Yuval Noah Harari: I don't have a smartphone

How has your work changed your relationship to technology?
I don't have a smartphone. My attention is one of the most important resources I have, and the smartphone is constantly trying to grab my attention. There's always something coming in.

I try to be very careful about how I use technology and really make sure that I'm using it for the purposes that I define instead of allowing it to kind of shape my purposes for me. That sometimes happens when you open the computer: you have a couple of minutes to spare, so you start just randomly browsing through YouTube, and two hours later, you're still there watching all types of funny cat videos, car accidents, and whatever. You did not say to yourself, "Okay, I want to spend the next two hours watching these videos." The technology kind of dictated to you that this is what you're going to do by grabbing your attention in such a forceful way that it can kind of manipulate you.

How has removing those attention-grabbing technologies changed your quality of life?
I have much more time. I think it makes a much more peaceful… I mean, it's not such a big secret. The way to grab people's attention is by exciting their emotions, either through things like fear and hatred and anger, or through things like greed and craving. If somebody [is] very afraid of immigrants and hates immigration, the algorithm will show him one story after the other about terrible things that immigrants are doing. Then somebody else maybe really, really doesn't like President Trump, so they spend hours watching all kinds of things that make them very, very angry. And it doesn't matter if it's true or not—they see this headline of “President Trump Said the World is Flat,” they feel this irresistible urge to click on it.

It grabs your attention because you already have this weakness. But if you kind of sit there and just read infuriating stories for an entire hour you are basically feeding your mind with things that make you more angry and hateful. And this is especially bad if many of these stories are just not true. Sometimes they are true, quite often they're not. But the net result is that you now just spent an hour feeding your hate and your fury.

It's the same way with the other side of the coin, with greed. Because if you really want something—the perfect body, the perfect car—and you watch all these videos, you want it more and more. And if you don't have it, then you feel worse and worse that you don't have this kind of body, or you don't have this kind of car. So you just spent one hour feeding your cravings and your greed, and it's really not good for you.

The better you know yourself, the more protected you are from all these algorithms trying to manipulate you. If we go back to the example of the YouTube videos. If you know “I have this weakness, I tend to hate this group of people,” or “I have a bit obsession to the way my hair looks," then you can be a little more protected from these kinds of manipulations. Like with alcoholics or smokers, the first step is to just recognize, “Yes, I have this bad habit and I need to be more careful about it.”

So how do you get your news?
I rarely follow the kind of day-to-day news cycle. I tend to read long books about subjects that interest me. So instead of reading 100 short stories about the Chinese economy, I prefer to take one long book about the Chinese economy and read it from cover-to-cover. So I miss a lot of things, but I'm not a politician and I’m not a journalist, so I guess it's okay I don't follow every latest story.

via GQ

China and Science

Chinese schoolchildren are still taught to think of this general period as the “century of humiliation,” the nadir of China’s long fall from its Ming-dynasty peak. Back when the ancient observatory was built, China could rightly regard itself as the lone survivor of the great Bronze Age civilizations, a class that included the Babylonians, the Mycenaeans, and even the ancient Egyptians. Western poets came to regard the latter’s ruins as Ozymandian proof that nothing lasted. But China had lasted. Its emperors presided over the planet’s largest complex social organization. They commanded tribute payments from China’s neighbors, whose rulers sent envoys to Beijing to perform a baroque face-to-the-ground bowing ceremony for the emperors’ pleasure.

In the first volume of his landmark series, Science and Civilisation in China, published in 1954, the British Sinologist Joseph Needham asked why the scientific revolution hadn’t happened in China, given its sophisticated intellectual meritocracy, based on exams that measured citizens’ mastery of classical texts. This inquiry has since become known as the “Needham Question,” though Voltaire too had wondered why Chinese mathematics stalled out at geometry, and why it was the Jesuits who brought the gospel of Copernicus into China, and not the other way around. He blamed the Confucian emphasis on tradition. Other historians blamed China’s remarkably stable politics. A large landmass ruled by long dynasties may have encouraged less technical dynamism than did Europe, where more than 10 polities were crammed into a small area, triggering constant conflict. As we know from the Manhattan Project, the stakes of war have a way of sharpening the scientific mind.

Still others have accused premodern China of insufficient curiosity about life beyond its borders. (Notably, there seems to have been very little speculation in China about extraterrestrial life before the modern era.) This lack of curiosity is said to explain why China pressed pause on naval innovation during the late Middle Ages, right at the dawn of Europe’s age of exploration, when the Western imperial powers were looking fondly back through the medieval fog to seafaring Athens.

Whatever the reason, China paid a dear price for slipping behind the West in science and technology. In 1793, King George III stocked a ship with the British empire’s most dazzling inventions and sent it to China, only to be rebuffed by its emperor, who said he had “no use” for England’s trinkets. Nearly half a century later, Britain returned to China, seeking buyers for India’s opium harvest. China’s emperor again declined, and instead cracked down on the local sale of the drug, culminating in the seizure and flamboyant seaside destruction of 2 million pounds of British-owned opium. Her Majesty’s Navy responded with the full force of its futuristic technology, running ironclad steamships straight up the Yangtze, sinking Chinese junk boats, until the emperor had no choice but to sign the first of the “unequal treaties” that ceded Hong Kong, along with five other ports, to British jurisdiction. After the French made a colony of Vietnam, they joined in this “slicing of the Chinese melon,” as it came to be called, along with the Germans, who occupied a significant portion of Shandong province.

