Introduction
As every economist knows, the modern era is the era of economic growth. In the past two centuries, measures of output per capita have increased dramatically and in a sustained manner, in a way they had never done before.
It seems by now a consensus to term the start of this phenomenon “the Industrial Revolution”, although it is somewhat in dispute what precisely is meant by that term [Mokyr (1998b)]. In the past two decades an enormous literature has emerged to explain this phenomenon. A large number of “deep” questions have been raised, which this literature has tried to answer. Below I list the most pertinent of these questions and in the subsequent pages, I shall make an attempt to answer them.1. What explains the location of the Industrial Revolution (in Europe as opposed to the rest of the world, in Britain as opposed to the rest of Europe, in certain regions of Britain as opposed to others). What role did geography play in determining the main parameters of the Industrial Revolution?
2. What explains the timing of the Industrial Revolution in the last third of the eighteenth century (though the full swing of economic growth did not really start until after 1815)? Could it have started in the middle ages or in classical antiquity?
3. Is sustained economic growth and continuous change the “normal” state of the economy, unless it is blocked by specific “barriers to riches”, or is the stationary state the normal condition, and the experience of the past 200 years is truly a revolutionary regime change?
4. What was the role of technology in the origins of the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent evolution of the more dynamic economies in which rapid growth became the norm?
5. What was the relation between demographic behavior (and specifically the fall in mortality after 1750 and the subsequent decline in fertility and shift toward fewer but higher-quality children) in bringing about and sustaining modern economic growth?
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What was the role of institutions (in the widest sense of the word) in bringing about modern economic growth, and to what extent can we separate it from other factors such as technology and factor accumulation?7. To what extent is modern growth due to “culture”, that is, intellectual factors regarding beliefs, attitudes, and preferences? Does culture normally adapt to the economic environment, or can one discern autonomous cultural changes that shaped the economy?
8. Did the “Great Divergence” really start only in the eighteenth century, and until then the economic performance and potential of occident and the orient were comparable, or can signs of the divergence be dated to the renaissance or even the middle ages?
9. Was the Industrial Revolution “inevitable” in the sense that the economies a thousand years earlier already contained the seeds of modern economic growth that inexorably had to sprout and bring it about?
10. What was the exact role of human capital, through formal education or other forms, in bringing about modern economic growth?
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