enabled economic growth to become exponential. It's a faith in the possibility and desirability of technological progress, in the desirability of private property and individual rights and the mutual benefit of trade, and a support for the social institutions (state, business, unviersity) that bring these about. Exactly the sorts of things the radicals had identified. After that, most of it involves intermediate-level norms that are sort of obvious adaptations to the selection imposed by the prior steps--norms about answering correspondence, giving credit, accepting testimony, etc, that make the process accelerate once it's begun.
You could separate Mokyr's argument into two fundamental parts: Baconian knowledge norms and political permissiveness. There is (inevitably) a bit of a chicken-egg issue at play here. Culture needs to be motivated to explore useful knowledge, but it also needs to be able to escape repression by the status quo. It's not entirely clear how Mokyr understands the relationship between the two. Are they two independent conditions that need to arise at the same time? Or are these preconditions somehow linked? Anyway, Europe had them both, whereas China (the only counterexample discussed) did not, despite having a large population, an integrated market, a high degree of specialization, education, literacy, printing press, etc. One critical difference was that Europe was politically fragmented, often antagonistically so, but still united by a shared language (latin) and culture (Christianity) endowed with institutional power. Chinese people came up with many of the ideas necessary for the IR at one point or another, but were stifled by the power of the united state, which funneled intellectual talent and activity into civil service exams that was conservative and focused on past texts.
In Europe, political fragmentation made this rebellion against conservatism unquashable, and eventually even fanned it. If rulers couldn't collude to stifle free-thinking together, some would instead encourage ideas dangerous to each other purely out of competition or spite. Mokyr spends much of the first half discussing Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton as "cultural entrepreneurs"--not "Great Men" who transformed history through their will and genius so much as people who successfully "sold" ideas that people were already prepared to accept, in such a way that made them dominant and influential in the way the next generation evaluated new ideas of their own. Mokyr is unapologetic about the fact that this process took place entirely among the elite--it was the "Republic of Letters" where these norms were adopted, perpetuated, and put to use. It's a premise of the hypothesis that while normal iterative cultural evolution can produce tremendous improvements in particular fields over time (something China benefited from earlier than Europe) and that technicians played an irreplaceable role in the IR, only the introduction of experimental knowledge of the rules of nature to the system can start exponential technological change. The sine qua nons had to come from scientists, not technicians.
It's certainly not an airtight proof, and a lot of it ends up being boring simply because it feels like Mokyr is just listing quotes and naming names to trace the path of the ideas spread by his "cultural entrpreneurs." Is this a convincing way to argue? Maybe, but not decisively. Still, I found the argument reasonable enough to accept overall. It is, again, sort of the least controversial imaginable version of this process we know must have occurred in some form or other. That also makes it maybe the least interesting! I'll be curious to see if anyone has advanced a meaningful challenge to it, and how they go about arguing their case. There are still plenty of intermediate steps Mokyr doesn't address that are waiting to be filled in here. It's a fairly broad picture. Why did European Republic of Letters come into being in the first place (the extent of correspondence seems hugely significant here and the absence of such a culture in China is conspicuously under-discussed in that section)? Why did it hold the ideas on evidence that made Bacon come up with his ideas and that caused his peers to accept them as they did? Etc. But those are minor points, perhaps, and the sort of thing that can always be traced one step back in evolutionary questions.
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December 24, 2017A deep dive into the cultural shifts that allowed the Industrial Revolution to occur. While reading, you'll instinctively draw contemporary parallels to today’s computer/internet revolution. Five stars for depth of content, but 1 star for organization.
June 2, 2018
Focusing on the years from 1500-1700, Mokyr traces the influences foreshadowing the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. One crucial key was the writings of Francis Bacon, whose explanation of how knowledge can be discovered through close observation of nature and by conducting experiments to discover Nature's secrets, guided and inspired subsequent tinkerers, scientists, and mathematicians.
One question that Mokyr explores is why the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries occurred in the Western Europe, which led to the the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, and not elsewhere, especially China, which was about equal to Western Europe in technology, wealth, and cultural attainments in 1500. His answer is complex. He emphasizes the contingent nature of the rise and eventual domination of much of the world by Europeans, that the outcome could have been much different. China and other areas of the world could have achieved the sort of advancements had their situations been somewhat different. The circumstances in Europe encouraged the communication among the educated elite, which Mokyr calls the Republic of Letters, that spread the the scientific, technological, and philosophical discoveries and innovation widely throughout Western Europe. Aiding in spreading these ideas was the fragmentation of Europe into different nations with different political divisions and levels of tolerance for radical ideas. China, being more centralized politically and culturally, lacked much of this, especially the questioning of ancient canonical authors such as Confucius. In the West, respect for Aristotelian science declined as new discoveries contradicted its claims. Galileo, Hooker, Newton, Boyle, Descarte, Leibniz, and numerous others won the struggle in the market of ideas. Communication by letters and books, aided by the printing press (the Chinese had already developed movable type in the 11th century, but ultimately its advantages were partially compromised by the enormous number of Chinese written characters), helped produce an atmosphere of open discussion and debate. Discoveries made by Galileo in Italy could be explored by Descarte in France and further improved by Newton in England. Writing in the common scientific and philosophical language of Latin aided in the spreading new ideas widely regardless of political boundaries and religious commitments of the different thinkers.
While discoveries during the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries contributed to the ideas of the Enlightenment, such as the autonomy of the individuals to choose their own political and religious beliefs, the gradual growth of tolerance to different viewpoints, and subjecting ideas to tests that to judge their efficacies, there was a lag of about a century before applying scientific principles for practical purposes had any influence on the Industrial Revolution. The early years of the Industrial Revolution depended on practical men inventing new marvels such as the steam engine based on trial-and-error experience rather than on scientific principles. Once scientific principles were combined with practical experience, the Scientific Revolution really took off in the 19th century and accelerating in the 20th century.
Although the subtitle of the book is "The Origins of the Modern Economy", I found little in the book that I thought relevant to economics. Mokyr imagines that economic concepts such as incentives and markets played a role in which ideas survived and which were forgotten. He does take a kind of Darwinian approach in the sense that the most useful ideas tend to be the ones that survive based on incentives.
Although somewhat repetitious, the book contains a wealth of ideas and does try to explain why the West arose economically and technologically while the rest of the world didn't. Mokyr doesn't automatically assume that the West was somehow superior than the rest of the world. He implies the the West was just lucky.
