The ratio of professional footballers tells nothing of the quality of the footballer stock. Even the best, most enthusiastic fish from a small pond often are decidedly average swimming in a big pond.
A Finnish elite hammer thrower, competing for the national #1 spot recently went to the US to train and study. A number of girls in her state level team were her betters. A pool of 300 million people contain vastly more elite hammer thrower types than a pool of 5.5 million.
For one particular, narrowly-tailored definition of “state”, and why does the lifespan of a state even matter? People will go on innovating no matter what polity lays claim to the land they’re living in. Europe has been inhabited for as long as China, and Africa for even longer.
One could argue that it is only a specific cultural lense which makes the progression of Greeks > Romans > “Greek” “Romans” > Turks in Thrace, Greece, and Anatolia seem less continous than the progression of various Chinese dynasties
Well it mattered historically (prior to the 20th century) as the state provided resources for the people (scribes, monks, artesians etc) who weren’t part off the rich aristocratic elite (and many those that were) to do some of that innovation.
After (and during) the 20th century world wars innovation was no longer left to a few idle rich dudes and instead became part of the states military capacity.
Eh, sometimes it was the state providing that support, and sometimes it was a church, and sometimes the lines between state and church are blurred. But the question remains: If a piece of land goes from being territory of one state to being territory of another state, but both states funded and otherwise supported research (likely even research done by the same individuals), does it matter that it’s different states? If a piece of land remains in one state for ages, but that state’s support for research waxes and wanes, does it matter that it’s the same state?
It even works when the territory stays stable, but the people move. Before World War II, Werner von Braun was making innovations in rocketry with support from the German government. After the war, he was making innovations in rocketry with support from the American government. The change didn’t matter at all to him.
If there is absolutely no difference between the two states no. But in practice there are big differences between states. a rich liberal democracy, a feudal monarchy, a facist dictatorship, an empire, a Islamic caliphate all have very different ways of supporting innovation (and supporting a class of people with enough wealth, spare time and education to innovate)
That becomes even more important when innovation and science become part of the state’s military apparatus as happened in the first half of the 20th century.
I mean it mattered a whole bunch to him, the difference between the resources (and slaveworkers to work to death 
) provided to him by the peacetime German government, versus the wartime Nazi regime, and the post war US government was huge. And the amount of innovation research and new inventions he produced reflected that:
Vs
Yes they will. But, innovators need Governmental support and an infrastructure which nurtures them and can get their ideas translated into practical effects. For that you need a stable state.
The difference between China and the rest is that while China has had several periods where the state was divided into warring factions, there always was an identifiable centre which each of the factions hoped to control. This was manifestly not they case in the other regions of the Eurasian landmass, Europe, MENA, Indo-Pak subcontinent. There every new claimant, wanted to establish a hegemony based, not upon taking over the existing centres of power, but establishing news ones based out of its own heartland and eclipsing the previous one,
To be clear: they meant professional footballers in international leagues around the world, not just players making their living inside the country.
Iceland has about 360k people. By coincidence, the total number of people in the ten most populous countries in the EU (Germany through Greece) is about 360 million, giving us a tidy ratio of about 1 to 1000. Now let’s assume (making up numbers for illustration) those ten countries collectively have 1000 professional football players in teams around the world. If Iceland has one professional player somewhere, the ratio holds. But if they have two, they appear to be punching rather above their weight, statistically.
This is why I was amused by the boasting: With Iceland’s population being so small, it doesn’t take much to skew the proportions.
Anyway, this is a sidetrack. I just wanted to clarify what the Icelanders were telling me.
And in practice there are also big difference between the same state.
An identifiable center that multiple factions are warring to control sounds to me like the exact opposite of a stable state.
Only if you’ve been operating under the presumption that factionalism is eternal. As I said, China has vacillated between periods of intense innovation and development to stagnation and ruin.
The former tends to occur when one faction dominates the centre and provides stability.
I would recommend de Camp’s The Ancient Engineers. Innovation wherever it is tends to stay. Others see and copy it. Rarely are inventions lost to history if they are practical and useful.
The Greeks and Egyptians for example used stone beams from pillar to pillar, working with what they had. Post-and-lintel tech was useful but made for pillar-dense buildings are they got larger. Somewhere along the line, the Romans began making arches, which allowed them to build wide open buildings of stone and longer bridge spans. Pretty soon, the whole world around them was making arches too.
