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The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress | 
 enlarge | Author: Joel Mokyr
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  12 reviews
Sales Rank: 349845
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5.3 x 0.7
ISBN: 0195074777
Dewey Decimal Number: 338.064
EAN: 9780195074772
ASIN: 0195074777
Publication Date: April 9, 1992
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Product Description
In a world of supercomputers, genetic engineering, and fiber optics, technological creativity is ever more the key to economic success. But why are some nations more creative than others, and why do some highly innovative societies--such as ancient China, or Britain in the industrial revolution--pass into stagnation? Beginning with a fascinating, concise history of technological progress, Mokyr sets the background for his analysis by tracing the major inventions and innovations that have transformed society since ancient Greece and Rome. What emerges from this survey is often surprising: the classical world, for instance, was largely barren of new technology, the relatively backward society of medieval Europe bristled with inventions, and the period between the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution was one of slow and unspectacular progress in technology, despite the tumultuous developments associated with the Voyages of Discovery and the Scientific Revolution. What were the causes of technological creativity? Mokyr distinguishes between the relationship of inventors and their physical environment--which determined their willingness to challenge nature--and the social environment, which determined the openness to new ideas. He discusses a long list of such factors, showing how they interact to help or hinder a nation's creativity, and then illustrates them by a number of detailed comparative studies, examining the differences between Europe and China, between classical antiquity and medieval Europe, and between Britain and the rest of Europe during the industrial revolution. He examines such aspects as the role of the state (the Chinese gave up a millenium-wide lead in shipping to the Europeans, for example, when an Emperor banned large ocean-going vessels), the impact of science, as well as religion, politics, and even nutrition. He questions the importance of such commonly-cited factors as the spill-over benefits of war, the abundance of natural resources, life expectancy, and labor costs. Today, an ever greater number of industrial economies are competing in the global market, locked in a struggle that revolves around technological ingenuity. The Lever of Riches, with its keen analysis derived from a sweeping survey of creativity throughout history, offers telling insights into the question of how Western economies can maintain, and developing nations can unlock, their creative potential.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 7 more reviews...
 Boring February 5, 2008
This was another book required by my European Economic History class. While there is a ton of useful information in this book, it didn't feel like there were any original insights or theories. For anyone who knows a lot about the Industrial Revolution, this book is just a regurgitation of existing ideas.
 More than a historical explination of innovation! November 22, 2007
This book is an in-depth study in why technological Creativity happens. Mokyr is doing more than just discussing history; he is giving it intellectual context. The reader should expect to think deeply about why certain innovations did or did not happen.
Anyone interested in how humanity has struggled within our world to advance productivity, increase quality of life, and sustain ever-increasing population growth will be enlightened by this book.
This book is complemented excellently with Mokyr's 2002 book "The Gifts of Athena."
 The Economics of Progress March 30, 2006
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
This is an important book about the historical process that not so long ago was unashamedly called "progress." Mokyr is professor of economics at Northwestern and author of The Economics of the Industrial Revolution. The present work undertakes a systematic cross-cultural, longitudinal study of the causes and conditions of economic growth. A central contention is that contemporary microeconomics lacks the conceptual equipment to elucidate the increment to economic growth supplied by technological change. This is a startling claim: can a science founded in industrialising Scotland to explain the causes of the wealth of nations fail to explicate what everyone knows is the mainspring of economic growth? Mokyr aligns with economists who believe that this is so. They call their heterodoxy "Schumpeterian economics." In the Theory of Economic Development (1912), Joseph Schumpeter emphasized that innovation is the fundamental impulse of capitalist production. Innovation is all-sided. Production, product, resource procurement, efficiency, and marketing are all drawn into the kinetic performance. The key to this dynamism was the relentless, aggressive drive of entrepreneurs. His contemporary heirs replace the entrepreneur by the inventor as the chief wealth-producing agent. While this assessment of the critical role of technology may seem obvious to the layman, it's scandalous in microeconomics.