One question that Mokyr explores is why the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries occurred in the Western Europe, which led to the the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, and not elsewhere, especially China, which was about equal to Western Europe in technology, wealth, and cultural attainments in 1500. His answer is complex. He emphasizes the contingent nature of the rise and eventual domination of much of the world by Europeans, that the outcome could have been much different. China and other areas of the world could have achieved the sort of advancements had their situations been somewhat different. The circumstances in Europe encouraged the communication among the educated elite, which Mokyr calls the Republic of Letters, that spread the the scientific, technological, and philosophical discoveries and innovation widely throughout Western Europe. Aiding in spreading these ideas was the fragmentation of Europe into different nations with different political divisions and levels of tolerance for radical ideas. China, being more centralized politically and culturally, lacked much of this, especially the questioning of ancient canonical authors such as Confucius. In the West, respect for Aristotelian science declined as new discoveries contradicted its claims. Galileo, Hooker, Newton, Boyle, Descarte, Leibniz, and numerous others won the struggle in the market of ideas. Communication by letters and books, aided by the printing press (the Chinese had already developed movable type in the 11th century, but ultimately its advantages were partially compromised by the enormous number of Chinese written characters), helped produce an atmosphere of open discussion and debate. Discoveries made by Galileo in Italy could be explored by Descarte in France and further improved by Newton in England. Writing in the common scientific and philosophical language of Latin aided in the spreading new ideas widely regardless of political boundaries and religious commitments of the different thinkers.
While discoveries during the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries contributed to the ideas of the Enlightenment, such as the autonomy of the individuals to choose their own political and religious beliefs, the gradual growth of tolerance to different viewpoints, and subjecting ideas to tests that to judge their efficacies, there was a lag of about a century before applying scientific principles for practical purposes had any influence on the Industrial Revolution. The early years of the Industrial Revolution depended on practical men inventing new marvels such as the steam engine based on trial-and-error experience rather than on scientific principles. Once scientific principles were combined with practical experience, the Scientific Revolution really took off in the 19th century and accelerating in the 20th century.
Although the subtitle of the book is "The Origins of the Modern Economy", I found little in the book that I thought relevant to economics. Mokyr imagines that economic concepts such as incentives and markets played a role in which ideas survived and which were forgotten. He does take a kind of Darwinian approach in the sense that the most useful ideas tend to be the ones that survive based on incentives.
Although somewhat repetitious, the book contains a wealth of ideas and does try to explain why the West arose economically and technologically while the rest of the world didn't. Mokyr doesn't automatically assume that the West was somehow superior than the rest of the world. He implies the the West was just lucky.
July 21, 2021
Mokyr’s text feels like it was published a generation ago and represents the very worst academic prose. His main contention that “nations and economies grow...because they increase their collective knowledge about nature” might have passed as an intellectually significant contribution to the discipline seventy years ago, but for a book so heavy on theory and light on primary research I expected a more sophisticated analysis. For instance, scholars exploring the role of ignorance such as Robert Proctor and Jonathan Kominsky have developed a significant body of literature that explores knowledge formation and suppression extremely relevant to Mokyr’s argument. Neither are cited and the index contains zero entries for “agnotology” or “ignorance.”
The worst aspect of this text is that the author presents it as a groundbreaking perspective, claiming economists have completely overlooked the role of nature. Woof.
The worst aspect of this text is that the author presents it as a groundbreaking perspective, claiming economists have completely overlooked the role of nature. Woof.
February 9, 2020
Joel Mokyr’s A Culture of Growth doesn’t read like history. As a study into the conditions of Europe from 1500-1700, Mokyr utilizes a cultural and economic model in production of an intellectual history to assert his principal claim: European culture was responsible for the snowballing technological and intellectual takeoff of the Industrial Revolution, Enlightenment, and ultimately the founding of the modern economy. That is a bold claim that, in the contemporary academic world, on its face invites charges of Eurocentrism, which Mokyr acknowledges and rebukes. With a more singularly historical narrative perspective, Mokyr likely would not be able to make that argument effectively. The interdisciplinarity of A Culture of Growth, born of Mokyr’s dual hatted-ness as an economist and historian, enables it to make bold causal claims. Adopting an interdisciplinary model has its downsides as well, but on the whole, we need more history that crosses disciplinary boundaries to truly flesh out our arguments and tease out the truth and meaning of the past. The interdisciplinarity of A Culture of Growth better enables Mokyr to make his case and the strength of the interdisciplinary approach far outweighs its weaknesses. A Culture of Growth is a good example of the direction that the field of history should be moving in. Before making this case in further detail, a summary of Mokyr’s argument will be useful.
A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy is aptly named; the book is a causal inquiry into the origins of the modern economy that places cultural change and intellectual developments in Europe at the center of its story. It is probably best described as an intellectual and economic history using a cultural model; but at some point of synthesis these adjectives cease having high definitional power, and this book passes that bar. The book is divided into five parts. In chapters 1-5, Mokyr establishes his analytical model and claims; he wisely defines “culture” (“a set of beliefs, values, and preferences, capable of affecting behavior, that are socially (not genetically) transmitted and that are shared by some subset of society”) before placing it at the center of his analysis, describing its inexorability with technological growth, its evolution and relation to the economy, and the things that affect that evolution. Chapters 6-8 establish the notion of the “cultural entrepreneur” and employ Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton as important case studies for the analysis. The next two sections of the book explore the conditions behind the Industrial Revolution and Enlightenment from 1500-1700, including human capital, shifting foundations in perception of knowledge, fragmentation, pluralism, and competition, institutional impact (especially the Republic of Letters), religion (specifically Puritanism) and British (mostly non-) exceptionalism (except for Puritanism), the idea of progress and the coming “Enlightenment.” The concluding section compares developments in Europe to the different, but not “worse” characteristics of Chinese intellectual, technological, and economic developments of the same periods. The defining theme of all professional history, the emphasis of contingency in processes of change, is stressed throughout the argument.
That summary sounds like a hodgepodge of confusingly arranged ideas all related to Mokyr’s broad thesis. Indeed that is the case in A Culture of Growth. Its stylistic weakness, though I argue that Mokyr still effectively makes his point, is that the argument is born of a series of guest lectures seemingly thrown together to form a book. Mokyr’s argument for the importance of European intellectual and cultural currents causing the takeoff of technological progress and the modern economy is powerful and hits the mark, but it does so more as a rhetorical shotgun loaded with buckshot than as a rifle firing with precision. The raw effectiveness of Mokyr’s argument stems from its interdisciplinary analytical model, the merits and weaknesses of which we now turn to.
Mokyr’s final paragraph states the conclusion of his argument succinctly. The emergence and interplay of the ideas that “knowledge and the understanding of nature can and should be used to advance the material conditions of humanity” and “that power and government are there not to serve the rich and powerful but society at large” ultimately led to the “triumph in the market for ideas” and “the economic sea changes” that formed the basis for the modern economy. The nature of that argument hints that the work is an intellectual history, and involves tracing ideas. That is a messy process; revealing any sort of causality or even untangling the strands of intellectual and cultural change is difficult enough in analysis let alone in conveyance of argument. But cultural and economic treatment, under Mokyr’s frameworks of the “market of ideas” and “cultural entrepreneurs” resolves much of the causal complexity in argumentation.