Meanwhile Japan, a “little brother” as far as China was concerned, responded to Western aggression by quickly modernizing its navy, such that in 1894, it was able to sink most of China’s fleet in a single battle, taking Taiwan as the spoils. And this was just a prelude to Japan’s brutal mid-20th-century invasion of China, part of a larger campaign of civilizational expansion that aimed to spread Japanese power to the entire Pacific, a campaign that was largely successful, until it encountered the United States and its city-leveling nukes.

China’s humiliations multiplied with America’s rise. After sending 200,000 laborers to the Western Front in support of the Allied war effort during World War I, Chinese diplomats arrived at Versailles expecting something of a restoration, or at least relief from the unequal treaties. Instead, China was seated at the kids’ table with Greece and Siam, while the Western powers carved up the globe.

Only recently has China regained its geopolitical might, after opening to the world during Deng Xiaoping’s 1980s reign. Deng evinced a near-religious reverence for science and technology, a sentiment that is undimmed in Chinese culture today. The country is on pace to outspend the United States on R&D this decade, but the quality of its research varies a great deal. According to one study, even at China’s most prestigious academic institutions, a third of scientific papers are faked or plagiarized. Knowing how poorly the country’s journals are regarded, Chinese universities are reportedly offering bonuses of up to six figures to researchers who publish in Western journals.

It remains an open question whether Chinese science will ever catch up with that of the West without a bedrock political commitment to the free exchange of ideas. China’s persecution of dissident scientists began under Mao, whose ideologues branded Einstein’s theories “counterrevolutionary.” But it did not end with him. Even in the absence of overt persecution, the country’s “great firewall” handicaps Chinese scientists, who have difficulty accessing data published abroad.

China has learned the hard way that spectacular scientific achievements confer prestige upon nations. The “Celestial Kingdom” looked on from the sidelines as Russia flung the first satellite and human being into space, and then again when American astronauts spiked the Stars and Stripes into the lunar crust.

China has largely focused on the applied sciences. It built the world’s fastest supercomputer, spent heavily on medical research, and planted a “great green wall” of forests in its northwest as a last-ditch effort to halt the Gobi Desert’s spread. Now China is bringing its immense resources to bear on the fundamental sciences. The country plans to build an atom smasher that will conjure thousands of “god particles” out of the ether, in the same time it took cern’s Large Hadron Collider to strain out a handful. It is also eyeing Mars. In the technopoetic idiom of the 21st century, nothing would symbolize China’s rise like a high-definition shot of a Chinese astronaut setting foot on the red planet.

Ross Andersen, The Atlantic
 

iGen: The Smartphone Generation

I’ve been researching generational differences for 25 years, starting when I was a 22-year-old doctoral student in psychology. Typically, the characteristics that come to define a generation appear gradually, and along a continuum. Beliefs and behaviors that were already rising simply continue to do so. Millennials, for instance, are a highly individualistic generation, but individualism had been increasing since the Baby Boomers turned on, tuned in, and dropped out. I had grown accustomed to line graphs of trends that looked like modest hills and valleys. Then I began studying Athena’s generation.

Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states. The gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, and many of the distinctive characteristics of the Millennial generation began to disappear. In all my analyses of generational data—some reaching back to the 1930s—I had never seen anything like it.

At first I presumed these might be blips, but the trends persisted, across several years and a series of national surveys. The changes weren’t just in degree, but in kind. The biggest difference between the Millennials and their predecessors was in how they viewed the world; teens today differ from the Millennials not just in their views but in how they spend their time. The experiences they have every day are radically different from those of the generation that came of age just a few years before them.

**
I call them iGen. Born between 1995 and 2012, members of this generation are growing up with smartphones, have an Instagram account before they start high school, and do not remember a time before the internet. The Millennials grew up with the web as well, but it wasn’t ever-present in their lives, at hand at all times, day and night. iGen’s oldest members were early adolescents when the iPhone was introduced, in 2007, and high-school students when the iPad entered the scene, in 2010. A 2017 survey of more than 5,000 American teens found that three out of four owned an iPhone.

**
To those of us who fondly recall a more analog adolescence, this may seem foreign and troubling. The aim of generational study, however, is not to succumb to nostalgia for the way things used to be; it’s to understand how they are now. Some generational changes are positive, some are negative, and many are both. More comfortable in their bedrooms than in a car or at a party, today’s teens are physically safer than teens have ever been. They’re markedly less likely to get into a car accident and, having less of a taste for alcohol than their predecessors, are less susceptible to drinking’s attendant ills.


Psychologically, however, they are more vulnerable than Millennials were: Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.

Even when a seismic event—a war, a technological leap, a free concert in the mud—plays an outsize role in shaping a group of young people, no single factor ever defines a generation. Parenting styles continue to change, as do school curricula and culture, and these things matter. But the twin rise of the smartphone and social media has caused an earthquake of a magnitude we’ve not seen in a very long time, if ever. There is compelling evidence that the devices we’ve placed in young people’s hands are having profound effects on their lives—and making them seriously unhappy.

