preview

A Culture Of Growth

Decent Essays

Joel Mokyr, author of A Culture of Growth, explains the beginning of modern economy where growth was considered ordinary from a cultural aspect. He focuses on the period from around 1500 to mid18th century in Europe, the first development of modern economic growth. The Enlightenment and the growth of useful knowledge become central concepts. Modern economic grown lead to the Great Divergence among countries who were rich versus poor. Growth and perpetual change of this stature was not just an increase in demand and labor or even investments. Geography lends to some of the differences between countries however it does not explain why growth was more or less successful due to emerging and sustaining growth of the region. Innovation to the greatest …show more content…

Those countries that innovated later or to a lesser degree were limited by factor costs, which made the innovation make less of an impact. However, Mokyr dismisses this interpretation. Industrial Britain was where innovation really began. He searches for the cultural origins of economic growth. Mokyr concludes his search about the relationship between institutions and culture with the idea that they go hand in hand. Mokyr says “culture is a set of beliefs, values, and preferences, capable of affecting behavior, that are socially (not genetically) transmitted and that are shared by some subset of society.” Propositional knowledge focuses nature’s inner workings, while prescriptive knowledge focuses on techniques. This is what Mokyr refers to when he mentions commonly known science and technology and the small subset or people who were scientists and innovators. Mokyr focuses almost entirely on physical environment and how it influenced people of the Enlightenment and completely surpasses the social sciences, although only a small portion of Britain’s population was even affected by the ideas set forth by the

Get Access