How do ideas change? That is a tough question that many intellectual historians overlook despite their ambition and claims to trace such changes. Mokyr devotes two chapters to detailing “choice-based cultural evolution,” describing the socialization process and the incentives and disincentives behind individual shifts in cultural attitudes as reflective of broader shifts. Such a model is simple compared to alternatives, revelatory, and natural for an economist – most historians probably wouldn’t be comfortable with such a level of theoretical social atomization or detailing of market shifts. By treating culture as a good, Mokyr is able to analyze and track it; beliefs, values, and preferences are able to be separate and analyzed in a way that makes sense – culture is: spread through transmission (“social learning”) and most of the time through choice (this is problematic but it allows for a good model), and is in some ways like genes (sometimes vertically imparted but always extremely complex but separable and made up of composite parts). Rather than describing a nebulous intellectual chronology, Mokyr uses his economic background to establish a concrete concept, culture, as the driver of intellectual and eventually economic change, an extremely useful historical contribution. Given the political fragmentation of 1500-1800 Europe, the mobility of ideas, and the rapidity of change, the reader almost finds themselves asking how such treatment, which enables actual definition and analysis of the critical “market of ideas,” was not undertaken before 2018. The fact that this intervention took so long is probably due to the fragmentation of social scientific thought and assumptions in modern academia, a fact that Mokyr overcomes through the interdisciplinarity of A Culture of Growth and from his training as a historian and economist.
This interdisciplinary treatment also enables Mokyr to employ the useful concept of “cultural entrepreneurs.” Certain individuals, according to Mokyr, can synthesize ascending cultural variables into an argument that can persuade large amounts of cultural consumers into accepting them, sometimes rather durably. Mokyr is careful to qualify this, and in the absence of such cultural entrepreneurs in history, others may very well have emerged that could have wrought similar effects on their cultural spheres – though entrepreneur’s distinct, contingent actions matter greatly. Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton are the two central cultural entrepreneurs of Mokyr’s argument. Bacon provided the “Baconian program” of linking the ideas of intellectual, empirical, scientific progress with the idea of material human betterment, creating a “feedback loop that changed the economic history of the world.” Newton provided one of the first and most dramatic realizations of the Baconian program, not necessarily providing immediate impetus for economic transformation but definitively fusing Baconian cultural ideas into the Western (at first elite but later broader) cultural ethos through his work.
This isn’t great man history. Mokyr is careful to differentiate the representation of cultural entrepreneurs from the idea that singular actors produce massive historical shifts. Cultural entrepreneurs only partly drive history, serving as focal points of broader forces. Bacon and Newton aren���t important because they’re Bacon and Newton, they’re important because they convinced other cultural consumers to buy their “products” and integrate them into society. The concept of cultural entrepreneurs thus helpfully reinforces the “market of ideas” paradigm and the broader economic treatment of Europe’s intellectual and cultural development.
The atomistic market treatment of cultural consumers allows easier definition and analysis of historical problems, but it also gives rise to my chief criticism of the book. Cultural consumers’ freedom of choice is overstated. Mokyr acknowledges that such choice is not unconstrained, but that assumption does seem to run through A Culture of Growth at least in analysis of specific regions. Despite this flaw, Mokyr’s interdisciplinary treatment of the cultural and intellectual development of Europe is a revelatory intervention; more work like this should be done.
A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy is aptly named; the book is a causal inquiry into the origins of the modern economy that places cultural change and intellectual developments in Europe at the center of its story. It is probably best described as an intellectual and economic history using a cultural model; but at some point of synthesis these adjectives cease having high definitional power, and this book passes that bar. The book is divided into five parts. In chapters 1-5, Mokyr establishes his analytical model and claims; he wisely defines “culture” (“a set of beliefs, values, and preferences, capable of affecting behavior, that are socially (not genetically) transmitted and that are shared by some subset of society”) before placing it at the center of his analysis, describing its inexorability with technological growth, its evolution and relation to the economy, and the things that affect that evolution. Chapters 6-8 establish the notion of the “cultural entrepreneur” and employ Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton as important case studies for the analysis. The next two sections of the book explore the conditions behind the Industrial Revolution and Enlightenment from 1500-1700, including human capital, shifting foundations in perception of knowledge, fragmentation, pluralism, and competition, institutional impact (especially the Republic of Letters), religion (specifically Puritanism) and British (mostly non-) exceptionalism (except for Puritanism), the idea of progress and the coming “Enlightenment.” The concluding section compares developments in Europe to the different, but not “worse” characteristics of Chinese intellectual, technological, and economic developments of the same periods. The defining theme of all professional history, the emphasis of contingency in processes of change, is stressed throughout the argument.
That summary sounds like a hodgepodge of confusingly arranged ideas all related to Mokyr’s broad thesis. Indeed that is the case in A Culture of Growth. Its stylistic weakness, though I argue that Mokyr still effectively makes his point, is that the argument is born of a series of guest lectures seemingly thrown together to form a book. Mokyr’s argument for the importance of European intellectual and cultural currents causing the takeoff of technological progress and the modern economy is powerful and hits the mark, but it does so more as a rhetorical shotgun loaded with buckshot than as a rifle firing with precision. The raw effectiveness of Mokyr’s argument stems from its interdisciplinary analytical model, the merits and weaknesses of which we now turn to.
Mokyr’s final paragraph states the conclusion of his argument succinctly. The emergence and interplay of the ideas that “knowledge and the understanding of nature can and should be used to advance the material conditions of humanity” and “that power and government are there not to serve the rich and powerful but society at large” ultimately led to the “triumph in the market for ideas” and “the economic sea changes” that formed the basis for the modern economy. The nature of that argument hints that the work is an intellectual history, and involves tracing ideas. That is a messy process; revealing any sort of causality or even untangling the strands of intellectual and cultural change is difficult enough in analysis let alone in conveyance of argument. But cultural and economic treatment, under Mokyr’s frameworks of the “market of ideas” and “cultural entrepreneurs” resolves much of the causal complexity in argumentation.
How do ideas change? That is a tough question that many intellectual historians overlook despite their ambition and claims to trace such changes. Mokyr devotes two chapters to detailing “choice-based cultural evolution,” describing the socialization process and the incentives and disincentives behind individual shifts in cultural attitudes as reflective of broader shifts. Such a model is simple compared to alternatives, revelatory, and natural for an economist – most historians probably wouldn’t be comfortable with such a level of theoretical social atomization or detailing of market shifts. By treating culture as a good, Mokyr is able to analyze and track it; beliefs, values, and preferences are able to be separate and analyzed in a way that makes sense – culture is: spread through transmission (“social learning”) and most of the time through choice (this is problematic but it allows for a good model), and is in some ways like genes (sometimes vertically imparted but always extremely complex but separable and made up of composite parts). Rather than describing a nebulous intellectual chronology, Mokyr uses his economic background to establish a concrete concept, culture, as the driver of intellectual and eventually economic change, an extremely useful historical contribution. Given the political fragmentation of 1500-1800 Europe, the mobility of ideas, and the rapidity of change, the reader almost finds themselves asking how such treatment, which enables actual definition and analysis of the critical “market of ideas,” was not undertaken before 2018. The fact that this intervention took so long is probably due to the fragmentation of social scientific thought and assumptions in modern academia, a fact that Mokyr overcomes through the interdisciplinarity of A Culture of Growth and from his training as a historian and economist.
