Mokyr (2017) — A Culture of Growth

Citation. Mokyr, Joel. A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy. Princeton University Press, 2017.

Summary

The Great-Divergence-scale extension of Mokyr’s earlier work (The Gifts of Athena, The Enlightened Economy). Argues that the decisive European advantage was epistemic: Europe assembled, over the early modern period, an open-knowledge ecosystem — the Republic of Letters, scientific societies, universities, printing presses, learned correspondence networks — that produced a self-sustaining feedback loop between propositional knowledge (natural philosophy) and prescriptive knowledge (technique and craft). No other civilization had the combination of institutional openness, transnational scholarly networks, and normative commitment to open-knowledge sharing at this density.

The book explicitly engages the Needham question (why didn’t Chinese science produce modern science?) and argues the answer is institutional: Chinese intellectual life was organized around the imperial examination system and the bureaucratic state rather than around autonomous scholarly societies; it had great individual thinkers but no cumulative-knowledge infrastructure comparable to Europe’s. Shifts Mokyr’s earlier framework from an IR-scale argument to a civilizational-scale one.

Key claims

• Modern economic growth is substantially an epistemic phenomenon: a transformation in how knowledge is produced, verified, and shared.
• Europe built the institutional infrastructure for cumulative useful-knowledge production — Republic of Letters, scientific societies, universities, printing — in a uniquely effective combination between roughly 1500 and 1800.
• The Needham question resolves through institutional differences: Chinese intellectual life was organized around the imperial examination and bureaucracy, not around autonomous scholarly networks; this explains the absence of a Chinese Scientific Revolution despite Chinese intellectual capability.
• The Industrial Revolution is intelligible only against this multi-century epistemic background; factor-price and coal explanations are necessary but insufficient.
• Modern economic growth everywhere is downstream of this European epistemic achievement, or of its transplantation/emulation elsewhere.