Knowledge, Technology, and Economic Growth During the.pdf

Knowledge, Technology, and Economic Growth During the Industrial Revolution Joel Mokyr Departments of Economics and History Northwestern University Evanston, Ill. 60208 j-mokyr@ Version of December 15, 1999 Forthcoming in Bart Van Ark and Gerard Kuper, eds., Technology and Productivity Growth. The Hague: Kluwert, 2000. This paper is part of my forthcoming Neither Chance nor Necessity: Evolutionary Models and Economic History (Princeton University Press, 200?). I am grateful to Kenneth Alder, Daniel Headrick, Barbara Karni, Haider Khan, Peter Murmann, Arie Rip, Jim Stewart and an anonymous referee for helpful comments and to Steve Nafziger for research assistance. 1 “It is clear from the preceding that every “art” [technique] has its speculative and its prac tical side. Its speculation is the theoretical knowledge of the principles of the technique; its practice is but the habitual and instinctive application of these principles. It is difficult if not impossible to make much progress in the application without theory; conversely, it is difficult to understand the theory without knowledge of the technique. In all techniques, there are specific circumstances relating to the material, instruments and their manipulation which only experience teaches.” Denis Diderot, article on “Arts” in the Encyclopédie Introduction Can we “explain” the Industrial Revolution? Recent attempts by leading economists (Lucas, 1998; Hansen and Prescott, 1998; Acemoglu and Zilibotti, 1997) focus more on the issue of timing (“why did it happen in the eighteenth century”) than the issue of place (“why Western Europe?”).