Summary of Joel Mokyr's A Culture of Growth

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 The world today is richer than it has ever been. We know a lot about the economic transformations that made it this way, thanks to a vast literature that examines every possible aspect of modern economic growth since ca. 1800. But why did this happen.

#2 The Industrial Revolution, which began in the nineteenth century, transformed the economies of much of Europe and the European offshoots. It began to spread to Japan and other non-Western economies.

#3 The Great Divergence between Europe and the rest of the world has been difficult to explain. The Industrial Revolution, in the sense of an acceleration of technological progress, did not seem to be a response to any obvious institutional stimulus.

#4 The second riddle is related to the first, but looks at the problem from a different, more economic, point of view. The issue of the exact role of science in the Industrial Revolution is still debated, but there can be no doubt that as growth accelerated, the input from science increased and became the dominant motive power.

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Release date

Ebook: 23 July 2022