A thought recently occurred to me about the population disparity between Asia and, well, the rest of the world. And also the distribution of where innovation and invention has happened. It’s commonly known that in ancient times, many inventions came from China in particular and Asia in general; gunpowder and paper being two of the most well-known ones, but a slight bit of research will turn up many, many more. However, that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore - or more to the point, if it is still the case, we don’t seem to hear as much about it, which may well be a significant failure of knowledge.
Logically, one assumes that, all other things being equal, more population should equal more innovations and inventions, simply because there’s more people in whose heads a new idea might spring. I’m wondering if there’s been some corroboration of that; a moderately thorough study to correlate whether the rate of inventions and such consistently grows as the population does, as it seems like it should.
One obvious problem is defining an ‘innovation or invention’, naturally, but whatever definition is come up with as long as it’s consistent seems like it should give the general answer.
One catch is that all other things are not equal. To cite a couple of examples, the culture and business environment in which a person operates will influence their behavior. A culture that values conformity is a disincentive to the expression and exploration of new ideas, and will tend to inhibit internal technological advancement. Along those same lines, wealth is a powerful incentive for most folks, so if you live within an economic system that makes it difficult or impossible for you to profit from your ideas, you’re not going to be terribly motivated to put in the long hours of thinking and tinkering to polish your ideas and turn them into viable products that you can share with (or sell to) others.
You brought up China specifically, so I’ll point to the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s as an event that sought to crush capitalism and intellectualism, both of which are things that foster technological innovation. China is certainly not the only place where these kinds of things happened.
The 2009 book Start-up Nation, about Israel’s record of impressive business growth, mentioned a couple of factors:
The authors argue that a major factor for Israel’s economic growth can be found in the culture of the Israel Defense Forces, in which service is mandatory for most young Israelis. The authors believe that IDF service provides potential entrepreneurs with the opportunities to develop a wide array of skills and contacts. They also believe that IDF service provides experience exerting responsibility in a relatively un-hierarchical environment where creativity and intelligence are highly valued.
This is the counterpart to what I mentioned above: whereas a conformist culture represses inventiveness, a culture that values creativity and intelligence fosters it.
The book also dwells at length on immigration and its role in Israel’s economic growth: "Immigrants are not averse to start from scratch. They are by definition risk-takers. A nation of immigrants is a nation of entrepreneurs. From survivors of the Holocaust to Soviet refuseniks through the Ethiopian Jews, the State of Israel never ceased to be a land of immigration: 9 out of 10 Jewish Israelis today are immigrants or descendants of immigrants the first or second generation. This specific demographic, causing fragmentation of community that still continues in the country, is nevertheless a great incentive to try their luck, to take risks because immigrants have nothing to lose.
America likewise has a history of immigration, which no doubt has had a hand in the innovation that’s happened here.
I realize that business development and tech innovation aren’t the same thing, but they have a lot in common: both require a great deal of perseverance, risk tolerance, and creativity.
Although larger populations offer greater statistical opportunities for ‘genius’ to emerge, most innovations aren’t actually the result of a singular genius but rather a culmination of knowledge and practice as well as an infrastructure for codifying and communicating knowledge. Generally speaking, for basic developments in science to be adapted into advancements in technology requires both ‘leisure’ to allow for time spent in doing research and experimentation as well as a socially and politically permissive environment for the sharing of knowledge, hence why the Age of Enlightenment presaged and bolstered the Industrial Age in Europe. Many of the early discoveries of the Industrial Age actually existed in some form in Roman and Hellenistic periods but the instability and tendency to limit knowledge to only the wealthy classes.
Warfare, as destructive as it is, has usually been the impetus to invest in applied innovation and only later benefited exploration and trade. Most scientific advancements that did not have military applications—astronomy, anatomy, zoology—were generally supported by wealthy patrons looking to secure their place in history if not by doing the actual work then in having their names associated with it (although most have long forgotten the names Rudolf II, William Petty Fitzmaurice, and Watzenrode the Younger). In general, innovation sparks innovation which is why you often find technological development clustered in one geographic location; Silicon Valley is the latest in the line of concentrations in which competitors would often vie with each other hiring people with special expertise away from each other or unrewarded innovators starting up their own ventures.