**


Gen X managed to stretch adolescence beyond all previous limits: Its members started becoming adults earlier and finished becoming adults later. Beginning with Millennials and continuing with iGen, adolescence is contracting again—but only because its onset is being delayed. Across a range of behaviors—drinking, dating, spending time unsupervised— 18-year-olds now act more like 15-year-olds used to, and 15-year-olds more like 13-year-olds. Childhood now stretches well into high school.

Why are today’s teens waiting longer to take on both the responsibilities and the pleasures of adulthood? Shifts in the economy, and parenting, certainly play a role. In an information economy that rewards higher education more than early work history, parents may be inclined to encourage their kids to stay home and study rather than to get a part-time job. Teens, in turn, seem to be content with this homebody arrangement—not because they’re so studious, but because their social life is lived on their phone. They don’t need to leave home to spend time with their friends.

If today’s teens were a generation of grinds, we’d see that in the data. But eighth-, 10th-, and 12th-graders in the 2010s actually spend less time on homework than Gen X teens did in the early 1990s. (High-school seniors headed for four-year colleges spend about the same amount of time on homework as their predecessors did.) The time that seniors spend on activities such as student clubs and sports and exercise has changed little in recent years. Combined with the decline in working for pay, this means iGen teens have more leisure time than Gen X teens did, not less.

So what are they doing with all that time? They are on their phone, in their room, alone and often distressed.

**
The number of teens who get together with their friends nearly every day dropped by more than 40 percent from 2000 to 2015; the decline has been especially steep recently. It’s not only a matter of fewer kids partying; fewer kids are spending time simply hanging out. That’s something most teens used to do: nerds and jocks, poor kids and rich kids, C students and A students. The roller rink, the basketball court, the town pool, the local necking spot—they’ve all been replaced by virtual spaces accessed through apps and the web.

You might expect that teens spend so much time in these new spaces because it makes them happy, but most data suggest that it does not. The Monitoring the Future survey, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and designed to be nationally representative, has asked 12th-graders more than 1,000 questions every year since 1975 and queried eighth- and 10th-graders since 1991. The survey asks teens how happy they are and also how much of their leisure time they spend on various activities, including nonscreen activities such as in-person social interaction and exercise, and, in recent years, screen activities such as using social media, texting, and browsing the web. The results could not be clearer: Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy.

Jean M. Twenge
The Atlantic, Sep 2017

İnsanlığın Yıldızının Parladığı Anlar

“Bir ülkenin bir başka ülkeye savaş ilan etmesi ânında halk yığınlarının sokaklara ve meydanlara dökülüp sevinç gösterilerinde bulundukları her zaman görülmüştür, bu tür gösterilerde sokakları dolduran halk yığınları arasından başka seslerin, daha yavaş, daha gerilerde kalmış seslerin de yükseldiği, yine bilinen bir gerçektir. Bir savaş ilanı ânında korku da, kaygı da kuşkusuz kendini gösterir; ancak bunlar açığa vurulmazlar, odalarda fısıltı biçiminde dolaşırlar ya da kül gibi olmuş dudaklardan bir türlü dışarı çıkamazlar. Kendi kendilerine, düşman askerleri çocuklarımızı öldürecek mi, diye soran anneler, malı, tarlası, evi, hayvanları ve ürünü için kaygılanan köylüler her zaman ve her ülkede bulunur. Acımasız düşman askerleri tarafından ekinleri çiğnenip evleri yağma edilmeyecek mi? Çalıştıkları tarlalar kanla sulanıp gübrelenmiş olmayacak mı?”
**
“İnsan adı verilen şu tuhaf yaratığın yeryüzüne ayak basışından bu yana geçen binlerce, belki de yüz binlerce yıl boyunca, insanoğlunun ilerleyişinin en büyük göstergesi olarak atın koşması, tekerleğin dönmesi, geminin kürekle ya da yelkenle hareket etmesi gösterilmişti. İnsanlık tarihi dediğimiz ve bilgi ile aydınlanmış o daracık alana sığdırılan bütün teknik gelişmeler, hiç de öyle dikkat çekici bir hızla gerçekleşmedi. Wallenstein'in orduları, Sezar'ın lejyonlarından çok daha hızlı ilerlemedi, Napoléon'un orduları Cengiz Han'ın akıncılarından daha çabuk yol almadı, Nelson'un gemileri Wikinglerin korsan kayıklarından ve Finikelilerin ticaret gemilerinden daha hızlı değildi. ChildeHarold yolculuğuna çıkan bir Lord Byron, bir günde, Pontus sürgününe giden Ovidius' tan daha fazla yol alamıyordu. On sekizinci yüzyılın büyük şairi Goethe, bin yıl önce yaşamış bir Havari Paulus'tan daha rahat ve daha hızlı yolculuk yapamıyordu. Ülkeleri birbirlerinden ayıran zaman ve mekân olgusu hiç değişmiyor, Roma İmparatorluğu zamanında nasılsa, Napoléon zamanında da öyle kalıyor. Kısacası, madde, insanoğlunun isteklerine karşı üstünlüğünü korumayı sürdürüyor.”
**