Readers are alerted to heterodoxy on the first page when Mokyr signals that his findings are at odds with "one of the most pervasive half-truths that economists teach their students, . . . that there is no such thing as a free lunch." We are apprised that it is the specific achievement of technology to deliver banquets for millions. It does so thanks to transactions between creative minds and nature that result in tapping natural powers and harnessing them to productive output. The wheel, the sail, the water mill, the wind mill (a wheel-sail), and the steam engine exemplify ways by which ingenuity coaxes nature into delivering disposable power at a precise point. These transactions occur outside the domain of market exchange, although they may and often do intersect with exchange. But it is not obvious to orthodox economics, whose doctrine is that technological innovation can be calculated as a response to market demand or else as a production cost. Mokyr answers that technological input is supply-led in the double sense that technology creates products and services unimagined by consumers, and that technology creates the incomes that make a demand for technology possible.
Mokyr's strategy for supplementing economics with a theory of technological innovation is to accept the half-truth that growth can be understood within economics of commercial expansion, size and scale effects, and investment. This will capture "microinnovation," that is, efficiency improvements and other changes that are made more or less spontaneously in the course of production. But then he passes on to macroinnovationm, which "involves an attack . . . on a constraint that everyone else takes as given" (9). Macroinnovators are mavericks who would change the givens. Market reward doesn't come easy. The strategy is to focus micro- and macroinnovation simultaneously in selected time-slices, and to examine their cross-fertilisation as well as the intersections between macroinnovation and the market.
The study is divided into historical narrative and systematics. The narrative covers classical antiquity, the middle ages, and the development of technology in western Europe from 1500 to 1914. The systematics is assisted by three comparative studies, of classical antiquity and medieval Europe, of China and Europe, and of Britain and Europe. Each study develops a theme meant to elucidate why macroinnovations occur and the circumstances that influence their uptake into production. They illustrate of the book's centrepiece, an analytical chapter entitled "Understanding Technological Progress." The second part of the author's systematics attempts to forge links between the dynamics of technological change and the Darwinian analysis of evolutionary change. This is a very ambitious undertaking, not easily understandable without specialist knowledge of evolutionary thought.
Here are some of Mokyr's results:
* Opposition to technological innovation is culturally pandemic. Often it's income- and market-related. Labour combinations and tariffs, over many centuries, document attempts to protect inefficient productive methods. There's also a syndrome of technology aversion. Islam and China after 1400 A.D. exhibit this syndrome after having passed through a long period of technology development. These cultures became progressively more risk-averse and xenophobic to the point of stigmatizing the imitation of foreign innovations. His description of the closure of these cultures helps understand the values and institutional prescriptions that arrest innovation; but what occasioned this turn-about? Mokyr believes that it expressed conservatism or risk-aversion at the power centers of society, that is, anxiety about loss of social control.
* Status values and the structure of preferences in a culture may assign low status to commerce or technology or both. This well-known diagnosis of Greek and Roman antiquity is confirmed by the author's investigations. He reminds us that this preference structure was nuanced. The Greeks discovered the science of mechanics and developed metallurgy and machine construction to a high pitch. But in the Greco-Roman world machines of war and building construction were the only areas in which sustained applications were made.
* Governments do not figure in Mokyr's study as significant promoters of technological innovation. The positive role of the mandarins prior to the onset of risk-aversion is emphasised, as is the strong affirmation of technology development in revolutionary and Bonapartist France. But these are exceptions; the author is more impressed by the tendency of governments to discourage innovation. The optimum recipe was the circumstance of early modern Europe, where a diversity of competing states and domestic institutions removed the option of risk-aversion taken in China and Islam. This diagnosis is confirmed by those cases where monarchs successfully imposed risk-aversion-Spain and Hapsburg went into economic decline. Since the author's history stops at 1914, we are left wondering whether the strong involvement of governments in R & D since 1945 marks a fundamental enhancement of the institutional capacity to promote technological innovation. The Soviet Union developed its technology entirely under government auspices, with mixed success. Perhaps Mokyr will explore this experience in a subsequent publication.