This interdisciplinary treatment also enables Mokyr to employ the useful concept of “cultural entrepreneurs.” Certain individuals, according to Mokyr, can synthesize ascending cultural variables into an argument that can persuade large amounts of cultural consumers into accepting them, sometimes rather durably. Mokyr is careful to qualify this, and in the absence of such cultural entrepreneurs in history, others may very well have emerged that could have wrought similar effects on their cultural spheres – though entrepreneur’s distinct, contingent actions matter greatly. Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton are the two central cultural entrepreneurs of Mokyr’s argument. Bacon provided the “Baconian program” of linking the ideas of intellectual, empirical, scientific progress with the idea of material human betterment, creating a “feedback loop that changed the economic history of the world.” Newton provided one of the first and most dramatic realizations of the Baconian program, not necessarily providing immediate impetus for economic transformation but definitively fusing Baconian cultural ideas into the Western (at first elite but later broader) cultural ethos through his work.
This isn’t great man history. Mokyr is careful to differentiate the representation of cultural entrepreneurs from the idea that singular actors produce massive historical shifts. Cultural entrepreneurs only partly drive history, serving as focal points of broader forces. Bacon and Newton aren���t important because they’re Bacon and Newton, they’re important because they convinced other cultural consumers to buy their “products” and integrate them into society. The concept of cultural entrepreneurs thus helpfully reinforces the “market of ideas” paradigm and the broader economic treatment of Europe’s intellectual and cultural development.
The atomistic market treatment of cultural consumers allows easier definition and analysis of historical problems, but it also gives rise to my chief criticism of the book. Cultural consumers’ freedom of choice is overstated. Mokyr acknowledges that such choice is not unconstrained, but that assumption does seem to run through A Culture of Growth at least in analysis of specific regions. Despite this flaw, Mokyr’s interdisciplinary treatment of the cultural and intellectual development of Europe is a revelatory intervention; more work like this should be done.
July 3, 2023
First off, whoever designed this book needed to increase the font size a point or two. I’m getting older, but not that much older. In terms of the book, Mokyr does string a nice thread from Bacon to the Enlightenment as the source of the eternal question of why the industrial revolution happened when and where it happened. Not 100% sure why solely in England and not the rest of Europe, but the continent and the intellectual environment of the Republic of Letters seems to have a good connection. I have not read any criticism of the text, so I imagine that this is accepted as gospel truth in the economic history community since the publication of the text. One thing that I find really interesting is that at the end of the text he looks at China in the same period and examines some factors that might have inhibited the industrial revolution there, even though they had a technological lead. The most crucial point is not that China (Or elsewhere in Asia or Africa) failed by not grabbing onto the rocket of the industrial revolution, but that it was a unique set of intellectual institutions that really helped grow the economy as we know it. As a side note, it’s probably time to read McCloskey on similar issues.
December 16, 2020
A thorough look at why the Industrial Revolution started Europe in the 1700-1800s. Dense and well researched. If you are asking why did the world go from living on meager incomes for most of history and then suddenly everyone became richer? then this book helps provide a the cultural answer to that colossal question.
December 22, 2022
This book is based on a series of lectures that Joel Mokyr delivered at the University of Graz in 2010. Its focus is on the two centuries that precede the Industrial Revolution, although it frequently discusses the late 18th Century too. Mokyr's arguments in The Enlightened Economy, which covers the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution in more detail, are tighter and more persuasive than those in this work, and I would recommend that book over this one for a better understanding of the origins of growth.
However, A Culture of Growth does contain some important (though not necessarily novel) points about openness, competition and scepticism towards tradition. In particular, it fleshes out some of the arguments made by Walter Scheidel in Escape from Rome about the benefits of early modern Europe's polycentric political formation.
However, A Culture of Growth does contain some important (though not necessarily novel) points about openness, competition and scepticism towards tradition. In particular, it fleshes out some of the arguments made by Walter Scheidel in Escape from Rome about the benefits of early modern Europe's polycentric political formation.
April 20, 2019
Interesting book but for a someone I believe that already has a relative background to the subject. Otherwise it is a bit challenging to keep up with the terminology. Plus I feel that the author used pompous words just for the sake of it.
September 26, 2023
A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy
Joel Mokyr ©2017, 403 pages
A short book report by Ron Housley (9.26.2023)
Here we go again! I can’t count the times some version of the question has come up: “Why did the Industrial Revolution happen when it did and where it did, after so many centuries of human stagnation?” Why didn’t the stagnation just continue with its eternal history of “that’s just the way life on earth is?”
Joel Mokyr is professor of economics and history at Northwestern University, educated at Yale and Hebrew University of Jerusalem, respected author of important works in his field.
MY ATTRACTION TO THIS BOOK
My own outlook on this book’s central question has been that we witnessed a confluence of Enlightenment principles (reason, science, individualism, liberty) with the first political institution to ever align with those principles (America), whereupon the floodgates of productivity were opened.
I was curious about this author’s theme that the stage for the explosion of prosperity we enjoy today was set by cultural developments between Christopher Columbus and Isaac Newton, roughly between 1500 and 1700.
AUTHOR’S STARTING POINT
Joel Mokyr contends that during these two centuries, some little noticed, but pivotal, shifts took place: there was a gradual tendency to reward personal accomplishments in keeping with a subtle shift in values toward individualist rather than collectivist orientation; there was a gradual recognition that overall economic outcomes were related to individualism poking its head above the horizon; there was a gradual birth in the belief that economic progress is actually “possible;” and there was the concomitant belief that economic progress is “desirable.” Mokyr refers to these changes as the transition of “elite cultural beliefs,” a breaking down of “knowledge barriers that kept human society at living standards close to subsistence since the beginning of humanity.” (p. 340)
All this was a backlash, of sorts, against the centuries long belief that wealth accumulation was sinful, that a rich man would never enter “the kingdom of heaven.”
With both the possibility and the desirability of economic progress on the table, all that remained was to actually change the institutions which would allow the actually blossoming.
SIR FRANCIS BACON (1561-1626)
In my generation, every schoolboy was taught that Francis Bacon was responsible for specifying the “Scientific Method,” and was to be remembered for his famous: “Nature to be commanded must be obeyed.” What they did not teach us was the cultural climate from 1500 to 1700, when Bacon exerted his influence on the thinking of the day — which would be carried forward for many generations. Professor Mokyr goes on at some length to fill in the details of what my schoolboy education skipped over. What I missed was an appreciation for how attitudes about knowledge evolved in this period, how they took root in European culture, how they set the stage for the great expansion of knowledge and prosperity that was to follow. By the end of the chapter on Bacon, I was given to say: Long Live Francis Bacon! Who knew that in the 21st century, his legacy would not only have been forgotten, but worse, his scientific method forsaken(!).
