Joel Mokyr
About
Economic historian of technology and the Enlightenment
Cast within
No topic-region cast yet — this appears once Joel Mokyr's compiled claims are aligned into a topic region's argument tree.
Claims by Joel Mokyr (20 of 21)
Science and Tools Mutually Reinforce
Technology and science reinforce one another in a subtle feedback loop: better instruments and tools (built by makers) allow science to advance, and building things in turn teaches us more science; the 17th-century scientific revolution was triggered by opticians building lenses, telescopes, and vacuum pumps, and today high-powered computing is the most powerful research tool ever invented.
Mass Flourishing Hits Diminishing Returns
Edmund Phelps is wrong to dismiss conceptual scientific breakthroughs in favor of small trial-and-error innovation; without periodic expansion of fundamental understanding (a change in the 'fixed factor'), incremental innovation will run into diminishing returns, just as classical physics could only take us so far before quantum mechanics enabled electronics.
Steam Engine Required Knowing Atmosphere Exists
The steam engine could not have been invented without the prior scientific discovery that the earth is surrounded by an atmosphere exerting pressure; Newcomen's 1712 atmospheric engine depended on 17th-century work by Torricelli, von Guericke, and Pascal, which is why the Chinese could not have built one—demonstrating that major machines require conceptual breakthroughs, not just incremental tinkering.
Computing Is Unprecedented Research Tool
High-powered computing is the most powerful research tool humans have ever invented, enabling solutions to previously intractable problems—from simulating large molecules (which won the 2013 Nobel in chemistry) to solving mathematical equations by simulation—and we have only just begun to scratch the surface.
Modern Chemistry Built by a Dozen People
Modern chemistry, which made fertilizer and synthetic materials possible, was essentially the product of at most a dozen people working between 1760 and 1800 (chiefly Lavoisier), and without that conceptual breakthrough the subsequent mass of incremental innovations would have been inconceivable because people had the wrong model of how materials work.
Technology Creates Unimaginable New Occupations
As technology advances and machines absorb routine work, it creates entirely new occupations that previous generations could not have imagined—computer game developers, cybersecurity workers—and lowers transaction costs enough to enable new peer-to-peer markets like Airbnb and furniture-assembly services that were previously infeasible.
Reputation Mechanisms Curb Opportunistic Behavior
Platforms like Airbnb are cleverly designed to give users strong incentives for honest behavior: a renter who trashes an apartment will be known to the website and penalized by being barred from future use, which solves the opportunistic-behavior problem that would otherwise make such peer-to-peer transactions infeasible.
GDP Was Designed for Constant-Quality Economies
GDP and total factor productivity measures are reasonable for short-run year-to-year comparisons but become deeply misleading over long periods because they were designed for 'wheat and steel' economies producing roughly constant-quality baskets of goods, and they cannot handle the appearance of entirely new goods or the quantum-leap quality improvements in existing goods (e.g., a modern laptop versus a 1980s 386).
GDP Also Overcounts by Ignoring Costs
National income accounting not only undercounts welfare by missing quality improvements, it also overcounts production because it ignores costs imposed on society that no one pays directly—such as foregone leisure and environmental damage like carbon dioxide emissions, which for 200 years were treated as free even though they damage the planet and should have been deducted as negative value added.
Commuting Time Is Miscounted as Leisure
The cost of commuting is not figured into national income accounts—time spent driving to work in bumper-to-bumper traffic counts as leisure—so eliminating commuting via remote work would be a major improvement in economic welfare without changing measured national income at all.
Technology Creates Biteback Requiring More Technology
Technology is not an undivided good: every improvement produces unexpected side effects ('biteback') that require new technological solutions, which in turn create their own biteback, in an endless cycle—so like the Red Queen, we must keep running (innovating) just to stay in place, which is why technological progress cannot afford to slow down.
Optimism Conditional on Institutions Not Interfering
If we can keep political and social institutions from interfering, the human race's technological creativity will in the next hundred years produce things we today find unimaginable—as unimaginable as smartphones and GPS would have been to someone in 1912—because of humanity's infinite ingenuity and creativity.
Gut Microbiota May Be Key to Preventing Obesity
Recent research shows the microbiota in the human gut—billions of symbiotic bacteria—are a main determinant of health, including obesity and immune function, and scientists are developing ways to change gut biota to prevent obesity even in people genetically inclined toward it, representing a technological solution to the biteback created by cheap abundant food.
Stagnation Thesis Ignores Tailwinds
Robert Gordon's stagnation argument is wrong because it focuses only on headwinds against growth while ignoring the tailwinds; the 20th century had more headwinds (two world wars, the Great Depression, totalitarianism, the Cold War) than any other yet was the most economically successful century in history.
Technology Has Vastly Increased Leisure and Its Value
Over the 20th century industrialized countries dramatically reduced working hours (US from roughly 3,000 to about 1,950 hours per year, a third less; Europe by perhaps half), and technology has hugely increased the value of leisure by creating things to do with it—such as the entire spectator-sport industry that emerged out of nothing.
The Death of Distance Will Transform Work and Life
Digital communication is bringing about the 'death of distance,' increasingly substituting for physical travel in most (not all) human interactions, which will reduce airline and commuter traffic, save wasted commuting hours (uncounted in GDP), and—most profoundly—reverse the Industrial Revolution's separation of work from home, returning people to their families and homes the way humanity lived before 1750.
Technology Makes Skills Obsolete, Hurting Older Workers
The serious danger of smart machines is not that they fail to create new jobs but that they render existing skills valueless, leaving a generation of workers—like the hand-loom weavers of the Industrial Revolution—who are too old or otherwise unable to retrain and who die bitter, disappointed, and poor.
GDP Misses Cheap But Essential Inventions
National income accounting grossly understates welfare gains because many of the most important inventions of the late 19th and 20th century—aspirin, light bulbs, water chlorination, anesthesia—were so inexpensive they made little impact on national accounts, yet we could not do without them; consumer surplus from such goods (e.g., anesthesia, for which the willingness-to-pay is effectively infinite) is enormous but uncounted.
My Notes
Loading notes...