China has gone through several historical periods of innovation followed by repression of knowledge, so it isn’t just a matter of population size; innovations have to be supported and disseminated to be useful and built upon. With a lot of modern technical advancement predicated upon ‘expert’ tools and knowledge bases that are beyond the scope of a single person or even a small group of experts to master, innovation in the future may be driven more by machine intelligence than human capability, making it essentially independent of general population size or distribution.
One area where it does work that way is in language. It is well known among linguists that languages hardly change at all in small isolated communities and change most rapidly among large populations. More innovators = more innovations.
It’s also not just any people who innovate. Mostly, it’s going to be educated, financially-secure people who innovate. I suspect the population disparity between East and West is much smaller, if you look only at people in a good position to innovate.
Yeah. Don’t forget that for most of human history the vast majority of humans spent their time either hunting and gathering, or performing manual labor in service to the production of food.
Specialization of labor eventually gave some small chunk of the population the free time and resources (both in material and in education) to do other things, such as innovate. But in most times and places throughout human history, these individuals were not only few and far between, their education and resources came not by merit but by blood. Which means that you only had a tiny handful of people who had the opportunity to innovate, and there was no particular reason to think they’d be the individuals with the ability to actually do so.
There have been some very innovative places where the population was quite small. The Greek City states, and the Italian city states of the Renaissance. They did, however, trade extensively and good ideas traveled and took root.
Empires can facilitate trade or they can become inward looking and isolated from the world. China has lurched between the two extremes regularly. A lot of its innovations came during periods where it embraced ideas from the rest of the world rather than trying to suppress them.
State sponsored innovation is generally confined to developing military technology. The Soviets were very innovative in that respect, but that never translated towards the broader economy. During peacetime, this was a huge waste of resourced and led to a stagnant economy.
There are several ingredients for innovation: trade and migration, sufficient wealth for a population of independent thinkers and experimenters. An education system that encourages literacy and numeracy. A political system that allows ideas to be exchanged. An economic system that encourages competition and prevents monopolies. Cities, where people can meet and work together.
Well, these are definitely the ideas that seems to be strong; that the situation or culture or something wound up more conducive to innovation. Part of my wondering was whether this actually was borne out by data rather than merely impressions we have; I know a lot of ideas that have become very strongly embedded in our background knowledge about how, without mincing words, some regions of the world are superior, are based in history or statistics that range from questionable to outright false, and I was wondering if this might be one of those things. It all seems very logical, but I know that can be deceptive.
And, well, it wasn’t something that produced useful results on my attempts at searches, so I hoped someone might know of some sort of study or report or any actual data about it, on the chance that something along these lines has actually been studied.
How would you measure innovation? You could measure registered patents. But that is highly problematic. Patent law is itself a historically a quite recent innovation . It is specific to the legal systems of nation states and the there are cost barriers to using it that vary over time. Also broad based patent law tends to stifle innovation by inviting legal challenges from rivals that draw resources away from innovation. Then there are the patent trolls. It is a very imperfect system and a major issue in trade negotiations.
Could innovation be measured by the publication of research papers in learned journals? That, too is a flawed measure, for many reasons. Some research papers are simply there for prestige value and to encourage more funding. It can be a numbers game that compromises quality with quantity. In any case academic research is often in subjects that are distant from any immediate practical application.
Governments and corporations sometimes try to encourage innovation. But the internal dynamics of companies sitting on top of established markets are to maintain that profitable situation. Often they ignore the achievements of internal groups and guard any intellectual property tenaciously. People have to leave such places and startup an new company to realise an idea. So what do you count and who has the numbers for this?
