Useful Knowledge as an Evolving System: the view from Economic History

The process of modern growth is different from the kind of growth experienced in Europe and the Orient before 1800 in that it is sustained. Whereas in the premodern past, growth spurts would always run into negative feedback, no such ceiling seems to have been limiting the economic expansion of the past two centuries. The enigma of modern growth has led to a great deal of modeling and speculation amongst economists interested in the topic. One important strand in the literature has been that the Malthusian models that provided much of the negative feedback before 1800, have been short-circuited by the desire and ability of a growing number of individuals to reduce their fertility. Another has been institutional change, which has reduced opportunistic behavior and uncertainty. What has not been stressed enough is that the new technology was made possible by ever increasing "useful knowledge" as Kuznets called it. The sources of this growth in knowledge, surprisingly, have not been fully analyzed. How does "useful knowledge" emerge and develop? Why does it occur in one society and not another, at one time, and why does it take the form it does? This paper examines the details of how new knowledge is created by various combinations of luck, trial and error, inference, and experiment. To analyze the history of useful knowledge, an evolutionary framework to the economic history of useful knowledge is employed.