SIR ISAAC NEWTON (1642-1727)
Mokyr gives us a big dose of Isaac Newton, too. As with Bacon, I had some schoolboy impressions: famous for those “laws of motion;” even more famous for his “Principia Mathematica” and as one of the inventors of the calculus; but most importantly as the first figure to represent the Enlightenment itself. Newton demonstrated to us that mankind could figure out how things worked in the natural world, that we could figure out how to “command” the nature that Bacon told us must be “obeyed.” So stupendous was Newton’s achievement that I have a portrait of him in my study, man at his best.
But the reason Mokyr includes Newton is to illustrate his own thesis that certain ideas were put in place during this era, ideas which made possible the Great Enrichment which came about once the Industrial Revolution began.
USEFUL KNOWLEDGE
By Mokyr’s accounting, the growing regard for “useful knowledge” began to take hold in the 16th and 17th centuries, after comparatively little such regard in all the centuries preceding. It is his contention that the exploding regard for “useful knowledge was key to (the) material progress” (p. 99) which was about to bestow upon mankind a prosperity never before imagined. Bacon and Newton apparently blazed the trail to “an understandable universe, that could and should be manipulated for the material benefit of humankind.” (p. 103).
At every step along the way there was notorious push-back by the Church, with accusations of man “playing God” or worse: contradicting God(!). But esteemed intellectuals of the era spoke loudly in favor of what Newton stood for: “the pursuit of sober self-interest, an endorsement of human domination over nature.” (p. 113)
FOUNDATIONS OF THE "GREAT ENRICHMENT"
Mokyr takes pains to develop the case that Europe’s support of education was NOT a critical element in the meteoric growth of wealth that eventually took place. “The great engineers and inventors who made the Industrial Revolution were rarely well educated.” (p. 125) He demonstrates that Chinese culture was educationally on par with Europe, yet failed to participate in the same material awakening.
Even though education per se may not have been an important factor, a crucial factor was the development of “new useful knowledge” discovered by scientists of the day, which in turn made the work of inventors and engineers possible. As Mokyr points out: “If all that were needed for the Industrial Revolution had been enlightened and ingenious artisans, it could have occurred centuries earlier.” (p. 274)
THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS
I asked myself: how did something so big and important as “The Republic of Letters” escape my awareness all these many decades? In a long section of his book, Mokyr details the birth and workings of this loose, transnational federation of scholars scattered throughout Europe. They apparently figured out a way to communicate with one another even as postal services were in their infancy; they wrote letters, pamphlets, books; they occasionally visited one another; it was the precursor to what eventually became the peer-reviewed scientific journal, for disseminating discoveries of new knowledge. The participants were able to bypass political and religious censorship for nearly two centuries by participating in their not-so-little Republic of Letters. It was the ‘invisible college’ of internationally connected scholars and intellectuals” (p. 186) Who knew?!
The Republic of Letters was central in triggering the Industrial Revolution.
REASON (v. FAITH)
Much is written in these pages about “progress” as the result of embracing reason, as if reason had been a previously undiscovered aspect of the human consciousness. The text makes clear that in those two centuries between Columbus and Newton “the idea of progress had emerged victorious in areas where reason and experiment reigned.” (p. 253)
Mokyr shows the break that was needed to separate religious dominance over the soul of man when people’s relationship with their environment had been dictated by church dogma. He tells us “…that people’s relationship with their environment (came to be) based on intelligibility and instrumentality,” (p. 221) instead; and that what was crucial was the “metaphysical belief that the universe was knowable and manipulable.” (p. 277)
Dominance of Reason over Faith was pivotal to triggering the Industrial Revolution.
INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS (AS AN INSTITUTION)
Although Mokyr does cite “well-defined property rights,” contract enforcement, intellectual property protected by patents and copyrights, and the “rule of law” as critical in fostering technological progress, I was disappointed that he gave short shrift to John Locke (1632-1704) as the moral force behind establishing these rights as foundational for prosperity.
Mokyr’s glancing nod to, but without ever actually naming, individual rights is his contention that one of the requirements for the great material and spiritual growth of the Great Enrichment was “the belief that power and government are there not to serve the rich and powerful but society at large.” (p. 341). He doesn’t actually use the words, “individual rights,” but he tells us that government power is to be contained.
Institutionalizing “individual rights” was pivotal to triggering the Industrial Revolution.
INDIVIDUALISM (v. COLLECTIVISM)
Just as Mokyr gave us only a glancing nod to “individual rights,” so also did he seem to give us only a glancing nod to how individualism was born after an eternity of collectivism governing human life on earth.
He described countless instances of individualism as it emerged from the corruptions of endless collectivism, but he was reluctant to name it by name. This was my deepest disappointment in “A Culture of Growth.”
The rise of Individualism to compete with long-established Collectivism was necessary in triggering the Industrial Revolution.
THE BOTTOM LINE
“A Culture of Growth” is a heavily footnoted scholarly work, taking us on a trip showing what happened as mankind emerged from the Middle Ages and began using his own complex conceptual consciousness in ways previously unchartered.
If all of human history has been to record the long slog of mankind to bring into focus what had been a blur between the cognitive and the non-cognitive content of his own consciousness, Mokyr’s book shows us a snapshot of two critical centuries when much of the blur came into focus for the first time ever.
Professor Joel Mokyr credibly makes the case that a confluence of factors ignited the Industrial Revolution in Europe, and more broadly in Western Civilization. Foremost among the factors are the culture’s embrace of reason over faith; the embrace of individual rights institutionally; and the institutional (and legal) recognition of the individual above the collective, all in a culture of trade.
If the next generation can grasp the requirements for prosperity detailed in this volume, then perhaps mankind will attain the next mesa rather than falling back into the quagmire of its old collectivist past. Prof. Joel Mokyr has offered us a degree of clarity to help us to make the right choices, or not.
Joel Mokyr ©2017, 403 pages
A short book report by Ron Housley (9.26.2023)
Here we go again! I can’t count the times some version of the question has come up: “Why did the Industrial Revolution happen when it did and where it did, after so many centuries of human stagnation?” Why didn’t the stagnation just continue with its eternal history of “that’s just the way life on earth is?”
Joel Mokyr is professor of economics and history at Northwestern University, educated at Yale and Hebrew University of Jerusalem, respected author of important works in his field.
MY ATTRACTION TO THIS BOOK
My own outlook on this book’s central question has been that we witnessed a confluence of Enlightenment principles (reason, science, individualism, liberty) with the first political institution to ever align with those principles (America), whereupon the floodgates of productivity were opened.
I was curious about this author’s theme that the stage for the explosion of prosperity we enjoy today was set by cultural developments between Christopher Columbus and Isaac Newton, roughly between 1500 and 1700.
AUTHOR’S STARTING POINT
Joel Mokyr contends that during these two centuries, some little noticed, but pivotal, shifts took place: there was a gradual tendency to reward personal accomplishments in keeping with a subtle shift in values toward individualist rather than collectivist orientation; there was a gradual recognition that overall economic outcomes were related to individualism poking its head above the horizon; there was a gradual birth in the belief that economic progress is actually “possible;” and there was the concomitant belief that economic progress is “desirable.” Mokyr refers to these changes as the transition of “elite cultural beliefs,” a breaking down of “knowledge barriers that kept human society at living standards close to subsistence since the beginning of humanity.” (p. 340)
All this was a backlash, of sorts, against the centuries long belief that wealth accumulation was sinful, that a rich man would never enter “the kingdom of heaven.”
