I don’t like Joel Mokyr’s history of progress and have written about that before. I also have a longer analysis and explanation of my issues coming soon in The Hindu. On December 8 I got more occasion to critique his thinking over his Nobel lecture in Stockholm, after receiving the prize that applied to his inchoate history of European Enlightenment a sheen of credibility I (and others) don’t think it deserves. In his lecture (transcribed in full here), Mokyr said:
I have argued at great length that these four conditions [incentives for elite innovators; a competitive “market for ideas”; talented people having the freedom to go where they like; a somewhat ‘activist state’] held increasingly in Europe between 1450 and 1750, the three centuries leading up to the industrial revolution. That is the kind of environment that led increasingly to incredibly creative innovative people: Baruch Spinoza, David Hume, James Watt, Adam Smith, Antoine Lavoisier, and Leonhard Euler, [something indecipherable], Ludwig van Beethoven. These are all people who came up with brand new ideas in an environment that supported them, if not perfectly at least far better than anything in the past.
The question is: do these conditions hold today? I would put it this way: the incentives in propositional knowledge in science are still there and they’re stronger and larger and more pervasive than ever. The market for ideas today provides unprecedented rewards and incentives to successful intellectual innovators, particularly in science. We have hundreds of thousands of people who work in intellectual endeavours, most of them (but not all) in universities. So what we do is we offer them what most of these people need more than anything else, which is financial security, which is tenure and of course in research institutions you get things like named chairs. Then we have rewards and of course there’s a whole pyramid of rewards at which the Nobel Prize and the Abel Prize presumably stand at the very peak, but there are many many other rewards, memberships in academies, and prizes for the best papers and the best books, and honorary degrees.
The funny thing is these incentives are cheap relative to the benefits that these people bestow on humankind, and that is I think a critical thing. Of course, in addition to all that there’s name recognition, fame through mass media, and, perhaps most important, these things lead to peer recognition: many academics really want to be respected by their peers, by other people like themselves, and of course in addition for a very few you know there’s lots of money to be made if they work in the right fields and get it right. Now, most of these incentives were already noticeable in about 1500, but in some ways the 20th century has done far better than anybody before.
In short Joel Mokyr treats rewards like the Nobel Prize to be a low-cost “pyramid” of incentives that helps the “upper tail” of society generate ideas. However the Nobel Prizes aren’t only incentives for innovation: they also exemplify how modern societies manage credit and legitimacy, which are examples of social relations, in ways that shape what innovation looks like and who benefits. The irony here is thus that the Nobel Prizes are part of the same system of social relations he underplays in his theory of progress — and a good example of his blindspot vis-à-vis the history of Europe’s progress.
According to Mokyr, ideas originate in the minds of an intellectual elite — his “upper tail” of society — and society’s job is to reward them. The diffusion of ideas is secondary in his framing. However, scientists, social science scholars, and historians of science have all critiqued the fact that the Nobel Prizes systematically individualise what’s almost always distributed work and sideline the science labour of laboratory managers, technicians, makers of instruments, graduate students, maintenance staff, supply chains, and of course state procurement. The Prizes advance a picture of “elite incentives” working to advance science when in fact it’s predicated equally, if not more, on questions of status and hierarchy, particularly on admission, patronage, language, funding, and geopolitics.
And in their turn the Prizes impose inefficiencies of their own. As we’ve seen before with the story of Brian Keating, they can reorganise research agendas — and more broadly they fetishise problems in science that can be solved and easily be verified to have been solved by a small number of people ‘first’.
Later in his lecture Mokyr further says:
… when technology changes, institutions have to adapt in various ways, and the problem is that they are usually slow to adapt. It takes decades until various parliamentary committees and political forces agree that some form of regulation or some form of control is necessary. And what evolutionary theory suggests is that adaptation to a changing environment is quite possible provided the changes in the technological environment are not too fast and not too abrupt. A sudden discontinuous shock will lead to mass extinctions and catastrophe; we know this is true from evolutionary history.
So there’s some concern that the acceleration in the rate of technological change in recent decades cannot be matched by institutional adaptation. What’s more, the acceleration implied by the last 10 years’ advances in AI and similar fields [suggests where] this is going to be a problem. Certain technological inventions have led to political polarisations, through social media for instance. This is something we haven’t fully solved and it’s not clear that we will be able to.
TL;DR: technology often advances faster than institutions adapt and politics, misinformation, nationalism, and xenophobia threaten the conditions for progress.
But then wouldn’t this mean then that incentives for the elites are the easy part? That is, Nobel Prizes or other incentives like them don’t fix these problems, in fact they may even distract from them by implying the main thing is to simply keep “geniuses” motivated.