A Look At Technological Growth

Before we can adequately analyze the growth of the West as a technological phenomenon, an understanding of what technological change is, and how it directly affects the political, economic and social weathering of a country (and even, of the world) is required. Technological is inherently self-sustaining, holding all other factors constant, as the complexity and pervasiveness of economic¹ and technological growth is such that each change causes, to borrow from the book Economic Transformations, a “concatenation of linked causes and events.”

How, then, do we define technology? Clearly, without a definition of what technology is, we can’t make any decisions about what has affected technology. Dictionaries and other “authoritative” sources for meaning tend to have trouble agreeing upon a definition for technology, though, it seems, from an economic perspective, our definition of technology (and therefore, technological growth) must stem from either the ability to “produce” economic value of sorts or the ability to improve “well-being”². Again borrowing from “Economic Transformations,” the definition of technology utilized here is as follows:

“[Technology] is the set of ideas specifying all activities that create economic value. It [is] knowledge about product [specifications], [knowledge] about [processes used to produce], [and] knowledge about [how] productive activity is organized.”

Such a definition is all-encompassing for anything that creates new economic value-providing ideas, and therefore, provides an optimal working set for analyzing the self-serving production of well-being. Technologies, then, tend to exist explicitly to solve problems. This does not, however, imply a challenge-response-type model of innovation, nor does it suggest that technologies are only developed to handle problems; often technologies are developed academically or otherwise with little-to-no clear challenge to overcome (and often, such as the case of lasers and other high-tech revolutions of the last 200 years, have no clear application whatsoever). This effect is more expressed in much more detail in the Economic Transformations book discussed at the end of this article.

Historically, technological growth³ in the West has varied. For much of the early section of the 2nd millennium, the East had holistic dominance with respect to technological and academic growth, progress in technologies that the future scientific revolution was dependent on, such as mathematics⁴, was achieved almost entirely in the East, with a (relatively) small amount of assistance from Western countries⁵.

1. Note, the use of “economic growth” refers to growth that isn’t manifested entirely in the gross domestic product; GDP is a simplification and an easy number to perform calculations and plots with, but, in discussing the legal revolution of the West, it’s found to be easier to analyze the functional, commodity-type changes themselves to understand how growth has manifested. [↩]
2. It’s intentional that producing economic value and improving well-being are likely the same thing. [↩]
3. Even, economic hegemony — which, may actually be correlatively linked to technological growth. [↩]
4. Particularly, Islamic and Indian developments in calculus during the 10th and 11th centuries. The following time period showed significant Persian and further Indian developments. [↩]
5. This may be in part caused by the relative instability of Western societies at this time, as there was seemingly little-to-no philosophical or scientific revolution to spawn such growth dominance of the East [↩]

1. An Introduction
2. A Look at Technological Growth
3. Comparative Differences: Eastern Arab-Islam and the West
4. Western Legal Revolution: Changes and Shifts
5. Long-run Economies and the Results of Revolution
6. Further Reading
7. View all pages.

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