The Mail
In Adam Gopnik’s review of recent works on the crisis in liberalism, he discusses Joel Mokyr’s theory, laid out in his book “A Culture of Change,” that the successful exchanges between scientists and artisans are often what propel the growth of a civilization (Books, March 20th). But Mokyr’s true concern is a more fundamental cultural question: Why did some sixteenth-century Europeans start thinking that they could materially improve their lives? He concludes that, in the course of the previous two hundred years, Europeans came to believe that progress was possible, and thus became willing to discard the intellectual heritage of earlier eras. This huge cultural shift allowed them to overcome what Mokyr calls Cardwell’s Law: the fact that technological innovation, historically, tends to fizzle out—and with it goes economic growth. Overcoming Cardwell’s Law, Mokyr writes, requires “a community that combines pluralism and competition with a coordination mechanism that allows knowledge to be distributed and shared, and hence challenged, corrected, and supplemented.” The intellectual attack on the legacy of the Enlightenment has been going on for some time, but it should now be clear that specific policies put forward by the Trump Administration and many members of the Republican Party are a direct assault on everything that has prevented Cardwell’s Law from overtaking us.