* The influence of ambient attitudes is discussed episodically throughout the study. The prevailing thought is that technological development is fostered best by an environment open to new ideas and new practices, which is not risk-averse and not intolerant, and which accords dignity to inventors and inventions. Religions are reckoned to be endogenous variables expressing a society's preference structure; Mokyr observes wryly that "every society . . . gets the religion it deserves" (171). The social rigidity of the Hindu religion strongly discouraged innovation, whereas the Judeo-Christian affirmation of man's dominion over nature provided support for technological intervention. Lynn White's fine studies of the Benedictine order are cited to substantiate this claim. The Protestant ethic is not mentioned as a relevant consideration.
Coming now to innovation and invention themselves, Mokyr treats them as aggregates and seeks to discern their properties. He stipulates that growth through invention and innovation is "any change in the application of information to the production process in such a way as to increase efficiency, resulting either in the production of a given output with fewer resources (i.e., lower costs) or the production of better or new products" (6). An invention is an increment in the set of total knowledge of a society, which is in turn the union of sets of individual technical knowledge. Since an invention that isn't utilized is without economic effect, the on-going synchronization of invention and innovation are critical to sustaining economic growth. The absence of this synchronisation is the reason why few societies have been technologically creative.
Space doesn't permit a discussion of Mokyr's extended analogy between organic evolution and the cultural evolution of technology. Let it be said that he endorses the punctuated equilibrium model of evolution because it incorporates macroevolution. As for the underlying psychology that microeconomics never elucidates, Mokyr's thinking is convergence with my own elucidation of "polytechnic rationality" which I developed in The Politics of Progress: The Origins and Development of the Commercial Republic.
Great Information -- And Read the Reviews Too December 28, 2004
This is a scholarly and fact-focused treatment of a subject that has often been treated in a way that is meant to support a particular author's theoretical framework. The subject is complicated, and the book does a good job of dealing with the facts. As is so often the case, the most valuable part of the book is the commentary it elicits, so if you're going to go to the effort of reading the book, take the extra ten minutes to read whatever commentaries/reviews it gets, too. Just the ones on Amazon are pretty helpful for putting it in context.
dgc
Understanding the history of wealth November 6, 2004
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Understanding topics of human achievement often means understanding their history. Such is the case when we investigate the creation of unprecedented wealth during the last centuries of our existence. The result is as we see it, but it could have been very different. An indeed, many examples of similar initial conditions exist, which did not translate into an industrial revolution, and hence a "lever of riches".
And so, this is a book of history. Indeed, the creation of wealth is more than the economic decision to put so many people with so many tools at work, in order to produce so much output. After history went its course, it turns out that some people can produce many, many times over what other people can do during a similar period of time.
The question is why, and that answer is easy: technology. Having, and being able to use it, technology is the difference between eking out a living at the margin of subsistence, or breaking through age-old Malthusian constraints. The hard question is why some people do, and others do not, have the use of this technology.
The history part shows in a very clear way, and into some modest detail, how many societies of the past at some point stagnated, while a few, including medieval Europe did not. But apart from learning history, we also learn to think *about* history. What influence have factors like, say, climate? Or religion? Can we learn something by borrowing models from evolutionary theory?
Apart from theoretical considerations, there is also a good deal of more practical history. How does Roman Europe compare with medieval Europe? Why did Europe see progress at an age and a stage where China did not, or at least much less? And why did England take off in a way that turned the rest of Europe into a bunch of followers?
The picture that emerges is one where a multitude of necessary conditions have to combine into a long story of increasing capability and efficiency. Only if and when those conditions are met, societies make the kind of progress that allows them to follow the road to improving material life. And though the book thereby confirms this road is not necessarily an easy one for those who didn't find it yet, it also yields some thoughts about how to hand over our own lever of riches to those who still need it so much.
As I would reserve 5 stars for those truly outstanding books you should read as a masterpiece of art, even if you couldn't care less about the topic, I will quote this book four stars. Highly recommended if you're interested in this subject.
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