It is an intriguing question because there are a lot of factors that are required make any kind of measure of innovation on a large scale. You have first to define it, then find a way to measure it. Some of the things that are innovative are cultural and small scale. How do you measure the number of inventors working away in sheds or silicon valley types in garages? How to you measure the changes in processes and organisations? Because innovation is not only some invention, it is a whole lot of techniques and processes required to make it do something useful at scale. Many innovations never escape the laboratory or workshop because they don’t help to solve a problem. How do you measure the rate of cross fertilization of ideas between completely different areas of application? That requires people to move around between businesses, taking their ideas with them. That requires an economy and culture that allows that to happen. A set of ingredients. But these things often only come together rarely and usually by accident than by design.
I am ploughing through ‘How Innovation Works’ by Matt Ridley at the moment, it is a fascinating subject and very absorbing read.
When I visited Iceland a few years ago, more than one local made a point of telling me that they had more professional footballers per capita than any other country. I have not verified this myself, but given their extremely small population, it wouldn’t take very many of them to skew the numbers.
The reasons for this apparently come down to climate and geography that limit recreational opportunities, resulting in lots of indoor pitches and thus lots of casual players, plus some institutional support that allows local football clubs to flourish, leading to early player development. Factors like these set the country apart and bolster its player population.
I assume similar statements can be made about the cultural prerequisites that enhance a nation’s innovative spirit, as has been discussed.
You have to take into account the history of a large population. Take Russia, for example. For centuries, the best and the brightest have either been killed or at least banished or suppressed. Where are the intellectual and scientific leaders of this large population? Its only major industries are involved with crudely taking things out of the ground, while the general population is incapable of feeding itself. In other words, the largest shithole country in the world.
This is a seriously clichéd view of Russian history. While Russia’s democratic culture leaves much to be desired, the country does have a long tradition of eminent scientists and literati. And the claim that its “general population is incapable of feeding itself” is just plain wrong. It’s a middle income country that does have a problem with poverty, but it’s not plagued by mass famine.
I recall an interesting analysis I read about this some time ago. Before 1492 you could divide the world into four distinct populations that had been separated for millenia: Eurasia (including Africa), The Americas, Australia, and Tasmania.
The level of technology exactly matched the population in all four cases - highest in Eurasia and lowest in Tasmania. The authors attributed this to the idea of the OP - that more people helps create and pass on technology. In very small populations, even if an idea is developed there is a risk of it being lost, because the few people who have mastered it might die before passing it on.
The main things driving innovation are the same as those driving culture - leisure time, education, riches and particularly the ability to enjoy riches unmolested. Riches drive demand, hence scarcity and the search for additional ways to produce. It also provides the surplus wealth to allow for experimentation.
Education ensures that more people are aware of things, so they have a wider base on which to build new innovations. Leisure means that freed from the scrabbling to satisfy basic needs, (think Maslow) people have time to try alternatives. One article on how tradition-bound and unwilling to change very poor societies are, is that they cannot afford to gamble their very lives on a new method of farming, or building houses, or protecting themselves compared to what has proven to work over generations.
I wonder too whether we can equate technical innovation with cultural innovation - literature, painting and sculpture, theatre, music and more modern arts. The leisure and social non-conformity to experiment and innovate also allows the leisure to innovate to create new cultural content; and the riches available permit the leisure time and resources to try such innovations.
But the industrial revolution started and went full steam ahead (sorry!) in Britain first. I will probably also throw in Jared Diamond’s contention that luck in having the right resources is also an important factor in producing riches and encouraging innovation to build on that.
Over the medium and long term larger populations will innovate more. Or should. Of course we only have the example of one large highly populated state which has lasted for several millennia, and that is China, everything else has been temporary conglomerations. As said, China seems to have vacillated.
Small populations can innovate just as well, but they tend to lack staying power. Long term. See the Greek and Italian city states.
I’d say the critical factor is not population per se, but population who aren’t living hand to mouth, and have free time and resources to pontificate about philosophy.
At least historically. Post WW2 when invention moved from a couple of rich dudes working in a lab on their own dime, to an state sponsored part of the military industrial complex* then things got more complicated.
False analogy, since soccer is only one of a hundred popular sports in the modern world, while the OP discusses invention / innovation, which is an astronomically wider / deeper field.