Mokyr's Reading Flashcards
2 fundamental assumptions of the causes of the Great Divergence
- modern economic growth started in the “West” — that is, selected economies in the northern Atlantic region
- Britain was a leader, while Continental Europe was a follower, if a rather quick one.
Correlation between convergence club and European enlightenment
- “convergence club” — countries that were industrialized, urbanized, educated, and rich
- correlation: countries belong to this club were subjected to the European Enlightenment in 18th cent
- strong correlation is not in and of itself proof of causality
How did The the Enlightenment affect the economy (2)
through two mechanisms
- the attitude toward technology and the role it should play in human affairs
- institutions and the degree to which rent-seeking and redistribution should be tolerated
What is the ‘epistemic base’ underlying a technology?
Narrow epistemic base refers to the people who invented the techniques did not have much of a clue as to why and how they worked
thorough understanding and knowledge of how tech and methodology works and are integrated
Advantages of narrow epistemic base
such a lack of an epistemic base does not necessarily preclude the development of new techniques through trial and error and simple serendipit
Disadvantages of narrow epistemic base
makes the subsequent wave of micro-inventions that adapt and improve the technique and create the sustained productivity growth much slower and more costly.
no one knows what will not work and thus increase the costs of research and experimentation
Characteristics that identify useful knowledge
knowledge that:
- details out what works
- details out what does not work
- => holistic
Difference bw propositional and prescriptive knowledge
prescriptive knowledge: understanding of the “how to” knowledge underlying the invention; more specific and detailed
propositional knowledge: the “what”, broader definition of knowledge, catalogs of phenomena and regularities that could be relied upon even if the underlying processes were not quite understood
Narrow epistemic base during the IR
- difficult to link the main technological breakthroughs of the Industrial Revolution to the scientific discoveries of its time
- main advances during the first stage of the Industrial Revolution (say, 1760-1800) were only weakly based on science but its subsequent momentum increasingly came to depend on prescriptive knowledge
- epistemic base of inventions does not only include a modern definition of science but did include propositional knowledge to temporarily depend on
Differences in knowledge and its impact on modern econ growth
- Prescriptive needed for sustainability
- Propositonal needed to push forward and reach towards the prescriptive
Understanding of tech vs. understanding of market on growth
- Growth was possible through capital accumulation, increasing trade, better internal allocations, freer markets, and improved institutions. But all of those processes would eventually run into diminishing returns.
- It is technology that remains at the foundation of modern economic growth
- Tech = what keeps growth sustainable, all else are catalysts
Definition of European Enlightenment
- intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries that were celebration of reason
- much of it concerned with natural law and justice, religious and political tolerance, human rights and freedom, inequality, legal reform, and much else
- At the deepest level, however, the common denominator was the belief in the possibility and desirability of human progress and perfectibility through reason and knowledge
What caused the two types of knowledge to establish closer interaction during the Enlightenment?
- Baconian philosophy and Newton’s achievement
- Baconian: produce innovations of which through technological progress consisted of the application of the inductive and experimental method to investigate and reorganise science as a human activity
- Newton: establish the prestige of formal science in the world of learning
=> method: by way of exploration and discovery, trial-and-error processes minimally informed by an understanding of the natural processes at work, inspired tinkering, and a great deal of serendipity and good fortune
=> result: the growth of useful knowledge would solve technological problems and that the dissemination of existing knowledge to more and more people would have what we could call today substantial efficiency gains
What was the link between tolerance and innovation?
Process that Enlightenment made a difference to the growth of useful knowledge:
- agenda
- capabilities
- selection
- diffusion.
(tapped these areas to for persuasion)
Innovation and agenda
- “Baconian Program” increasingly served as the key to the agenda of researchers.
- The idea was that knowledge was supposed to be “useful” — morally, socially, and increasingly, materially.
- Society was improvable through knowledge, and the purpose of the study of nature and experimentation was to help solve practical problems just as much and eventually more so than to satisfy human curiosity or to demonstrate the wisdom of the creator
- idea of turning research into useful knowledge was larger than the discovery of underlying general laws
- Many of the investigations of the eighteenth century were in the style of the “three C’s”: counting, cataloguing, classifying
=> persuade through description and organisation of knowledge to be utilised in the most useful way
as a result
- broaden the epistemic base of some techniques that had been in use for centuries becuase scientists felt an acute responsibility to help improve the material world (e.g.chlorine bleaching technique, the lightning rod, and the mining safety lamp. )
- efforts were reinforced by commercial interests, which created a literal market in knowledge
