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WP 00-1

Joel Mokyr. Knowledge, Technology, and Economic Growth During the Industrial Revolution.

Keywords: Evolution of knowledge, economic growth, positive feedback..

Abstract:

This paper is an application of evolutionary theory to a concrete historical problem, namely explaining the timing of the Industrial Revolution in the last third of the eighteenth century. The argument is that useful knowledge (that is, knowledge and understanding of natural phenomena and regularities) constrains the form that techniques can take. It defines the central concept of an epistemic base of a technique, which describes how much of the natural forces underlying the functioning of a technique are understood. The paper then argues that despite of the widespread notion that science had little to do with the Industrial Revolution, the rapid changes in the diffusion of and access to useful knowledge as much as scientific breakthroughs, helped make the Industrial Revolution possible. In that way, the scientific revolution and the enlightenment triggered an “information revolution” that helps explain the timing of the Industrial Revolution. This view is reinforced by pointing out that the unique historical event was not just the traditional “wave of gadgets” of the 1760s and 1770s but the fact that these did not peter out in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The technological system in Western Europe, and especially in Britain, shows growing positive feedback and complementarity between techniques and the useful knowledge underlying them leading eventually to a self-reinforcing dynamic system of technological progress.

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