6 ideas
Mokyr argues that sustained economic growth rests fundamentally on a society's capacity to keep generating and adopting new techniques, not on trade or capital alone. Technology is the ultimate free lunch that lifts the whole production frontier.
Mokyr distinguishes rare, discontinuous macro-inventions that open new possibilities from the many incremental micro-inventions that refine and exploit them. Progress needs both: leaps to create new fields and steady improvement to make them pay.
History shows repeated episodes of technological flowering, as in classical Rome or Song China, that failed to become self-sustaining. The real question is not why innovation happens but why it so often stops.
Mokyr catalogs why creativity dies: vested interests protecting old methods, risk aversion, weak institutions, and cultural hostility to novelty. Technological progress is fragile and must overcome organized opposition from those it threatens.
Beyond economics, Mokyr stresses attitudes toward manipulating nature and tolerance for heterodoxy as decisive. Societies that celebrate tinkering and permit dissent sustain invention; conformist ones extinguish it.
Mokyr resists monocausal theories, arguing that Europe's sustained technological lead came from a contingent combination of fragmentation, competition and cultural factors. Progress is overdetermined and reversible, not inevitable.