IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sprchp/978-3-031-74987-2_3.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Innovation and the Capitalist Revolution

In: The Microeconomics of Market Failures and Institutions

Author

Listed:
  • Coen Teulings

    (Utrecht University)

  • Martijn Huysmans

    (Utrecht University)

Abstract

The economic evolution in Western Europe and North America in the past 200 years is exceptional. Technological progress has always been very limited. That changed dramatically during this exceptional episode. As a consequence Western Europe and North America became very wealthy and global inequality exploded (the great divergence). Why did this happen there and at that time? We explore four factors: institutions, population density, agglomeration in cities, and human capital. The institutional factors were: the political control of the military, the rule of law for elites, enduring organizations, and looser kinship ties. The rule of law and the political control of the military allowed for a stronger commitment to not abuse violence than could be achieved by just relying on the condition for cooperation discussed in Chap. 1. Throughout history, cities played a pivotal role in transferring ideas, boosting human capital, and enabling innovation.

Suggested Citation

  • Coen Teulings & Martijn Huysmans, 2025. "Innovation and the Capitalist Revolution," Springer Books, in: The Microeconomics of Market Failures and Institutions, chapter 3, pages 61-86, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-031-74987-2_3
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-74987-2_3
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-031-74987-2_3. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.