Creative Forces

Joel Mokyr from the May 1993 issue

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The exact form that technological reaction will take differs from society to society. In some cases, reactionary governments simply close economies off to the rest of the world, and an iron bureaucracy either suppresses innovation altogether or channels it in directions deemed worthy by the rulers. This happened in Tokugawa Japan, Qing China, and Communist Albania; it is happening in Myanmar (Burma) and North Korea today.

In other cases, vested interests will use violence to block progress. The Roman Emperor Tiberius is reported to have executed an inventor who claimed to have come up with unbreakable glass, out of fear for his interests in glass making. Nineteenth-century inventors often fled for their lives to escape vengeful artisans. Professional trade associations, craft guilds, and regulations ossified the production process and made it impossible to deviate from established rules. Labor unions, with some exceptions, have been traditionally hostile to machines, which they feared would take their jobs.

In our time, well-meaning environmentalists, greedy product-liability lawyers, and feather-bedding unionists are contributing to the problem. Simply put, Cardwell's Law works because technological creativity is a delicate and fragile flower that needs just the right institutional environment to thrive. Yet in a truly dialectical manner, its very success usually destroys the environment it needs to survive.

If the global village is to consist of coordinated institutions and unified laws (and not just the free movement of goods and people between different countries), technological progress could disappear altogether from our world, because by definition there would be no one to take over once Cardwell's Law took full effect. This has happened before: The Roman Empire, the closest the "world" ever got to a global village, was surprisingly uncreative technologically and was rescued from complete stasis only by non-citizens living outside it. Much the same can be said about the Chinese Empire in its last centuries. For its citizens, it was "the world," and its repressive institutions encountered no outside competition. The result was that the Chinese fell rapidly behind more creative societies, and they were in for a rude awakening when the proud empire was humiliated by its defeat in the Opium Wars of the 1840s.

What this story suggests is that the unification of Western Europe in an ever tighter E.C., if it occurs, might involve unexpected long-term costs. A France and a Germany more closely integrated in the E.C. are less likely to fight. As their institutions and laws become more and more like each other's, diversity and competitiveness will be reduced. If this trend continues, global diversity and competition could be endangered. We are still a long distance from this, and it is not yet clear how far the trend has gone.

Moreover, a partial integration such as the E.C. may be a net improvement. After all, a world consisting of a small number of large, open, but distinct and competitive "villages" in a "Global County" might be the best of all possible outcomes. The loss of internal competition within Europe, with the growing unification brought on by the E.C., could be offset by a growing competition between a European "village," a North American "village," a Pacific "village," and so on.

For this utopian outcome to occur, three important conditions have to be met. First, the blocs have to remain separate and competitive. Second, nationalism should not be allowed to weaken the blocs internally. This has already happened in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, with devastating results. It is unlikely to happen in North America, and the North American Free Trade Agreement clearly strengthens this bloc (although Quebec separatism is an unhappy exception). Finally, the competitive game between the blocs must remain firmly committed to peaceful rules: Trade wars, let alone another Pearl Harbor, would be devastating to it.

The historical parallel is Europe between 1850 and 1914, an era of unprecedented technological development growing out of healthy competition, all brought to naught by World War I. The Cold War had similar technological side benefits; but a number of times it got a little too close to the brink for comfort. Competition between nation-states is a knife-edged point: Too little of it may lead to stagnation, but too much could lead to catastrophe. Maneuvering between the twin possibilities of the eruption of disastrous war and global lethargy is not going to be made easier by Muslim fundamentalism, Balkan tribalism, Oriental ethnic arrogance, or Western xenophobia. Yet these dangers have always been there. In retrospect, the most surprising thing is perhaps that we have come this far.