“O âna kadar kendi içine kapalı bir yaşam biçimine sahip insanoğlunu, dünya ile bütünleştirecek olan bu büyük ve tarihsel olaya, telgrafın bulunduğu 1837 yılına, ne yazık ki okul kitaplarımızda çok az yer veriliyor: çünkü bu kitapları hazırlayanlar, ulusların ve ordu komutanlarının kazandıkları savaş ve utkularını, insanlığın gerçek utkusundan daha üstün tutuyorlar. Ama buna karşın, daha sonraki çağlarda gerçekleşecek hiçbir tarihsel olay, zaman ölçüsündeki bu köklü değişikliğin yol açtığı psikolojik etkisiyle kıyaslanamaz. Artık dünya değişmiştir. İnsanoğlu, Amsterdam, Moskova, Napoli ve Lizbon'da olup bitenleri aynı anda Paris'te de öğrenme olanağına kavuşmuş bulunuyor. Yalnızca bir adım daha atmak gerekiyor, o zaman dünyanın öteki yerleri de insanlığın ortak bilinci ve sıkı işbirliğiyle bir araya gelmiş olacak.”
**
“Bir mucizenin gerçekleşebilmesi ya da olağanüstü bir şeyin tamamlanabilmesi için bireyin, her şeyden önce bu mucizeye inanması gerekir. Bazen bilgisi kıt birinin çılgınlığı, bilginlerin yapmakta duraksadıkları yaratıcı hamleyi yapma olanağını verir.”
**

“Hiç kimsenin dikkatini çekmeyen bu ufak tefek ve tıknaz adam, gözlerden uzak, sessiz bir yaşam sürüyor. Kalabalık içinde görünmekten kaçınıyor, çekik kara gözlerindeki o keskin bakışlarını, pek fark eden yok. Ziyaretine gelenlerin sayısı da çok az. Ama her gün düzenli olarak sabah saat dokuzda kütüphaneye gidiyor ve orada, öğle tatiline, saat on ikiye kadar oturuyor. On ikiyi tam on geçe evinde oluyor ve herkesten önce kütüphanede bulunmak için, bire on kala yeniden evinden çıkıyor ve akşamın altısına kadar orada oturuyor. Fakat haberalma servislerinde çalışan ajanlar, yalnızca çok konuşan adamlara dikkat ettikleri ve çok okuyup çok öğrenen yalnız insanların, dünyamızda gerçekleştirilen devrimlerde oynadıkları rolün ne kadar büyük olduğunu bilmediklerinden, kundura tamircisinin evinde oturan bu sessiz ve önemsiz adam hakkında hiç bilgi toplamıyorlar. Sosyalist çevrelerin bu adamla ilgili bütün bildikleri, Londra'daki Rus mültecilerin çıkardığı küçük ve radikal bir derginin yazıişleri sorumlusu olduğu ve Petersburg'da, adı o zamanlar dile alınmayan bir partinin başkanlığını yaptığıdır. Sosyalist partinin en saygın üyeleri bile, yöntemlerini yanlış bulup haklarında sert eleştiriler yapan ve küçümseyici sözler söyleyen bu adamla uzlaşmanın asla mümkün olamayacağını bildikleri için, onunla pek fazla ilgilenmezler.''

The Start-Up from Batman

“In March 2016, I was visiting Sulaimaniya, in Iraqi Kurdistan, where a mutual friend introduced me to Sadik Yildiz, whose family runs a number of information-technology companies. Among them is Yeni Medya, or New Media Inc., which exemplifies just how fast a small maker can get just how big from just how remote a place by leveraging the supernova.

New Media Inc., which was founded by Yildiz’s nephew, Ekrem Teymur, does big data analytics and media monitoring for the Turkish and other governments and the private sector, among many other things. They track all the media, including social media, in real time and can report to their customers what stories appear about them in the media anywhere. They can also inform the customer in real time of the top twenty subjects people are talking about and in what proportions. It is all displayed on a dashboard in colored boxes with the headline and percentage in each box.

“The Turkish presidency is a customer, and through our system they can receive a real-time poll service—every minute you can poll the public,” Yildiz explained to me. “Big data is making things easy for everyone now. The software that we have developed in-house aggregates all the news sources in Turkey and the United States every five minutes—even Google News does not track every source at this pace all the time. We track all the existing stories on Twitter, and we archive all the stories that we track—one million stories a day; no one is archiving like that even in the United States—so if a news source deletes the story they publish about you after it is circulated, you can still use our system to retrieve it and use it for judiciary purposes. And then any government or company can use that to track what is said about them.”

How do you make money?
“The business makes money on a subscription basis depending on how many keywords you want tracked and how many users you will have,” explained Yildiz. “‘Thomas Friedman’ would only be one word.” (A bargain!) “They can give you content analysis, what is being said about you, break it down by geography, where it is coming from, how many people in which city are reading it, who started the story about you or the trend first—that is, who are the influencers—and how many followers used the same wording or how the original wording evolved and changed.”

I was intrigued. It turns out that whispering—like guessing—is also officially over. “All the members of the Turkish parliament are using it to track about themselves,” said Yildiz. “So are some news agencies, [who can] judge their reporters by whose stories are getting picked up most.”

I was pretty sure I didn’t want to hear everything being said about me, but I was intrigued by the tool they’d built. How much does it cost? Packages range from one thousand to twenty thousand dollars, he said, again depending on the number of keywords you want tracked.

So with all this amazing technology and reach, I asked, where did you start this company?
“Batman,” he answered.

