Book Reviews

Book Reviews Finance & Development, December 2017, Vol. 54, No. 1

Culture at the Roots of Growth Joel Mokyr

A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy

Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 2017, 400 pp., $35 (hardcover).

Joel Mokyr’s A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy gives culture center stage in the rapid economic growth and industrialization brought about by the first Industrial Revolution and ongoing and self-reinforcing in Western Europe ever since. It is a certain type of culture that is the reason growth-inducing change occurred in Europe and not, say, in China, the author insists. What this culture means, and what made it different in Europe, is the topic of this provocative analysis.

Mokyr proposes that the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution were not exogenous developments, but were a consequence of a change in attitudes (which he sums up as “culture”) in Western Europe. This occurred over roughly two centuries, between 1500 and 1700, a period that brought about a change in beliefs about people’s ability to use science to control their destiny and, especially, the natural world.

The Enlightenment, taking off in the late 17th century and lasting through the 18th, encouraged a quest for “useful knowledge”—that is, science and technology—that resulted in permanent and sustained command over the forces of nature.

Nudging this process were two prominent figures, Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, who changed thinking in Western Europe and then the world. “The true and legitimate goal of the sciences is to endow human life with new discoveries and resources,” wrote Bacon. His and his followers’ impact on the Enlightenment was instrumental in bringing about the conviction that “natural inquiry” through experimentation is essential for economic growth and human well-being. Newton’s contribution was to demonstrate that the “rules”—the mathematical regularities—of nature could be identified, thereby unlocking the mysteries of the natural world. Both Bacon and Newton altered thinking in their time because competition in the marketplace of ideas allowed their ideas “to be distributed and shared, and hence challenged, corrected and supplemented,” says Mokyr.

But how did these cultural changes come about and spread in the period of fundamental change in Europe? How did the Enlightenment turn into the Industrial Revolution, which in turn was the starting point of sustained growth? Mokyr paints a...