Brad DeLong: prediction

Transcript context

…Where does that impulse come from, of the Royal Society? It seems not an accident that it’s in England — the same era when you’re developing rule of law, constitutional thought, some theory of the rights of man, other stranger movements. Right. I don’t know. As I go looking back, starting around 1600, the intellectual air starts to smell different. You have Tommaso Campanella writing in The City of the Sun about how there has been more technological progress in the past century than in millennia before. He then ruins the effect by saying this is a result of the astrological influence of the moon and Scorpio, which as a theory of a technological progress we would find rather lacking in many ways. [laughter] You have Francis Bacon saying that the world has been utterly transformed by the compass, by movable-type printing and gunpowder. The utopia he goes on to paint is one in which there is indeed Salomon’s House, a bunch of scientists devoted to uncovering the secrets of nature to the enlargement of the human empire and to the effecting of all things possible. That utopia, or cornucopia at least, is on our future and is going to be because we’ve figured out how to use our minds to understand things, rather than because we’ve managed to recover a golden age, or because some theological being has come to our rescue, or because we’ve finally figured out the right static social order. That’s unusual. I got to trace it to what happened between 1500 and 1600, which was the discovery of the New World, the subsequent Columbian exchange, the great reduction of the prices of carrying goods across the world as a result of the first globalization. That and the tinkering culture of Western Europe meant that, in 1600, you could look back and, for the first time in history, really say, “Wow, things are a lot different than they were even 100 years ago.” In fact, we know more than anyone in the past ever did. In earlier ages, you look back and you see monuments of at least some ancient civilization that look pretty impressive to you. By 1600, no. By 1600, the idea that knowledge was a possible thing that humanity could grab for was in the air, and as you say, it all concentrates in England. It all concentrates in England, or maybe better to say it all concentrates in a circle 300 miles around the port of Dover, because Hume and Smith and the other Scottish Enlightenment people head for London fairly quickly in order to get inside the circle and get inside the discourse. That is a wonderful and marvelous thing to have happened. I think it is a systematic change from the House of Wisdom in Baghdad in 900, or from the empirical and metaphysical and alchemical researches of the researchers of the Song Dynasty. As I say, we’re very lucky it happened. What do you think of the original Paul Romer view that across the very long run, growth rates simply rise?…

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