Is that a real place? I asked. “Yes it is!” Yildiz shot back. “And actually the city’s mayor has sued the Batman movie for using the name without permission!” Yildiz is a Turkish Kurd, and so his family’s company is based in the Kurdish-speaking region of eastern Turkey, in the family’s hometown, called Batman. They have other businesses—construction and water treatment. But their real success came through leveraging the supernova from Batman. How did they do that? It was a family affair that started up as soon as the global flows from the supernova hit their town.

“My nephew, Ekrem Teymur, is the founder and chief engineer behind it—he is forty-two,” explained Yildiz. “He was born in Batman and is the number-one data engineer in Turkey—the company was his idea.” New Media Inc. has one hundred employees, and for a long time was competing from Batman with the biggest companies in the world. Most of the key positions in the company are held by family members—Ekrem and his six sisters, all born in Batman. The sisters, most of whom had only basic education, are now working as the chief editor,  “sales managers, and app production managers—a remarkable thing for a city where most of the women are not even allowed by their families to work.

The main business office, though, is now in Istanbul, said Yildiz, “but we still employ a lot of people in Batman.” Thanks to all the connectivity today, they “can sit in their home in front of their computers and do jobs for us—and so it creates a lot of employment opportunities.” Besides Batman and Istanbul, they have offices now in Dublin, Dubai, Beirut, and Palo Alto. Why the hell not?
“There is nothing called ‘underprivileged’ anymore,” said Yildiz. “All you need is a working brain, some short training, and then put your idea into a fantastic business from any part of the world!”

Sadik Yildiz’s story—and I have met so many others like him in the past decade—is a vivid example of how education plus connectivity plus supernova means that “more and more people are being empowered at lower and lower levels of income than ever before, so they think and act as if they were in the middle class, demanding human security and dignity and citizens’ rights,” explained Khalid Malik, former director of the U.N.’s Human Development Report Office. “This is a tectonic shift. The Industrial Revolution was a ten-million-person story. This is a couple-of-billion-person story.” And we are just at the beginning of it.”

Thank You For Being Late!

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”[Marie Curie]
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“In this book, I will argue that we are living through one of the greatest inflection points in history—perhaps unequaled since Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg, a German blacksmith and printer, launched the printing revolution in Europe, paving the way for the Reformation. The three largest forces on the planet—technology, globalization, and climate change—are all accelerating at once. As a result, so many aspects of our societies, workplaces, and geopolitics are being reshaped and need to be reimagined.

When there is a change in the pace of change in so many realms at once, as we’re now experiencing, it is easy to get overwhelmed by it all. As John E. Kelly III, IBM’s senior vice president for cognitive solutions and IBM Research, once observed to me: “We live as human beings in a linear world—where distance, time, and velocity are linear.” But the growth of technology today is on “an exponential curve.”

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In such a time, opting to pause and reflect, rather than panic or withdraw, is a necessity. It is not a luxury or a distraction—it is a way to increase the odds that you’ll better understand, and engage productively with, the world around you.

How so? “When you press the pause button on a machine, it stops. But when you press the pause button on human beings they start,” argues my friend and teacher Dov Seidman, CEO of LRN, which advises global businesses on ethics and leadership. “You start to reflect, you start to rethink your assumptions, you start to reimagine what is possible and, most importantly, you start to reconnect with your most deeply held beliefs. Once you’ve done that, you can begin to reimagine a better path.”

But what matters most “is what you do in the pause,” he added. “Ralph Waldo Emerson said it best: ‘In each pause I hear the call.’ 

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“In his sobering book Sabbath, the minister and author Wayne Muller observes how often people say to him, “I am so busy.” “We say this to one another with no small degree of pride,” Muller writes, “as if our exhaustion were a trophy, our ability to withstand stress a mark of real character … To be unavailable to our friends and family, to be unable to find time for the sunset (or even to know when the sun has set at all), to whiz through our obligations without time for a single, mindful breath, this has become a model of a successful life.”

I’d rather learn to pause. As the editor and writer Leon Wieseltier said to me once: technologists want us to think that patience became a virtue only because in the past “we had no choice”—we had to wait longer for things because our modems were too slow or our broadband hadn’t been installed, or because we hadn’t upgraded to the iPhone 7. “And so now that we have made waiting technologically obsolete,” added Wieseltier, “their attitude is: ‘Who needs patience anymore?’ But the ancients believed that there was wisdom in patience and that wisdom comes from patience … Patience wasn’t just the absence of speed. It was space for reflection and thought.” We are generating more information and knowledge than ever today, “but knowledge is only good if you can reflect on it. 

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“Not everything is better faster or meant to go faster. I am built to think about my grandchildren. I am not a cheetah.” 

Why the Industrial Revolution didn’t happen in China

To economic historians like Joel Mokyr, there's nothing inevitable about the incredible wealth and health of the modern world. But for a spark in a little corner of Europe that ignited the Industrial Revolution — which spread incredible advances in technology and living standards first across the north Atlantic coast in the 1700 and 1800s and gradually around the world — we could all be living the nasty, brutish and short lives of our ancestors centuries before.

Mokyr, who teaches at Northwestern University, dives into the mystery of how the world went from being poor to being so rich in just a few centuries in a forthcoming book, “A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy.”

Drawing on centuries of philosophy and scientific advancements, Mokyr argues that there's a reason the Industrial Revolution occurred in Europe and not, for example, in China, which had in previous centuries shown signs of more scientific advancement: Europe developed a unique culture of competitive scientific and intellectual advancement that was unprecedented and not at all predestined.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Why is it important to consider this question, of why the Industrial Revolution occurred?

