I was reading more of "The Lever of Riches" today, and it reminded me of my latest post. We have far more good ideas at any one time than we can ever "make real". But we can still see that many of those ideas are balanced right on the edge between dream and reality. More Mokyr, coming up.

In the centuries after 1500, the gap between Europe and the rest of the world gradually widened.... Technological progress in the conventional sense continued unabated. The increase in productivity, however, became more gradual.... One explanation for the absence of discontinuous breakthroughs between 1500 and 1750 is that although there was no scarcity of bold and novel technical ideas, the constraints of workmanship and materials to turn them into reality became binding. If inventions were dated according to the first time they occurred to anyone, rather than the first time they were actually constructed, this period may indeed be regarded as just as creative as the Industrial Revolution. But the paddle-wheel boats, calculating machines, parachutes, fountain pens, steam-operated wheels, power looms, and ball bearings envisaged in this age—interesting as they are to the historian of ideas—had no economic impact because they could not be made practical. The paradigmatic inventor of this period was the Dutch-born engineer Cornelis Drebbel ( 1573-1633 ), who made minor contributions in a host of areas….but whose main claim to fame rests on a demonstration of the idea of the submarine in 1624, two-and-a-half centuries before submarines became practicable.

We today are in the same boat as poor Drebbel. We can see that all manner of wondrous devices are within our grasp...almost. Just a little more effort and we shall have the "Turtle".Nanotech promises to ease a lot of constraints, and I believe it will deliver the goods. Of course, we could always just say "Enough".

As noted, by 1500 Europe was no longer the technological backwater it had been in 900, nor was it the upstart imitator of 1200. It is clear that Europe owed China a great deal, as Needham has argued tirelessly. Yet in the two centuries before 1500, Europe’s technological creativity had become increasingly original. In the later Middle Ages Chinese technology had become, in Landes’s phrase, a “magnificent dead end.” After 1500 China ceases to be of much interest to the historian of technology. Its use of iron and waterpower did not lead to a Chinese Manchester anymore than its knowledge of printing led to a massive outpouring of printed books in China; Su Sungs’s famous water clock did not cause a large clock to be erected in the center of every town in China…p56

You may have heard of the Chinese "Treasure Fleets". In the early fifteenth century, Chinese exploration vessels got as far as Africa and Southeast Asia. Though they were a total failure from a financial standpoint, they brought back priceless knowledge.
They returned to a new regime at home, however, and within twenty years, the big deepwater ships were beached, burned, and banned. Building a multi-master became a capital offense.

The greatest enigma in the history of technology is the failure of China to sustain its technological supremacy. p 208

As an interesting side note, some of you may have read "A Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge, a truly wonderful reworking of good old-fashioned space opera. He named his starfaring traders the Qeng Ho. (pronounced Cheng Ho) That was the name of the swashbuckling eunuch Admiral who commanded the Treasure Fleets. He's also known as Zheng He. Gotta love those historical references!

And yet China failed to become what Europe eventually became. At about the time we associate with the beginning of the Renaissance in Europe, China’s technological progress slowed down, and ultimately came to a full stop. China’s economy continued to expand, to be sure, but growth was mostly of the Smithian type., based on an expansion of internal commerce, monetization, and the colonization of the southern provinces. Some techniques that had been known fell into disuse, then were forgotten. In other cases great beginnings were not pursued to their full potential. The implications of this failure for world history are awesome to contemplate…..”China came within a hair’s breadth of industrializing in the fourteenth century,” writes Jones. Yet in 1600 their technological backwardness was apparent to most visitors; by the nineteenth century the Chinese themselves found it intolerable. pp 218-219

There's a lesson there for all of us, maybe even several lessons. I feel confident that the Chinese have long since gotten the point. Which is very good. Americans sometimes get sloppy and complacent without someone to keep them on their toes.

Political fragmentation was thus not a sufficient condition for technological progress. In some cases…decentralization led to more destruction than innovation….competition in and of itself does not guarantee efficiency….And yet in Europe….political fragmentation guaranteed that no single decision maker could turn off the lights, that the capriciousness or piety of no single ruler could prevent technological advances and the economic growth they brought. p208

I'm so glad we don't have world government yet. We still have room to grow.