The Culture Transplant by Garett Jones

Author:Garett Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2022-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

And Japan would be number 6 in the left column with 24 Nobels. Switzerland, with just 9 million people, shows up on both lists—the world owes the Swiss a debt. But as a rule, it’s hard to be a top creator of world-shaking ideas if you don’t have a big population. If you want to find a lot of gold, get a lot of people panning for gold.

But how can the T index (Tech History in 1500) matter? Well, there’s the obvious story that the more things change, the more they stay the same, so if your nation’s ancestors tended to be comfortable with tech in 1500, your nation has a good chance of tech success today. But that’s not really capturing the why; it doesn’t explain the links the chain of cause and effect running from past to present.

As economist James Ang already showed us in chapter 4, Tech History is a powerful predictor of the quality of a nation’s institutions, its governance. With the exception of China, all the top idea-creating nations do well on all the institutional quality lists—low corruption, a wide embrace of markets, a decent legal system. And notice that China, although in only the middle of global rankings on typical institutional quality measures, does have scale, a massive population, going for it—about four times that of the United States and sixty times that of South Korea. But even then, China is a bit uneven on idea creation.

So, while on a per-capita basis, China still makes the top 25 percent in global R & D spending, even in total numbers, China never did well on triadic patents at all. When it comes to big global, marketable ideas, institutional quality is almost surely holding China back, way back, and it’s making up for it with quantity. China has moved up a lot in government quality over the past three decades, but it’s got a long way to go before it catches up to the world’s other majority-Chinese countries: Taiwan and Singapore, and in a limited sense, Macau and Hong Kong.

But let’s not just assume that good government institutions drive innovation. Let’s try to, well, not exactly prove it like a mathematical theorem, but let’s at least look to see if there’s real-world evidence that good governance helps generate good ideas. We’ve already seen that the Deep Roots scores—SAT and the rest—capture traits that can cause changes in government quality over the very long run, and we’ve already seen that politically important attitudes substantially migrate and last for generations, almost surely shaping government policy. What we should look for now is whether changes in government institutions, changes in the rules of the game, matter for innovation, for R & D, and for patents.

And here, the evidence is abundant. In 2013, two economists, Edinaldo Tebaldi of Bryant University and Bruce Elmslie of the University of New Hampshire, ran some simple, clean tests that create a great first look at the question.6 They start off answering the simplest question:

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