The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [194]
p. 252 ‘As Joel Mokyr puts it’. Mokyr, J. 2003. The Gifts of Athena. Princeton.
p. 253 ‘George Orwell was tired of the way the world appeared to be shrinking’. Orwell, G. 1944. Tribune, 12 May 1944.
p. 254 ‘when the credit card took off’. Nocera, J. 1994. A Piece of the Action. Simon and Schuster. (That said, there is little doubt that finance is one area of human activity in which too much innovation can be a bad thing. As Adair Turner has put it, whereas the loss of the knowledge of how to make a vaccine would harm human welfare, ‘if the instructions for creating a CDO squared [a collateral debt obligation of collateral debt obligations] had somehow been mislaid, we will I think get along quite well without it.’) See Turner, A. 2009. ‘The Financial Crisis and the Future of Financial Regulation’. Inaugural Economist City Lecture, 21 January 2009. Financial Services Authority.
p. 254 ‘Lewis Mandell discovered’. Quoted in Nocera, J. 1994. A Piece of the Action. Simon and Schuster.
p. 254 ‘Michael Crichton once told me’. M. Crichton, email to the author, June 2007.
p. 254 ‘said William Petty in 1679’. Quoted in Mokyr, J. 2003. The Gifts of Athena. Princeton University Press.
p. 255 ‘in Alfred North Whitehead’s words’. Whitehead, A.N. 1930. Science and the Modern World. Cambridge University Press.
p. 255 ‘As the scientist Terence Kealey has observed’. Kealey, T. 2007. Sex, Science and Profits. William Heinemann.
p. 256 ‘the biggest advances in the steam engine’. Kealey, T. 2008. Sex, Science and Profits. William Heinemann. Kealey argues that Watt vehemently denied any influence from Joseph Black. Joel Mokyr (in The Gifts of Athena) quotes Watt to the contrary.
p. 256 ‘efforts by eighteenth-century scientists to prove that Newcomen got his insights from Papin’s theories have proved to be wholly without foundation’. Rolt, L.T.C. 1963. Thomas Newcomen: the Prehistory of the Steam Engine. David and Charles. Likewise, the establishment was so incredulous that the humble mine engineer George Stephenson could have invented a miner’s safety lamp in 1815 without understanding the principle behind it, that they effectively accused him of stealing the idea from the scientist Sir Humphry Davy. The reverse accusation is more plausible: that Davy heard of Stephenson’s experiments from the engineer John Buddle, who heard of them from the colliery doctor named Burnet, who had been told by Stephenson. See Rolt, L.T.C. 1960. George and Robert Stephenson. Longman.
p. 256 ‘the famous Lunar Society’. For more on the Lunar Society see Uglow, J. 2002. The Lunar Men. Faber and Faber.
p. 257 ‘a semi-directed, groping, bumbling process of trial and error by clever, dexterous professionals with a vague but gradually clearer notion of the processes at work’. Mokyr, J. 2003. The Gifts of Athena. Princeton.
p. 257 ‘It is a stretch to call most of this science’. Joel Mokyr has recently suggested (Mokyr, J. 2003. The Gifts of Athena. Princeton) that although the scientific revolution did not start the industrial, none the less the broadening of the epistemic base of knowledge – the sharing and generalisation of understanding – allowed a host of new applications of knowledge, which escaped diminishing returns and enabled the industrial revolution to continue indefinitely. I am not convinced. I think the prosperity generated by industry paid for an expansion of knowledge, which sporadically returned the favour. Even when, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, science appeared to make mighty contributions to new industries, the philosophers still played second fiddle to the engineers. Lord Kelvin’s contributions to the physics of resistance