The Role of Ideas in the 'Great Divergence'

choi

Industrious and revolutionary l The Role of Ideas in the 'Great Divergence;' A new history puts the 'principle of contestability' at the heart of the story of the Industrial Revolution. Economist, Dec 3, 2016.
http://www.economist.com/news/bo ... ability-heart-story
(book review on Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth; The Origins of the modern economy. Princeton University Press, 2016)

Note:
(a)
(i) Joel Mokyr
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Mokyr
(1946- ; born in the Netherlands and raised in Israel; the Robert H Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University as an economic historian)
(ii) I just found out, from his Wiki page, that his wife is Margalit B Mokyr, presently professor emeritus at University of Illinois at Chicago. An immunologist, she was my teacher, a few year after the couple's immigration from Israel to US (and her first year as assistant professor) -- with heavy accent then and hard to understand. I did not think her research was extraordinary, but she was respectable in character. She is the same age as her husband.

(b) "IN THE year 1000 the average person in western Europe was slightly poorer than their counterparts in China or India. By 1900, things were very different. Western Europe was five times richer."

list of regions by past GDP (PPP) per capita
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita

Angus Maddison: in 1990 International Dollars [which is 1990 US$]
.......................1000 ..........1913
Germany ..........410 ..........3,648
UK ...................400 ..........4,921
US ...................400 ..........5,301
Japan ...............425 ..........1,387
China ...............450 ............552
India ...............450 .............673

(c) "The Royal Society, a club for scientific exchange founded in London in 1660, started a journal in which everyone from Christopher Wren to Robert Boyle battled over ideas. Its motto was 'nullius in verba'—roughly, 'take nobody's word for it.' "
(i) Royal Society
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Society
(section 5 Publishing: "The society introduced the world's first journal exclusively devoted to science in 1665, Philosophical Transactions, and in so doing originated the peer review process now widespread in scientific journals")
(ii) nullius in verba
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullius_in_verba
(ii) Christopher Wren
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Wren
(1632 – 1723; English architect)
(iii) Robert Boyle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Boyle
(1627 – 1691; born to English parents in Ireland; an alchemist)
(iv) Latin English dictionary:
* nullius: "genitive masculine/feminine/neuter singular of nūllus [pronoun masculine: 'no one']"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nullius
* in (preposition): "in, at, on (space)" (parentheses in original)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/in
* verba: a form of verbum [noun neuter: 'word']
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/verba

(d) "A transnational community known as the 'Republic of Letters' sprang up. * * * He [Mokyr] assigns monumental importance to the 'Republic of Letters' but offers frustratingly little detail on how it actually worked."


Mapping the Republic of Letters. Stanford University, undated
http://republicofletters.stanford.edu
("Before email, faculty meetings, international colloquia, and professional associations, the world of scholarship relied on its own networks: networks of correspondence that stretched across countries and continents; the social networks created by scientific academies; and the physical networks brought about by travel. * * * They facilitated the dissemination -- and the criticism -- of ideas, the spread of political news, as well as the circulation of people and objects.  But what did these networks actually look like?")


(e) "There were no sacred cows. When Leonhard Euler, a mathematician, thought that Isaac Newton had erred, the Royal Society asked a self-taught optician to see who was right. The greatest mathematical mind of his age [alluding to Euler], challenged by a nobody"
(i) Leonhard Euler
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonhard_Euler
(Swiss)

Quote:

(A) "Euler was one of the most eminent mathematicians of the 18th century, and is held to be one of the greatest in history. He is also widely considered to be the most prolific mathematician of all time. His collected works fill 60 to 80 quarto volumes, more than anybody in the field. He spent most of his adult life in St Petersburg, Russia, and in Berlin, then the capital of Prussia.

"A statement attributed to Pierre-Simon Laplace [1749 – 1827; French] expresses Euler's influence on mathematics: 'Read Euler, read Euler, he is the master of us all.'

(B) caption for a stamp: "1957 Soviet Union stamp commemorating the 250th birthday of Euler. The text says: 250 years from the birth of the great mathematician, academician Leonhard Euler.

(ii) Euler
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Euler
(pronunciation)
(iii) The story of Euler, Newton and the "nobody" will be presented in a following posting.

(f) "Those familiar with the historiography will have their own grumbles. Mr Mokyr's theory is, ironically, untestable."
(i) historiography (n): "the writing of history; especially :  the writing of history based on the critical examination of sources, the selection of particulars from the authentic materials, and the synthesis of particulars into a narrative that will stand the test of critical methods"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/historiography
(ii) historiography (n): "the study of the writing of history and of written histories"
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/historiography