It is a question that needs to be asked if we want to know how we became what we are. The 19th and 20th centuries are in many ways the most transformative centuries in all of human history. Until about 1800, the vast bulk of people on this planet were poor. And when I say poor, I mean they were on the brink of physical starvation for most of their lives.

Life expectancy in 1750 was around 38 at most, and much lower in some places. The notion that today we would live 80 years, and spend much of those in leisure, is totally unexpected. The lower middle class in Western and Asian industrialized societies today has a higher living standard than the pope and the emperors of a few centuries back, in every dimension. That is the result of one thing: Our ability to understand the forces of nature and harness them for our economic needs.

If we understood how that happened, we would understand human history. For thousands of years, the material conditions that people lived in changed very little. Then all of a sudden, in 1800, it just zooms up.

That came out of Western Europe and its offshoot in North America after 1800. If it hadn’t been for that, you and I would be looking at a life expectancy of maybe 40, and I probably I wouldn’t be sipping cappuccino from a fancy machine and talking to you on my smartphone. Look at what we have achieved in every dimension. Technology hasn’t just increased our income, it’s changed every aspect of daily life.

The question is, was all this inevitable? My answer is, absolutely no.

So why did this dramatic change occur? And why did it start in Europe, rather than in China?

China has a glorious past in its scientific achievements. And yet they were never able to turn it into economic growth as the West did. If you look at Europe and China in the 19th century, Europe is advancing at breathtaking speed. It’s building a rail network, steamships, factories. By the early 20th century, China looked like it was going to be completely occupied by imperialist powers. Clearly the technological and economic development of East and West diverged from 1850 on. The $64,000 question is “Why?”

People have given different answers, and I’m giving mine. One way of thinking about it is culture. But to state, “Hey, the Chinese have a different culture because they were Confucianists, and the Europeans were Christian,” I don’t buy that for a second. It’s much more subtle and complicated. The way I would phrase it is that culture is not independent of political and institutional circumstances.

China and Europe are different in many ways, but one is that after the Mongol conquest in the 12th century, China remains a unified empire run by a single Mandarin bureaucracy. There is nothing that competes with or threatens China. China does get invaded by Manchu tribes in 1644, but they don’t change the structure of the state. They learned to speak Chinese, dress like Chinese and eat like Chinese.

In Europe, no one ever succeeds in unifying it, and you have continuous competition. The French are worried about the English, the English are worried about the Spanish, the Spanish are worried about the Turks. That keeps everybody on their toes, which is something economists immediately recognize as the competitive model. To have progress, you want a system that is competitive, not one that is dominated by a single power.

I think that is the major difference. It isn’t just that China doesn’t have an Industrial Revolution, it doesn’t have a Galileo or a Newton or a Descartes, people who announced that everything people did before them was wrong. That’s hard to do in any society, but it was easier to do in Europe than China. The reason precisely is because Europe was fragmented, and so when somebody says something very novel and radical, if the government decides they are a heretic and threatens to prosecute them, they pack their suitcase and go across the border.

Europe creates a competitive world that encourages intellectual innovation. There’s the Reformation, which says the religion you had until now is wrong. The same happens in astronomy, chemistry, medicine, mathematics and philosophy. Eventually, it filters down to how we make textiles and shoes, and how we grow corn.

I want to make clear, very few serious historians think China failed. China wanted stability and security, and they achieved that for a long time. The Europeans don’t want stability. They want progress. Of course, China’s stability gets disrupted by Europeans showing up with more powerful ships and guns. Eventually, China crumbles under the onslaught of European modernity. It’s quite a tragic story.

Your book talks about how the Industrial Revolution resulted from a preference for “useful knowledge” and a connection that forms between the social elite and the productive sector of society. Explain that.

Between Columbus’s voyage to America in 1492 and the death of Isaac Newton in 1727, the agenda of research in Europe changes. For much of human history, people studied science and natural phenomena, not to make us materially better off, but just to satisfy curiosity. The ancient Greeks made fantastic scientific progress, but there are few instances in which they use it for anything. In fact, Aristotle says science shouldn’t be used, because work is something for the lower classes. Learned people didn’t work, and working people didn’t learn.

Before the Industrial Revolution, learned people in Europe changed the agenda. They say, “Look, we should study nature, but we should do so to improve our material welfare.” To people today, this sounds totally obvious. But it wasn’t in the year 1600. By the 18th century, this has become the consensus. That's what I call the Industrial Enlightenment.

Many of the scientific issues they were trying to solve, they couldn’t. But they kept trying, and by the 19th century, they start cracking problems. Electricity is one example. For 100 years, people struggle with trying to harness its power. Only by the 1860s is electrical generation cracked, and then all of a sudden you get Thomas Edison, electrical lighting and street cars. The same thing happened in the understanding of infectious disease, which is the main reason life expectancy goes up. These advances took a long time. But they never gave up, and in the end they cracked it. If you think about it, this is quite astonishing.

Now we haven’t cracked everything. I can’t tell you if we are going to crack nuclear fusion. But that’s what this game is all about, that nature is comprehensible, and we can understand and use it. We can never understand 100 percent of it, but we can do better and better.

