What has culture to do with the economy? Everything, according to Joel Mokyr, an eminent economic historian. Mokyr defines "culture" in his book (A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy) as "a set of beliefs, values, and preferences, capable of affecting behavior, that are socially (not genetically) transmitted and that are shared by some subset of society."
This subset in his opinion is the relatively small group of people (aristocrats, gentlemen, merchants, educated professionals) who in Europe roughly during 1500 to 1750 drove advancements in science and technology. Mokyr is especially concerned with the ideas of this subset about how those scientific ideas and technological advancement were transformed into what he calls "useful knowledge"-knowledge that can be directly applied to solve practical problems. Mokyr is inquiring, in fact, about the cultural origins of modern scientific thinking.
Mokyr does not deny the fundamental importance of institutional arrangements for economic growth. But his thesis centers on the idea that growth and innovation of the magnitude and permanence witnessed since the Industrial Revolution cannot be explained by economic or institutional factors alone. Explaining innovation, and therefore growth, requires looking beyond institutions-to knowledge and so to culture.
Mokyr repeatedly stresses that there was nothing inevitable about the emergence of modern science: cultural traditionalists were certainly not doomed to lose. This is where the enlightened elite were so critical; although Enlightenment thinking was always a minority viewpoint, in early modern Europe, it was one held by culturally influential elite. This culturally influential elite became convinced that general progress through increased knowledge was both possible and desirable and that their new knowledge, obtained through the methods of science, should be spread in order to enlighten the people. "Cultural entrepreneurs," as Mokyr calls them-people such as Bacon and Newton-were especially successful in promoting their scientific views, a rather surprising success considering that science, in its early years, not only was counterintuitive but also often failed to produce any practical results.
For Mokyr, then, the key development in early modern Europe was what he calls "the market for ideas," in which intellectual suppression was difficult and better rewards for intellectual innovation were developed. Protective institutions in which ideas could be discussed, and through which they were ultimately spread, flourished. One of the most important institutions for this market was "the Republic of Letters." This republic, which developed in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was a non-hierarchical, transnational community of scholars who corresponded with one another about new developments in the arts and sciences. The republic created a social arena in which reputations were built on the development and dissemination of new knowledge, knowledge that other people could test, contest, and use. It had an organisational infrastructure of universities, learned societies, and salons, and it profited enormously from the development of a pan-European network of publishers, booksellers, and postal services following the introduction of the printing press in the fifteenth century.
The market for ideas that Mokyr describes was pluralistic and politically fractured yet at the same time intellectually integrated. It was therefore difficult to suppress offending ideas, since scholars could always offer such ideas to the highest bidder, ranging from the rulers of states to local entities such as towns, universities, guilds, or estates. The Republic of Letters, as Mokyr emphasises, was a uniquely European phenomenon.
Science did, of course, play a role in the Industrial Revolution through the development of technologies such as the steam engine and gas lighting. But the broader point, stressed by Mokyr, is that science's greatest influence may have been cultural. By 1800, when industrialisation was truly taking off in Great Britain, there had already been a widespread diffusion within British society of a Baconian scientific mentality that prized tinkering, experimentation, and rational argumentation. More important, without some theoretical underpinnings, even the most skilled craftsmen would have quickly hit a ceiling in terms of innovation. And indeed, the Second Industrial Revolution, which began in the second half of the nineteenth century with the spread of the railroads, would have been unthinkable without science.
But Mokyr is not simply a champion of the learned gentlemen: he rightly stresses that without the practical knowledge of the craftsmen, science would have been a dead end economically. Someone had to transform the abstract principles of science into functioning machines that could be used profitably, and someone had to be able to maintain, repair, and adapt those machines. Skilled craftsmen were the ones who turned the abstract Enlightenment into an "Industrial Enlightenment". It was in this respect that Great Britain, the world's first industrial nation, was particularly advanced. It had more and better-skilled craftsmen and mechanics than any other European nation, and also an industrial culture in which, for reasons that are still not entirely clear, there was more interaction among scientists, tinkerers, artisans, and entrepreneurs than anywhere else.
Mokyr also points out the fundamentally constructive role played by mass media in disseminating knowledge in early modern Europe. Although the modern mass media, including online and social media, circulate unprecedented amounts of information, it is unclear how much this contributes to the spread of knowledge in the Enlightenment sense. Finally, Mokyr emphasises the importance of an institutional setting that guarantees equality and freedom.
These are excerpts from the essay review of Mokyr's book by Peter Vries published in the December 8, 2016 edition of Foreign Affairs magazine. The most important observation of Mokyr which needs to be studied in some depth concerns what he calls 'culturally influential elite.' His actual observation: "This culturally influential elite became convinced that general progress through increased knowledge was both possible and desirable and that their new knowledge, obtained through the methods of science, should be spread in order to enlighten the people." And he mentions Thomas Beccon (1511-1567) and Isaac Newton (1642-1726) as part of these culturally influential elite that preceded the First Industrial Revolution from the 18th to 19th centuries.
But this is all too remote in time and space in today's context when the world has already entered the Fourth Industrial Revolution once again led by Europeans and Americans and bypassing countries like Pakistan. And the reason for such countries to have been once again ignored by the latest industrial revolution is perhaps rooted in the fact that the culturally influential elite in such countries continue to suffer from illiberal dogma, intolerance, bigotry, parochialism and obscurantism. These elite seemingly abhor new knowledge, obtained through science and technology.
This perhaps is the main reason why Pakistan is lacking in research activity. Not only this. Since our cultural elite have developed an entirely puerile standard against which they measure success in career and life, our research workers do not get the national recognition that they deserve. In fact the environment for research in the country since long has been too unfavourable, dispiriting and unpromising.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is characterised by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres. And the breadth and depth of these changes herald the transformation of entire systems of production, management, and governance.
The possibilities of billions of people connected by mobile devices, with unprecedented processing power, storage capacity, and access to knowledge, are unlimited. And these possibilities will be multiplied by emerging technology breakthroughs in fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and quantum computing.
Already, artificial intelligence is all around us, from self-driving cars and drones to virtual assistants and software that translate or invest. Digital fabrication technologies, meanwhile, are interacting with the biological world on a daily basis. Engineers, designers, and architects are combining computational design, additive manufacturing, materials engineering, and synthetic biology to pioneer a symbiosis between micro-organisms, our bodies, the products we consume, and even the buildings we inhabit.
To date, those who have gained the most from it have been consumers able to afford and access the digital world; ordering a cab, booking a flight, buying a product, making a payment, listening to music, watching a film, or playing a game-any of these can now be done remotely.
Transportation and communication costs are dropping, logistics and global supply chains are becoming more effective, and the cost of trade is diminishing, all of which is opening new markets and driving economic growth. It is also profoundly impacting the nature of national and international security, affecting both the probability and the nature of conflict. The distinction between war and peace, combatant and non-combatant, and even violence and non-violence (think cyberwarfare) is becoming uncomfortably blurry.
It is, therefore, time for our culturally influential elite to wake up and smell the coffee. Or perhaps the civil society needs to make enough noise to force the current illiberal culturally influential elite of Pakistan to withdraw and a new enlightened set to move in so that an environment conducive for promoting scholarship and research is created without any further loss of time which in turn would hopefully prepare the country to draw for its people at least an irreducible minimum share from the on-going developments related to the Fourth Industrial Revolution.