Similarly, once one society came up with the stirrup as a means of stabilizing a horseback rider, it spread to many other societies. Writing seems to have spread the same way.
I still think the key to innovation is firstly, the richness of a society to be able to support a class of people exploring and innovating. Size helps here, because the bigger society provides a lot more so that even if it can support only a few small number innovating, that is still many more than in a smaller society equally rich. Innovation needs riches because when it allows for failure - a necessary part of learning - not being a complete disaster for the experimenters. Someone can try for example, a different means of growing food or making pottery or building a house if they know that should they fail, someone else will supply the goods using the old method. A larger group means more innovative ideas, and the communication between them to spark even more ideas.
However, if social mores frown on doing things differently, if new ideas “offend the gods” or some such, etc. - there will be less innovation. SO size is not always the answer.
Which makes the fact that it’s “always been China” completely irrelevant.
which
China has only ever been temporary conglomerations. Their own word for their country means “the prime republic” , which means to say that the capital area is the prime republic, everything else is rings of various hegemony ( various political attachment and control … ) So the Cantonese are a second rate attachment, Vietnam being weakly held… Beijing the prime republic… They have a long history of rearranging the congolmeration… the various warring provinces or the harmonious separations … which may well be pertinent to the original question… why did it not develop new technology ? one view is that in fact had an isolationist policy, banning the development of shipping… you can go and fish, but there will be no sea trade…
trade allowed scaling up processes… with any amount of iron ore available, it could be brought to the coal mining area… to allow scaling up the smelters… The brits just happenned to have the resources that needed industrialisation (cotton,linen for making textiles) and the resources to allow it (iron ore and coal.) due to their own local resource, coal, and their trade/colonialization network.
Isn’t the Chinese word for the country “Middle Kingdom”? It’s written 中国; 中 means middle or central, and 国 means kingdom, or country more generally.
This, as an aside, explains China’s current peculiar mindset. When the empire was in its heyday, it expanded and took over and annexed the neighbouring regions. When it was in decline, the periphery regions broke away as separate countries. (Or the stronger countries strong-armed it to obtain enclaves and occasionally burn the capital). So to admit that Hong Kong or Taiwan or Tibet etc. (or the South China Sea) is not an integral part of China would be a tacit admission that the central government is weak. This is why they have a seemingly irrational fixation on not compromising, or admitting even de facto separations like Taiwan.
I think one issue that limited the speed of invention in China was manpower. When you can build a wall across the country by summoning an army of hundreds of thousands, for example, novel labour-saving construction techniques are less important. Similarly, surplus labour obviates the need to for tech to replace it. It’s suggested one reason why technology did not progress much further than it did in Greece or Rome was that they had plenty of slave labour.
But we mustn’t forget Jared Diamond’s thesis in Guns Germ and Steel where he also suggested another major driver of technology and civilization was dumb luck. Eurasians had horses and other beasts of burden. America did not, the best they could do was dogs and llamas. Africa was even worse off, zebras are apparently even more vicious to try and domesticate (They bite! Badly!). Mesopotamia and then Europe lucked into wheat as a viable food source 10,000 years sooner than the Americas had developed corn. The Mediterranean had assorted bronze age metals and the calm central sea to trade them around and learn longer distance sailing. Britain and then Europe lucked into both iron ore and coal to make iron and then steel, plus had a more agreeable climate and water resources. And so on…
It really all comes down to ferment, doesn’t it? Vibrating, vital, possibility-ridden ferment. A hep boss ferment—like what makes a good cocktail party, you know?
Trade contributes to this of course. And exploration, but trade is always mere moments behind that. As noted above, greater amounts of leisure-time play into this with some significance—a vintage ferment takes time. Then luck, of course–the chance that two specific noggins bang together in some a certain grogswilling hole in nowhere.
