I am disappointed at this 14-page long prosaic article. I will try to sum up the best I can; yet because of Mokyr's descriptive style, it is really hard for you to use his material as any evidence. It should serve as a table of content for further readings though.
Main argument: social resistance is one factor that impedes innovation and technological advancement, but it has received little attention.
Mokyr starts with the very big notion of 'self-organizing systems', such as nature, languages, and the market economy. Such systems have the property of resisting change.
[I would like to quote Goldstone (2002) that innovation leads to new systems, and such systems try to perpetuate, leading to rigidity and its own demise. In this sense, in order to become and continue to be a system proper, any system is resistance to change (except the system which depends on 'change' for its existence). However, some systems are better at incorporating change, such as natural, languages, and the market economy, and they are the ones that can survive and prosper.]
Culture and labour are identified as two resisting factors.
Resistance almost always come through non-market mechanisms. Therefore the government is of vital importance, such as the pro-innovation Czar Peter the Great and Napoleon I, or the innovation-suffocating Qing China. Britain's edge in industrialization lies in that the government consistently sided with the party for innovation, while resistance in France appeared to be more successful.
Resistance may also come from intellectuals who do not have a direct interest in the economy. There are several sources for this:
- Risk aversion;
- Technology creates negative externalities;
- The social or political correlation of technology is bad, such as destructive weapons;
- The anthropocentic view of nature is evil.
[But how do you know that such resistance to change was relatively greater in Britain than in her competitor countries?]
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