With both the possibility and the desirability of economic progress on the table, all that remained was to actually change the institutions which would allow the actually blossoming.
SIR FRANCIS BACON (1561-1626)
In my generation, every schoolboy was taught that Francis Bacon was responsible for specifying the “Scientific Method,” and was to be remembered for his famous: “Nature to be commanded must be obeyed.” What they did not teach us was the cultural climate from 1500 to 1700, when Bacon exerted his influence on the thinking of the day — which would be carried forward for many generations. Professor Mokyr goes on at some length to fill in the details of what my schoolboy education skipped over. What I missed was an appreciation for how attitudes about knowledge evolved in this period, how they took root in European culture, how they set the stage for the great expansion of knowledge and prosperity that was to follow. By the end of the chapter on Bacon, I was given to say: Long Live Francis Bacon! Who knew that in the 21st century, his legacy would not only have been forgotten, but worse, his scientific method forsaken(!).
SIR ISAAC NEWTON (1642-1727)
Mokyr gives us a big dose of Isaac Newton, too. As with Bacon, I had some schoolboy impressions: famous for those “laws of motion;” even more famous for his “Principia Mathematica” and as one of the inventors of the calculus; but most importantly as the first figure to represent the Enlightenment itself. Newton demonstrated to us that mankind could figure out how things worked in the natural world, that we could figure out how to “command” the nature that Bacon told us must be “obeyed.” So stupendous was Newton’s achievement that I have a portrait of him in my study, man at his best.
But the reason Mokyr includes Newton is to illustrate his own thesis that certain ideas were put in place during this era, ideas which made possible the Great Enrichment which came about once the Industrial Revolution began.
USEFUL KNOWLEDGE
By Mokyr’s accounting, the growing regard for “useful knowledge” began to take hold in the 16th and 17th centuries, after comparatively little such regard in all the centuries preceding. It is his contention that the exploding regard for “useful knowledge was key to (the) material progress” (p. 99) which was about to bestow upon mankind a prosperity never before imagined. Bacon and Newton apparently blazed the trail to “an understandable universe, that could and should be manipulated for the material benefit of humankind.” (p. 103).
At every step along the way there was notorious push-back by the Church, with accusations of man “playing God” or worse: contradicting God(!). But esteemed intellectuals of the era spoke loudly in favor of what Newton stood for: “the pursuit of sober self-interest, an endorsement of human domination over nature.” (p. 113)
FOUNDATIONS OF THE "GREAT ENRICHMENT"
Mokyr takes pains to develop the case that Europe’s support of education was NOT a critical element in the meteoric growth of wealth that eventually took place. “The great engineers and inventors who made the Industrial Revolution were rarely well educated.” (p. 125) He demonstrates that Chinese culture was educationally on par with Europe, yet failed to participate in the same material awakening.
Even though education per se may not have been an important factor, a crucial factor was the development of “new useful knowledge” discovered by scientists of the day, which in turn made the work of inventors and engineers possible. As Mokyr points out: “If all that were needed for the Industrial Revolution had been enlightened and ingenious artisans, it could have occurred centuries earlier.” (p. 274)
THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS
I asked myself: how did something so big and important as “The Republic of Letters” escape my awareness all these many decades? In a long section of his book, Mokyr details the birth and workings of this loose, transnational federation of scholars scattered throughout Europe. They apparently figured out a way to communicate with one another even as postal services were in their infancy; they wrote letters, pamphlets, books; they occasionally visited one another; it was the precursor to what eventually became the peer-reviewed scientific journal, for disseminating discoveries of new knowledge. The participants were able to bypass political and religious censorship for nearly two centuries by participating in their not-so-little Republic of Letters. It was the ‘invisible college’ of internationally connected scholars and intellectuals” (p. 186) Who knew?!
The Republic of Letters was central in triggering the Industrial Revolution.
REASON (v. FAITH)
Much is written in these pages about “progress” as the result of embracing reason, as if reason had been a previously undiscovered aspect of the human consciousness. The text makes clear that in those two centuries between Columbus and Newton “the idea of progress had emerged victorious in areas where reason and experiment reigned.” (p. 253)
Mokyr shows the break that was needed to separate religious dominance over the soul of man when people’s relationship with their environment had been dictated by church dogma. He tells us “…that people’s relationship with their environment (came to be) based on intelligibility and instrumentality,” (p. 221) instead; and that what was crucial was the “metaphysical belief that the universe was knowable and manipulable.” (p. 277)
Dominance of Reason over Faith was pivotal to triggering the Industrial Revolution.
INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS (AS AN INSTITUTION)
Although Mokyr does cite “well-defined property rights,” contract enforcement, intellectual property protected by patents and copyrights, and the “rule of law” as critical in fostering technological progress, I was disappointed that he gave short shrift to John Locke (1632-1704) as the moral force behind establishing these rights as foundational for prosperity.
Mokyr’s glancing nod to, but without ever actually naming, individual rights is his contention that one of the requirements for the great material and spiritual growth of the Great Enrichment was “the belief that power and government are there not to serve the rich and powerful but society at large.” (p. 341). He doesn’t actually use the words, “individual rights,” but he tells us that government power is to be contained.
Institutionalizing “individual rights” was pivotal to triggering the Industrial Revolution.
INDIVIDUALISM (v. COLLECTIVISM)
Just as Mokyr gave us only a glancing nod to “individual rights,” so also did he seem to give us only a glancing nod to how individualism was born after an eternity of collectivism governing human life on earth.
He described countless instances of individualism as it emerged from the corruptions of endless collectivism, but he was reluctant to name it by name. This was my deepest disappointment in “A Culture of Growth.”
The rise of Individualism to compete with long-established Collectivism was necessary in triggering the Industrial Revolution.
THE BOTTOM LINE
“A Culture of Growth” is a heavily footnoted scholarly work, taking us on a trip showing what happened as mankind emerged from the Middle Ages and began using his own complex conceptual consciousness in ways previously unchartered.
If all of human history has been to record the long slog of mankind to bring into focus what had been a blur between the cognitive and the non-cognitive content of his own consciousness, Mokyr’s book shows us a snapshot of two critical centuries when much of the blur came into focus for the first time ever.
Professor Joel Mokyr credibly makes the case that a confluence of factors ignited the Industrial Revolution in Europe, and more broadly in Western Civilization. Foremost among the factors are the culture’s embrace of reason over faith; the embrace of individual rights institutionally; and the institutional (and legal) recognition of the individual above the collective, all in a culture of trade.
If the next generation can grasp the requirements for prosperity detailed in this volume, then perhaps mankind will attain the next mesa rather than falling back into the quagmire of its old collectivist past. Prof. Joel Mokyr has offered us a degree of clarity to help us to make the right choices, or not.