In James Burke’s “Connections” series he gives his take on why China didn’t have the level of scientific advancement and curiosity that led western cultures to the industrial revolution, despite the the number of technological achievements they made:
“The thing that surprises us in the west, because we use everything we can get hold of to cause change to happen, is that the Chinese had so much, and changed so little. What I mean by ‘so much’ is this. They had gunpowder you saw, and look what we did with that. And then 2,000 years ago they used to spin magnetic spoons on pictures of the earth and the sky, and depending which way the spoon pointed when it stopped they made a political prediction. When we got a hold of that in the form of the compass needle, we used it to conquer the world, to set up empires, aided in our voyages by a Chinese rudder. Chinese looms capable of making complex patterns like that [holds up an intricate silk and gold cloth] helped to set up the great 13th century European textile industries. 1,000 years before us, the Chinese had blast furnaces, steel, pistons, cranks, and this, paper. Part of the reason why, in spite of all this, change didn’t come in China the way it did when all this came to the west, was this [holds up a wood block which a Chinese character on it]. Not printing, although they invented that too, no, this word. Tao.”
“Tao, it means the universal way, the fundamental order of nature. The Taoist scholars were a group who looked for some rational order in things, to see how the universe worked, and because of their investigations gave China what we would call technology. And yet explosive change, the kind we in the west went through when we got hold of what China had invented, didn’t happen here. And to explain why I’m going to have to hit you with a bit more of inscrutable Chinese philosophy. You see, the Chinese believed that the universe was filled with ‘shen,’ a spirit that was in everything, and that all you could do was contemplate it. Trees, mountains, birds, rivers, were all one, and so you couldn’t reproduce a model of a bit of the universe and examine it, because you couldn’t fill it with shen. Now, in the Christian west, we reckoned that the universe was made of rational bits and pieces by a rational god, and if you were a rational human being you could make a model of a bit of the universe, and then take it apart to see how it worked, and use what you learned.”
“The other fundamental reason why change didn’t happen here in China, was that [points to a river in the distance], water. You see, about 5,000 years ago, the very first great civilized act of the Chinese was irrigation, on a vast scale, and that needed centralized planning, and that needed a bureaucracy. And what a bureaucracy. They pigeonholed everybody, and you stayed in your pigeon hole. I mean, you were a merchant, you saw a bit of technology and you thought ‘hah, this’ll give me a lead over the other fella, I’ll rise in the world.’ No way. You were not permitted to rise in the world, so you didn’t bother. No incentive, no change. Whereas in the medieval west, you had a little money, you got ahead. Profit motive, you know? And that is why we were able to do with technology what the Chinese could never have done. Like for instance, putting gunpowder into one of these [holds up a bell]. Or to be more accurate, one of those [cut to large church bells]. The fact that bell making was a peaceful religious business didn’t stop 13th Century Europeans from grabbing the idea. Look how easy it was to adapt, and the bell becomes a bombard (cannon). Instant artillery.”
Looking forward to more recent times the cultural revolution demonized academics and intellectuals, as well as historical traditions, in an attempt to basically neutralize anyone who might be a thinker, innovator, or roustabout. I wonder if this, and those older cultural policies, helps explain the different mindset towards education that isn’t so much about learning as it is about “passing the test.” Get the answers any way you can, it doesn’t matter if you remember it, just get the grade. That translates to business and innovation too. Steal the technology, run that 3rd shift, and cut corners, rather than coming up with something better. Anyone who does innovate just has their ideas stolen, and they can’t get ahead anyway without being in the pockets of the right government bureaucrats.
Mendeleev would like to have a word with you. So would Borodin who, although mostly known as a composer, was also a first class chemist. Then there is Euler who spent most of his career in St. Petersburg. And many many mathematicians I could name, but you wouldn’t recognize most of them.
For “inventions and innovations” to take hold you need a society in which such things can be imposed on the mass of people. I say that because many of these “inventions and innovations” are designed to make life better for a small elite, rather than the mass of people. Peasant serfs were right to be suspicious of changes in agriculture “suggested” by the lord because they knew it wasn’t going to be the lord who went hungry if his “great idea” tanked. Steam power offered few advantages to most people, but it was very useful for employers, who could now put their factories anywhere, as they no longer needed water power to run the mills. That meant they could move work away from villages where people had traditions of organization and resistance and could command them more effectively in the workplace. When competition makes replacing people with machines just “good business sense,” it throws many people of work–hardly an improvement for them. Of course, we understand history backwards, and the victors tend to be heard more, so we see “invention and innovation” where many saw worsening conditions and oppression. They called it “wage slavery” for a reason, after all.