The use of science and technology isn’t the same all over the world at a given time, but the availability is remarkably close, don’t you think? What are the less developed countries left out on? ITAR-controlled products, trade secrets, and patents? For everything else they have access to the exact same journals.
Perhaps your side note is what’s critical: are there organizational and management techniques which are available in the United States but which we’ve successfully kept a secret internationally? Are multi-generational trade secrets the critical part of science and technology?
Or would other countries grow much faster if they just fully used public domain technology, but there’s some other factor X which is preventing them from using it? If the latter, then what is X, and wouldn’t it be a better candidate explanation for disparate economic growth?
This is a reasonable observation; yes, it is not obvious why every nation can’t jump straight to modern-nation productivity.
There are plenty of places in Africa where water purification is a great new technology, and plenty of places in China where closed sewage lines would be a great new technology. Why don’t they use them?
The stories I hear from very-low-tech countries usually emphasize cultural resistance. One guy installed concrete toilets in Africa, and people wouldn’t use them because concrete had negative connotations. People have tried plastic-water-bottle solar water purification in southeast Asia, and some concluded (according to Robin Hanson) that people wouldn’t put plastic bottles of water on their roof because they didn’t want the neighbors to know they didn’t have purified water. Another culture wouldn’t heat-sterilize water because their folk medicine was based on notions of what “hot” and “cold” do, and they believed sick people needed cold things, not hot things. There are many cases where people refused to believe there are invisible living things in water. (As Europeans also did at first.)
(Frequent hand-washing and checklists are technologies that could save many thousands of lives every year in US hospitals, but that are very difficult to get doctors to adopt.)
But lots of low-tech countries can’t afford anything that they can’t build themselves. How much of modern technology can be built with materials found on-site without any tools other than machetes, knives, and hammers? Mosquito netting is very valuable in some places, but impossible to manufacture in a low-tech way.
My short answer is that there are a variety of obstacles to applying any technology in a low-tech nation. But growth is only possible either by finding more resources, or by using existing resources more efficiently, and using resources more efficiently = technology.
If it were possible to have growth without technology—let’s say 1% growth every 10 years—then a society with medieval technology, and no technological change, would eventually become as productive per person as today’s modern countries. And that’s physically impossible, just using energy calculations alone. There may be other necessary conditions, but tech improvement is absolutely necessary.
The use of science and technology isn’t the same all over the world at a given time, but the availability is remarkably close, don’t you think? What are the less developed countries left out on? ITAR-controlled products, trade secrets, and patents? For everything else they have access to the exact same journals.
Perhaps your side note is what’s critical: are there organizational and management techniques which are available in the United States but which we’ve successfully kept a secret internationally? Are multi-generational trade secrets the critical part of science and technology?
Or would other countries grow much faster if they just fully used public domain technology, but there’s some other factor X which is preventing them from using it? If the latter, then what is X, and wouldn’t it be a better candidate explanation for disparate economic growth?
This is a reasonable observation; yes, it is not obvious why every nation can’t jump straight to modern-nation productivity.
There are plenty of places in Africa where water purification is a great new technology, and plenty of places in China where closed sewage lines would be a great new technology. Why don’t they use them?
The stories I hear from very-low-tech countries usually emphasize cultural resistance. One guy installed concrete toilets in Africa, and people wouldn’t use them because concrete had negative connotations. People have tried plastic-water-bottle solar water purification in southeast Asia, and some concluded (according to Robin Hanson) that people wouldn’t put plastic bottles of water on their roof because they didn’t want the neighbors to know they didn’t have purified water. Another culture wouldn’t heat-sterilize water because their folk medicine was based on notions of what “hot” and “cold” do, and they believed sick people needed cold things, not hot things. There are many cases where people refused to believe there are invisible living things in water. (As Europeans also did at first.)
(Frequent hand-washing and checklists are technologies that could save many thousands of lives every year in US hospitals, but that are very difficult to get doctors to adopt.)
But lots of low-tech countries can’t afford anything that they can’t build themselves. How much of modern technology can be built with materials found on-site without any tools other than machetes, knives, and hammers? Mosquito netting is very valuable in some places, but impossible to manufacture in a low-tech way.
My short answer is that there are a variety of obstacles to applying any technology in a low-tech nation. But growth is only possible either by finding more resources, or by using existing resources more efficiently, and using resources more efficiently = technology.
If it were possible to have growth without technology—let’s say 1% growth every 10 years—then a society with medieval technology, and no technological change, would eventually become as productive per person as today’s modern countries. And that’s physically impossible, just using energy calculations alone. There may be other necessary conditions, but tech improvement is absolutely necessary.
Those are excellent answers; thank you.