Donald Cardwell, a British historian of science and technology, announced famous that “no nation has been very creative more than a historically short period.” Known as Cardwell’s law, this Dictum chases many people who are concerned about the future of innovation. Can the United States, or another country, come free from the Cardwell’s law and create an environment that promotes innovation indefinitely?
To better understand this challenge, it helps to zoom in from the level of nations to that of cities, which often function as engines of innovation. Although it is intended to describe entire societies, the law of Cardwell scales well at the level of individual urban centers. After all, city states were the first states and served as the locations of institutional experiments. And for a long time they were cities, not larger countries that were loyalty.
A grim message from my otherwise uplifting book, Centers or progress: 40 cities that have changed the world Is that the creative peak of a city tends to be – as Cardwell noted – letter. As the British science writer Matt Ridley stated in the foreword of the book: “Global progress depends on a sudden series of bush fires of innovation, burst into life in unpredictable places, fiercely burning and then die quickly.”
Are there exceptions to that rule? Have cities have succeeded in retaining longer than expected gold ages of innovation, and what can we learn from them?
The cities from earlier eras that I have profiled in my book can usually be seen for their performance for a longer period of time. Unfortunately, because in the distant past progress was often painfully slow – not because someone had squatted the code to break the law of Cardwell.
Writing, for example, developed over several generations, as simple icons invented for record assessment purposes for record assessment purposes for a symbolic script and eventually in very abstract, nuclear signs. The birthplace of writing was Uruk, an old Sumerian city. The most remarkable part of the history of Uruk lasted many centuries, but only because the great performance of the city took generations to reach. We hardly want to pursue a society that improved at such a pace.
If we turn to modern history, the pace of progress speeds up – but the creative window narrower. Manchester, the so -called workshop of the world, led the road during the industrial revolution, but only a few decades. The heyday of Houston to help ahead to explore space also lasted a few decades. Nowadays, the youngest living person who walked on the moon is 89. Tokyo went from a world capital of technology in the 1980s to decades of economic stagnation. The San Francisco Bay Area that Silicon Valley has born and the digital revolution has lost its crown, with many technological breakthroughs that are now occurring elsewhere. In the modern era, the Golden Age of innovation in every location lasts only a few decades, or even less.
To understand why this pattern repeats itself so consistently, consider the underlying conditions that support innovation – or sabotage – innovation. The economic historian Joel Mokyrin clarification 1993 EssayDescribes the limitedness of the path that societies must run to promote creativity, a true cord where one wrong movement can lead to everything that crashes. “In retrospect, the most surprising maybe we have come so far,” he concludes.
What causes the downfall of centers of progress, making the law of Cardwell so apparently prophetic? Although world-changing innovations come from an exceptionally diverse set of places, from Song-Ter-Hangzhou to post-two World War New York, sites of creativity almost always share certain important characteristics. It is the loss of those factors that spell their downfall. This function is: conditions of relative peace, openness for new ideas and economic freedom.
Free undertaking and healthy competition stimulate innovation, and the freedom to act across borders plays a important role By increasing that competition. At the same time, free exchange across borders should not be confused with the total dissolution of the boundaries: huge rich under centralized control tend to stagnate technologically, and complete integration of countries under a global government is likely to be a disaster. A certain type of international competition can be beneficial – simply not the kind of rivalry that leads to war.
War gives creative energies to deal with making deadly weapons and away from technologies aimed at improving the standard of living. And of course losing a war can lead to the complete destruction of a society.
Moreover, the war prevents innovators to work together about boundaries, and even thinkers in the same country cannot assemble their heads because of the secret that is inherent in war. Although some Credit WWII with accelerating the creation of the computer, it can be made that the conflict has actually delayed the invention of the computer by preventing cooperation between many innovators, from Konrad Zise in Berlin to Alan Turing in Great Britain. Even in peacetime, innovation can be suffocated when freedom and openness are limited.
In short, progress is threatened when peace is lost due to war, openness is suffocated by the oppression of speech and freedom is undermined by restrictive or authoritarian laws.
Hong Kong offers a recent and illustrative example of how quickly the conditions for progress can disappear. During his whirlwind economic transformation in the 1960s, Hong Kong rose from one of the poorest countries in the world to one of the richest. It has achieved this achievement through policies of “non -interventionism”: simply allowing Hong Kongers to freely compete and work together to enrich themselves and their society. But the proud tradition of the city of a limited government, the rule of law and freedom is abruptly extinguished by a hard and relentive action of the Chinese Communist Party.
Despite sobering examples such as those of Hong Kong, there is a reason for hope. Progress centers are often short -lived, but the fact that most societies throughout history remained creative for a short time should not discourage us. To defy Cardwell’s law, the only thing that is needed is a clear willingness to learn from the mistakes from the past and the conditions needed for further progress.