May 4, 2017
In this book, Mokyr explores how cultural changes in Europe during the Scientific Revolution is different from past events, and how these changes led up to the Industrial Revolution. He talks about the how cultural evolution leads up to the Industrial Enlightenment. In particular, he argues that the change in the beliefs of a group of intellectual elites under the Republic of Letters led to the success of a competitive market for ideas. The common Baconian belief by the RoL that knowledge should be used to better human lives led to competition and open contest of knowledge. The adoption of the idea of progress and Puritanism also led to to the Industrial Enlightenment, where theory meets practice.
I had to read this book and do a review for one of my modules. The idea proposed by Mokyr is a refreshing one and I like how he manages to link culture to economics. He is also quite specific in the kind of culture he is looking at and provides a coherent and consistent argument throughout the book. His comparison of China to Europe instead of Britain made the whole idea less Eurocentric as well, and he doesn't disprove alternative theories brought up by other economists and historians. This also serves the double-edged effect of making his thesis less strong though, because it is hard to get a grasp of the main argument when you bring in all other theories and say they play a part here and there. The points get pretty messy. And the book is pretty repetitive at some points I feel? The lead up to the book was also pretty draggy, and it was so hard for me to carry on.
Oh he had a nice witty twist at the end of his book about this book contributing to the market for ideas, which I thought was really cool.
I had to read this book and do a review for one of my modules. The idea proposed by Mokyr is a refreshing one and I like how he manages to link culture to economics. He is also quite specific in the kind of culture he is looking at and provides a coherent and consistent argument throughout the book. His comparison of China to Europe instead of Britain made the whole idea less Eurocentric as well, and he doesn't disprove alternative theories brought up by other economists and historians. This also serves the double-edged effect of making his thesis less strong though, because it is hard to get a grasp of the main argument when you bring in all other theories and say they play a part here and there. The points get pretty messy. And the book is pretty repetitive at some points I feel? The lead up to the book was also pretty draggy, and it was so hard for me to carry on.
Oh he had a nice witty twist at the end of his book about this book contributing to the market for ideas, which I thought was really cool.
November 14, 2018
Too much tautology, what does culture the word mean, how does the author use the word. This discussion is 10% of book. And the narrative of book is after a culture discussion non-existent and comes across as ODTAA (one damn thing after another) history book.
July 25, 2021
Prof. Mokyr is very erudite. The book is a tome and very well written. Francis Bacon and Newton were awesome. And if Newton had not come along Leibniz would have done just as well. As Euclid and Pythagoras had done years ago.
Any kind of growth, national, modern, local needs capital. A LOT of capital. The GDP of the Mughal Empire during Shah Jahan's era was 27x that of Louis XIV. That's a lot of capital. In fact Pliny the Elder complained that tens of thousands of talents of gold and silver were disappearing into India from trade back in 77 CE. Pliny was pretty grumpy about that.
Prof. Utsa Patnaik; Oxford trained economist has estimated that $48 Trillion was appropriated/transferred (pinched) by the British Empire and re-invested in US, Canada, NZ and Australia and also in industrialization. India was de-industrialized. No more gun, canon making, fabrics, silks, the Taj Mahal, ship building nope wasn't allowed. What could be produced? Why opium, tea and blue aniline dye.
According to Margaret C. Jacob's First Knowledge Economy its the practical application of science that led to Industrial revolution.
The New World provided vast new lands for agriculture (after the Native people were eliminated).
India + China (Captive Markets) = $$$$$$$$$$$$
$$$$$$$$$$$$ = Technology Application + Knowledge + Massive Factories
The New World = Food goods + Timber for the Royal Navy
Industrial finished good -> (Captive Markets) = $$$$$$$$$$$$
Its pretty simple.
I wish respected economists and historians like Irfan Habib and Joel Mokyr could write that more meaningful and deeper view of how Modern Economies came about.
Any kind of growth, national, modern, local needs capital. A LOT of capital. The GDP of the Mughal Empire during Shah Jahan's era was 27x that of Louis XIV. That's a lot of capital. In fact Pliny the Elder complained that tens of thousands of talents of gold and silver were disappearing into India from trade back in 77 CE. Pliny was pretty grumpy about that.
Prof. Utsa Patnaik; Oxford trained economist has estimated that $48 Trillion was appropriated/transferred (pinched) by the British Empire and re-invested in US, Canada, NZ and Australia and also in industrialization. India was de-industrialized. No more gun, canon making, fabrics, silks, the Taj Mahal, ship building nope wasn't allowed. What could be produced? Why opium, tea and blue aniline dye.
According to Margaret C. Jacob's First Knowledge Economy its the practical application of science that led to Industrial revolution.
The New World provided vast new lands for agriculture (after the Native people were eliminated).
India + China (Captive Markets) = $$$$$$$$$$$$
$$$$$$$$$$$$ = Technology Application + Knowledge + Massive Factories
The New World = Food goods + Timber for the Royal Navy
Industrial finished good -> (Captive Markets) = $$$$$$$$$$$$
Its pretty simple.
I wish respected economists and historians like Irfan Habib and Joel Mokyr could write that more meaningful and deeper view of how Modern Economies came about.
June 25, 2017
Joel Mokyr continua con el tren de ideas The Gift of Athena y An Enlighted Economy explorando los origines de la revolución industrial. Esta vez lo hace desde el punto de vista de los cambios culturales que se dan en Europa entre 1500 y 1700, aproximadamente entre el descubrimiento de América y la publicación de Philophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica de Newton.
En este periodo se establecio una red intra-continental de cientificos y filosofos "La república de las letras" en la que el conocimiento de sus integrantes se difundia y permitia ser replicado y mejorado con el tiempo. Este proceso eventualmente llevo al nacimiento de las academías de ciencia como la Royal Society en Inglaterra. De acuerdo a Mokyr los origines de la ilustración y despues de la revolución industrial se encuentran en la naturalza libre del flujo de información de esta comunidas, de la naturaleza abierta de la ciencia de la época y el surgimiento de la concepción practica del conocimiento, el conocimiento como vía para mejorar las condiciones materiales de las sociedades y la riqueza de los estados.
El libro hace una revisión profunda de la los trabajos desde Bacon hasta Darwin en occidente y de filosofos Chinos del siglo X con el proposito de contratar la evolución cultural y cientifica Europea vis á vis con la ocurrida en China (los últimos dos capitulos). Es una lectura recomendable para complementar el entendimiento sobre los origines de la gran divergencia que hasta nuestros tiempos comienza a revertirse.
En este periodo se establecio una red intra-continental de cientificos y filosofos "La república de las letras" en la que el conocimiento de sus integrantes se difundia y permitia ser replicado y mejorado con el tiempo. Este proceso eventualmente llevo al nacimiento de las academías de ciencia como la Royal Society en Inglaterra. De acuerdo a Mokyr los origines de la ilustración y despues de la revolución industrial se encuentran en la naturalza libre del flujo de información de esta comunidas, de la naturaleza abierta de la ciencia de la época y el surgimiento de la concepción practica del conocimiento, el conocimiento como vía para mejorar las condiciones materiales de las sociedades y la riqueza de los estados.
