If, like me, you believed scientific progress was in some way intertwined with the development of open and democratic societies this paper should upend your thinking.
Surely, it’s obvious, scientific progress developed in the West at the same time as the West was enjoying a Renaissance an Enlightenment or busy circumscribing the power of its monarchs. Cause and effect, right?
Moreover, science and its kissing-cousin technology, needs open and liberal societies to flourish and those based on autocracy or religious intolerance are therefore doomed. That’s why China, India and Islam have retarded scientific progress and the West has been an incubator.
If that sort of sums up your thinking (it did mine), think again..
Caroline S. Wagner from the Ohio State University takes a radical approach and backward-inducts what the progress of China, Japan, Korea and Singapore (none liberal and open democracies when scientific progress really took off) can reveal about what the West was really providing all those years ago.
The common thread in ALL cases, both for the West and the follow-on Eastern Wunderkinder, was/is a strong Nation State. In Europe these emerged after the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 and from there three conditions became present which are latterly observed in the most recent cases.
They are:
- Policies that protect intellectual property
- Polices that encourage mobility and skills development and,
- Government procurement of science and technology, especially through military purchases
In the case of China Ms. Wagner notes it was only after Deng Xiaoping encouraged the Four Modernizations program that this process could begin (the chaos of the prior administration was not conducive to such progress).
For those advocating policies as to how developing nations might more swiftly ride up a technology curve the work should make for a useful read.
The paper in full is here Science and the Nation-State.
Happy Sunday.