A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy.

AuthorKoyama, Mark
PositionBook review

A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy

By Joel Mokyr

Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016.

Pp. xiv, 403. $35 cloth.

Joel Mokyr is among the foremost experts in economic history and the history of innovation writing today. Thus, the publication of his latest book, A Culture of Growth, has been widely anticipated. The book's main aim is to uncover the reasons why early-modern Europe became increasingly open to new ideas, theories, and concepts between 1500 and 1800 and to explain why such a "culture of growth" did not emerge elsewhere in the world.

Mokyr has been writing about the origins of innovation and modern economic growth for the past thirty years, since he began The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Along the way, he has moved from a focus on the study of technology and scientific innovation to the role that culture plays in generating new ideas and inventions. Throughout, he has been motivated by questions such as, What was the link between science and innovation? Why did previously innovative societies, including ancient Rome or Song China, cease to innovate? Why was it during the Industrial Revolution that innovation became the norm and scientific development cumulative? Over the course of his career, Mokyr has explored many aspects of these questions. In the past decade, he has advanced the concept of an "Industrial Enlightenment" in order to characterize those important features of British society that in the eighteenth century helped to give rise to the Industrial Revolution.

In his previous work, Mokyr's argument has centered around the importance of technology and on the fact that sustained advances in technology are the ultimate drivers of modern growth. The arguments developed in each of the books he has written, however, have been subtly different. The Lever of Riches focused on die causes of technological innovation. In The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002) and The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700-1850 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009), Mokyr advanced what one could consider cultural arguments for the rise of not only inventors and innovators but also a workforce made up of tinkerers and "improvers" in eighteenth-century England. But in those books he shied away from investigating in full the forces that gave rise to such a culture of practical innovation and improvement.

This is the task that A Culture of Growth sets for itself, and the book represents recognition that culture has finally arrived as an important and legitimate concept in discussions of economic growth. In this endeavor, the book is an important landmark.

A Culture of Growth is divided into five parts. The first part is a meditation on how economists should think about culture. It discusses models of cultural evolution inspired by biologists and evolutionary scholars and models of choice-based cultural evolution developed by economists. It probes a number of important questions without offering a definitive answer to them: To what extent is cultural evolution analogous to biological...

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