In China today, people often talk about the country’s rich history of invention, for example of printing, gunpowder and the compass. And you mention that China had its own Enlightenment. So how was that different?  

China was extremely innovative in its heyday, which is basically under the Song dynasty, which ended in 1279. At that time, European and Islamic travelers realized that China was leading the world in technology. And China does have kind of an Enlightenment. And yet, in the end, they did not turn that innovation into sustained economic growth.

I believe the fundamental reason is China’s position as a single empire, and also its bureaucracy, which is a unique and peculiar animal. On the one hand, it is very progressive, because it is a meritocracy. In Europe, the people who were in power were the sons and nephews of other people in power. But in China there’s an examination, and the people who did the best rose in the Mandarin civil service. So you’d think, “Wow, that’s very progressive.” Except if you look at what they were studying for these exams, they were simply regurgitating the classics. It was the perfect tool to keep reproducing from the same mold generation after generation.

In Europe, something different happens. People study classical knowledge, Ptolemy and Hippocrates and Archimedes, and they begin to say, “Most of this stuff is wrong.” You couldn’t do that in China. If you said “This stuff is wrong,” you failed your exam. But in Europe, the ability to challenge received wisdom is irrepressible.

In the 17th century, Europeans build microscopes, telescopes and barometers that allow them to study nature in a way the classics never could. And they become rather cocky. There’s a French philosopher in the late 16th century, Pierre de La Ramée, who writes a book with the title “Everything Aristotle Has Said Is Wrong.” That’s chutzpah. A century earlier, he would have been strung up.

For example, Aristotle famously thought that a vacuum was impossible. Then one day, Europeans build a vacuum pump. The only conclusion they could reach is Aristotle is wrong. If he was wrong about that, could he be wrong about other things? You bet. Aristotle thought all the stars in the heavens were completely fixed; nothing is added and nothing is subtracted. In 1573, a Danish astronomer called Tycho Brahe observes a supernova. There was a star there before, and now it’s not. So people start being skeptical, and skepticism leads to what I call contestability. Arguments are decided not on authority, but on evidence, logic and mathematical proof.

That seems perfectly normal to us, but it's something that had to be learned. It's something no other society pulls off. In other places, wisdom and knowledge were revealed to our forefathers, and if you want to know the truth, you have to study their writings, whether it’s the Bible, or Confucius, or the Koran, or the Talmud.

What implications does all this have for our world today?

There's a debate about the extent to which everything that can be invented has been invented. Have we picked all the low hanging fruit, can we continue to grow the way we did? I take a very optimistic view. I think if you want to summarize the future of technology, the short summary is, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

The reason I say this is because science advances in part because people have the tools to work on problems. In the scientific advances of the 17th century, the microscope, the telescope and the barometer play a very important role. Now, if you ask what science has to work with today, it boggles the mind. We have microscopes that see the sub-molecular level. We have telescopes that see galaxies nobody dreamed existed. We have labs full of computers. A computer can find nanoscopic needles in a hay stack the size of Montana. The question is not, “What do computers do for our research?” The question people ask today is, “How the hell did anyone do anything before we had computers?”

We are going to make so much more progress, simply because we have more powerful tools. As science advances, it will push our capability of controlling nature further. Now, the problems also get harder. We are dealing with issues like climate change and desertification. But our capability of solving them is going even faster, which is why I’m optimistic.

Ana Swanson

The Washington Post, 28 Ekim 2016

Tersine Gelişim

Bugün var olan dünya eşitsizliğinin nedeni, bazı ülkelerin 19. ve 20. yüzyıl boyunca Sanayi Devrimi’nden, getirdiği teknolojilerden ve örgütlenme yöntemlerinden faydalanabilmesine karşın diğerlerinin buna imkân bulamamasıdır. Teknolojik değişim refahın lokomotiflerinden yalnızca biridir; fakat muhtemelen lokomotiflerinden yalnızca biridir; fakat muhtemelen en hayati olanıdır. Yeni teknolojilerden yararlanamayan ülkeler refahın diğer lokomotiflerinden de fayda göremediler. Bu ve bundan önceki bölümde gösterdiğimiz gibi, bu başarısızlık ister mutlakıyetçi rejimlerinin sürekliliğinin bir sonucu olsun, ister merkezi devletlere sahip olmamaları nedeniyle olsun, sömürücü kurumlarından kaynaklanıyordu. Fakat bu bölümün ortaya koyduğu bir şey daha var; bazı durumlarda, bu ülkelerin maruz kaldığı yoksulluğa zemin hazırlayan sömürücü kurumlar, tam da Avrupa’nın büyümesini teşvik eden süreç sayesinde ortaya çıktılar ya da en azından daha güçlü hale geldiler: Avrupa’nın ticari ve sömürgeci yayılmacılığıyla. Aslında Avrupa sömürge imparatorluğunun kârlılığı genelde bağımsız devletlerin ve yerli ekonominin yıkılmasıyla sağlanıyordu. Ya da yerli toplumların neredeyse tamamen çökertilmesinin ardından Avrupalıların Afrikalı köleleri ithal ederek plantasyon sistemleri kurduğu Karayipler’de olduğu gibi; sömürücü kurumların sıfırdan inşa edilmesiyle.

