The lever of riches

What Hacker News says

1. huitzitziltzinOct 2025
   Sure…

   Mokyr’s northwestern website has links to a lot of his papers.

   An extremely crude selection rule:

   Anything published in the American economic review, quarterly journal of economics, journal of political economy has the profession’s “highest stamp of approval”. It’s really hard to publish anything there. (There are two journals im not listing in that “top” category but he has no papers there on his website.). On aghion or howitts websites, look for the above journals but also econometrica and the review of economic studies. Those are the “top five” in the field.

   There are surely papers in good history and Econ history journals on mokyr’s website but I don’t know the journals!

   Standards for any chapter in a “handbook of X economics” or “handbook of the economics of X” are high - those should be good surveys.

   Similarly a paper in the “annual review of economics”

   Also mokyr has a bunch of work on Amazon. “The lever of riches” is a classic. “A culture of growth” is well regarded.

   Finally he has a forthcoming book called “two paths to prosperity” with two other distinguished guys - one Econ historian (greif) and one political economy guy (tabellini). It’s coming out in about three weeks. Good timing, Princeton U Press!

   Aghion and howitt have a growth textbook at the advanced undergrad level called “the economics of growth.”

   They have a much more advanced work called “endogenous growth theory” which is for specialists (or at least anyone with first year PhD macro)

   Aghion has a book called “the power of creative destruction.”

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2. mrDmrTmrJAug 2021
   Historically, all three of the examples you site (Industrial revolution in the UK, Chemical manufacturing in Germany, and current commercial space industry in the US) are exceedingly rare*. The vast majority of both countries and time periods show a total absence of new technological development. Roman agricultural productivity was under 0.1% for the entirety of the empire. [1]

   You're siting 0.1% historical outcomes when you look across all of the active civilizations across all of human history.

   The conditions in the US currently, and Pax Americana more generally, are extremely rare in the history.

   [1] Joel Moker's Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. I'd also highly recommend Moker's "The Gifts of Athena"

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3. skmurphyAug 2021
   A realistic Medieval city game could do a good job of teaching key aspects of history. I learned a lot from SimCity about thinking in systems. I think well-designed games can teach quite a bit.

   It would also be an interesting challenge to model the Industrial Revolution accurately. The Civilization tech tree is a good first approximation but in reading

      "The Lunar Men" by Jenny Uglow
      "The Lever of Riches" by Joel Mokyr
      "Turning points in Western Technology by Donald Cardwell 

   you get a very different impression. This could tie in to "Science of Progress" thinking in https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/we-need-...
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4. skmurphyAug 2019
   I have seen a lot of push back in various forums and whenever this link is tweeted but a lot of it seems to conflate "materials science" and "civil engineering" or "mechanical engineering." There is a very big difference between understanding historical trends--which is very important--and designing viable positive sum technology ecosystems. That being said, here are six technology historians I have found very insightful:

   Donald Cardwell in "Turning Points in Western Technology"

   Joel Mokyr in "Lever of Riches" and "Gifts of Athena"

   Edward Hutchinson in "Cognition in the Wild"

   James Utterback "Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation"

   David A. Mindell "Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics"

   Stephen B. Johnson "The Secret of Apollo: Systems Management in American and European Space Programs"

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5. restersAug 2019
   Developing nations (as the US was in the past) typically do not care much about IP. Read "The Lever of Riches" for a history of economic growth and IP law.
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6. ganeumannFeb 2015
   Your entire first paragraph is straw men. It doesn't matter how much any individual pays, it doesn't matter what any individual's sentiment is. If Google pays a researcher to do some research, they own it, regardless of how much any individual shareholder paid of that amount or what any individual's sentiment about that research is. Those things are irrelevant.

   It's not as easy as "publicly funded research should be free", I agree. As I said, it's that funded research should benefit the funders.

   Startups don't benefit from patents. There is plenty of (probably publicly funded) research to show that. Here's a recent paper on patents and innovation: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jep.27.1.3, or read Joel Mokyr's "The Enlightened Economy" or "The Lever of Riches" and see how James Watt held up the widespread commercialization of the steam engine by refusing to allow his patents to be used downstream (or read the NBER financed study on the impact of patents on downstream innovation: http://www.nber.org/papers/w20269). This paper (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2029098) is probably the most targeted towards whether patents help startups or not. The conclusion they came to was "the patent system was working 'neither well nor poorly for [startups]' and tended to favor larger companies."

   And last, if it benefits "society", that is, all people, how can there be free riders? If you mean it benefits non-taxpayers as well as taxpayers, well, that is one of the points of taxes (as opposed to fees.)

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