El libro hace una revisión profunda de la los trabajos desde Bacon hasta Darwin en occidente y de filosofos Chinos del siglo X con el proposito de contratar la evolución cultural y cientifica Europea vis á vis con la ocurrida en China (los últimos dos capitulos). Es una lectura recomendable para complementar el entendimiento sobre los origines de la gran divergencia que hasta nuestros tiempos comienza a revertirse.
September 6, 2023
Joel Mokyr sets forth an intriguing case for cultural factors being of decisive importance in the Great Divergence, the point where Europe embarked on sustained economic growth and progressed beyond the rest of the world. The description of how the Republic of Letters contributed to a new idea of progress based on useful knowledge feels inspiring, and the evolutionary framework laid forth at the start of the book is a useful one. The chapters where he compares Europe with China feel enlightening as well and steer clear of mindlessly worshipping Europe's fortunes.
However, he largely snubs material explanations of the Great Divergence in his book, rarely if ever giving them proper attention. As a result, one cannot help but feel like the book leaves out an important part of the environment in which cultural beliefs could evolve. Additionally, by ignoring material conditions it cannot shed light on whether current economic growth would have been possible without the help of fossil fuels, nor does it pay any attention to how colonization might have aided the West. As such, this book does not convince on trading materialist explanations for the more idealist ones that Mokyr himself clearly prefers.
However, he largely snubs material explanations of the Great Divergence in his book, rarely if ever giving them proper attention. As a result, one cannot help but feel like the book leaves out an important part of the environment in which cultural beliefs could evolve. Additionally, by ignoring material conditions it cannot shed light on whether current economic growth would have been possible without the help of fossil fuels, nor does it pay any attention to how colonization might have aided the West. As such, this book does not convince on trading materialist explanations for the more idealist ones that Mokyr himself clearly prefers.
June 20, 2023
Mokyr tackles some fundamental questions of growth: why did the industrial revolution occur in Europe instead of elsewhere? Why did it occur at all? Mokyr argues for the importance of a fragmented polity and fractured land. Thankfully, he steers clear of any arguments founded on cultural superiority, highlighting instead the importance of contingency and (exogenous) circumstance. A fragmented, competitive environment, combined with some lucky breaks, allowed for a virtuous circle between practical innovation by the hands of craftspeople and advances in natural philosophy needed to systematize knowledge and sustain more advanced innovations. I previously would have credited the industrial revolution to the marginal innovations of craftspeople reaching some tipping point. Monocausal explanations of economic growth are seldom satisfactory, so I'm glad to have gotten a richer view of this important period.
March 19, 2024
I listened to the Audiobook version. While I found the authors argument compelling, I found the book to be somewhat repetitive. The author often made the same point using slightly different adjectives producing quite a verbose structure. While the amount of knowledge contained within the book is almost encyclopedic, I wish the author would have engaged more with the large empirical literature on the development of culture, institutions, and industry, in early modern Europe, found both in political science and Economics. If the author wished to argue that economists should focus more growth, I feel an essay would have been more appropriate. If the author, wished (as I suspect) to make a causal argument, I feel that at least some empirical evidence should be provided. Ironically, he quite convincingly argues in favour of the value of hard evidence in the book, and I wish he would have followed his own advice.
January 12, 2024
The book makes an interesting point on why the Industrial Revolution and subsequent explosive economic growth occurred in Europe rather than in other places. Mokyr argues that the key factor that contributed to the Great Divergence are changes in the cultural environment of European scientists and intellectuals 200 years before the Industrial Revolution. This environment included the victory of the moderns over the ancients ('irreverence is the key to progress'), large epistolary networks, belief that nature was governed by a set of rules that were to be discovered by man and used for material progress, and most importantly, contestability of new knowledge. My only problem with the book is that it seems long and repetitive and at times it's hard to follow.
February 12, 2024
Every now and then you read (or bother to read) a book that is able to fundamentally change your view on something important - this is such a book.
Mokyr is trying to understand why the industrial revolution happened and specifically what factors enabled it to happen in Europe. As the title suggests he argues that Europe saw a unique confluence of cultural, scientific and technological breakthroughs that emerged in specific intellectual and political circumstances that enabled the industrial revolution to happen.
The book is not an easy read, it's very much written for historians with a somewhat laboured and overly structural style to each chapter and it very much could've done with a punchy summary at the start to guide the reader.
Mokyr is trying to understand why the industrial revolution happened and specifically what factors enabled it to happen in Europe. As the title suggests he argues that Europe saw a unique confluence of cultural, scientific and technological breakthroughs that emerged in specific intellectual and political circumstances that enabled the industrial revolution to happen.
The book is not an easy read, it's very much written for historians with a somewhat laboured and overly structural style to each chapter and it very much could've done with a punchy summary at the start to guide the reader.
February 16, 2021
Mokyr, the non plus ultra of erudition, explores the interaction of the cultural entrepreneurs that ultimately led to the Industrial Revolution. Why did it take place in Europe? What was the contribution of Luther, Paracelsus, Marx and Darwin to economic growth? What made European intellectuals challenge Ptolemy, Aristotle, or Galen? Find out in this sensationally good book, one of the best I have ever read.
March 4, 2023
Interesting questions try to get answered in this book, with the overarching one being "what was the social (culture/institutions) environment that allowed Europe to enter an era of sustained increase of useful knowledge?"
I felt that much of the writing was unnecessary for a non-technical reader. Maybe I am not the right audience for this book.
Read it if you have a background in economic history and want to enrich it with an additional point of view.
I felt that much of the writing was unnecessary for a non-technical reader. Maybe I am not the right audience for this book.
Read it if you have a background in economic history and want to enrich it with an additional point of view.
February 4, 2024
Original thinking biilt upon an impressively rich base of absorbed scholarship...to tell our story.
Highly recommended. The missing piece of the puzzle of where our model world comes from. Explains what really happened when the most momentous transformation in human history brought us into a radically new level of existence without anyone orchestrating, planning, intending, controlling or even anticipating its occurrence.e
Highly recommended. The missing piece of the puzzle of where our model world comes from. Explains what really happened when the most momentous transformation in human history brought us into a radically new level of existence without anyone orchestrating, planning, intending, controlling or even anticipating its occurrence.e
December 30, 2023
While this is clearly an important book, this is not one I enjoyed reading. I probably skipped half the content for lack of interest, and only remember the one paragraph summary of the thesis, which I pretty much knew going into it already.
Given its significance, and because maybe it was just bad timing on my part, and will try to get back to it at some point.
Given its significance, and because maybe it was just bad timing on my part, and will try to get back to it at some point.
November 27, 2017
Emphasizes the importance of the Scientific Revolution to the long-term success of industrialization. Altered my view of things, although I think there is more merit to Allen's British Industrialization in Global Perspective (2009) than Mokyr does.
July 13, 2018
Simply great
August 23, 2018
A well-researched analysis of interrelated factors leading to the Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, and modern growth. The academic writing style makes for a convincing but dry read.
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