Banda Adaları, Ace ya da Burma’daki bağımsız şehir-devletlerinin Avrupa müdahalesi olmasaydı nasıl bir rota izleyeceğini hiçbir zaman bilemeyeceğiz. Belki onların da kendilerine ait yerli Görkemli Devrim’leri olurdu ya da belki de baharat ve diğer kıymetli malların ticaretindeki büyümeye dayanan daha kapsayıcı siyasal ve ekonomik kurumlara doğru ilerlerdiler. Fakat bu olasılık Hollanda Doğu Hindistan Kumpanyası’nın büyümesiyle ortadan kalktı. Şirket gerçekleştirdiği soykırımla Banda Adaları’nda yerel gelişime yönelik tüm umutları yok etti. Ayrıca yarattığı tehdit Güneydoğu Asya’nın diğer pek çok bölgesindeki şehir-devletlerin ticaretten çekilmesine yol açtı.

Asya’nın en eski uygarlıklardan birinin, Hindistan’ın da buna benzer bir tarihi vardır; tek fark, Hindistan’da gelişimin tersine dönmesini sağlayanın Hollandalılar değil İngilizler olmasıdır. 18. yüzyılda Hindistan dünyanın en büyük tekstil üreticisi ve ihracatçısıydı. Hindistan patiskaları ve muslinleri Avrupa piyasalarını istila etti, Asya’da hatta Doğu Afrika’da alıcı buldu. Onları Britanya Adaları’na taşıyan asıl aracı kurum İngiliz Doğu Hindistan Kumpanyası’ydı. Hollandalı muadilinden iki yıl önce, 1600’de kurulan İngiliz Doğu Hindistan Kumpanyası 17. yüzyılı Hindistan’dan gelen kıymetli mallar üzerinde tekel kurmaya çalışarak geçirdi. Goa, Chittagongand ve Bombay’da üsleri olan Portekizlilerle ve Pondicherry, Chandernagore, Yanam ve Karaikal’de üslenen Fransızlarla rekabet etmek zorunda kaldı. Yine de Doğu Hindistan Kumpanyası için en kötüsü, 7. bölümde gördüğümüz gibi, Görkemli Devrim’di. Stuart krallarının Doğu Hindistan Kumpanyası’na bahşettiği tekel 1688’in hemen akabinde tehlikeye girdi; hatta 10 yıl kadar sonra kaldırıldı. Daha önce gördüğümüz gibi, İngiliz tekstil üreticileri parlamentoyu Doğu Hindistan Kumpanyası’nın en kârlı kalemi olan patiskanın ithalatını yasaklamaya ikna etmeyi başardıklarından kayda değer bir güç kaybı söz konusuydu. 18. yüzyılda Robert Clive liderliğindeki Doğu Hindistan Kumpanyası strateji değiştirerek kıtasal bir imparatorluk kurmaya başladı. O tarihte Hindistan çok sayıda rakip devlet arasında bölünmüştü; gerçi bunların çoğu sözde hâlâ Delhi’deki Babür imparatorunun kontrolü altındaydı. Doğu Hindistan Kumpanyası 1757’de Plassey ve 1764’te Buxar savaşlarıyla yerel güçleri mağlup ederek önce doğuda Bengal’e açıldı. Doğu Hindistan Kumpanyası yerel zenginlikleri yağmalayıp Hindistan’ın Babür hükümdarlarının sömürücü vergi kurumlarını kendine mal etti ve belki daha da güçlendirdi. Bu açılım Hindistan tekstil sanayiinin muazzam ölçüde küçülmesiyle aynı zamana denk geldi; ne de olsa artık İngiltere’de söz konusu ürünler için bir pazar yoktu. Şehirlerin boşalması ve artan yoksulluğun eşlik ettiği bu küçülme Hindistan’da uzun bir tersine gelişim dönemi başlattı. Çok geçmeden, Hintliler tekstil üretmek yerine İngiltere’den satın alıyor ve Doğu Hindistan Şirketi’ne Çin’de satmaları için afyon yetiştiriyorlardı.

Atlantik köle ticareti aynı örüntüyü –Güneydoğu Asya ve Hindistan’dan daha geri koşullarda başlamış olmasına rağmen– Afrika’da tekrarladı. Çoğu Afrika devleti yakaladıkları köleleri Avrupalılara satan birer savaş makinesine dönüştü. Farklı devletler arasındaki çatışmalar aralıksız bir savaşa dönüşürken Afrika’nın pek çok bölgesinde pek çoğu henüz yeterince siyasal merkeziyete ulaşamamış devlet kurumlarının çökmesi, kalıcı sömürücü kurumlara ve daha sonra inceleyeceğimiz başarısız devletlere zemin hazırladı. Avrupalılar Güney Afrika gibi Afrika’nın köle ticaretinden kurtulabilmiş birkaç bölgesine bu kez madenleri ve tarlaları için ucuz işgücü sağlamak üzere tasarlanmış bir dizi farklı kurum dayattılar. Güney Afrika devleti nüfusun yüzde 80’ini vasıflı işlerden, ticari tarımdan ve girişimcilikten mahrum eden bir ikili ekonomi yarattı. Tüm bunlar yalnızca sanayileşmenin neden dünyanın büyük bölümünü es geçtiğini açıklamakla kalmıyor, aynı zamanda ekonomik kalkınmanın bazen nasıl olup da başka yerel ekonomilerdeki ya da dünya ekonomisindeki azgelişmişliği beslediğini hatta yarattığını da özetliyor.