Donald Cardwell, a British history of science and technology, famously observed that “no country has been more historically more creative than a short mass.” Known as Cardwell’s law, this dictum haunts many people who are worried about the future of innovation. Can the US, or other countries, be freed from the Cage of Cardwell’s laws and create an environment rather than cultivating innovation indefinitely?
It will help to expand from the national level to the urban level to a better understanding of this challenge. Cities often act as engines of innovation. Although it is intended to explain society as a whole, Cardwell’s laws will scale back to the level of individual urban centres. After all, city-states were the first states and served as the site of institutional experiments. And for a long time it was no longer a country, but a city, that ordered loyalty.
My other way uplifting book, a harsh message from the centre of progress: that 40 cities that have changed the world tend to have creative peaks in cities – Cardwell Note – Brief. As British science writer Matt Ridley observed in the book’s preface, “global advances rely on a series of sudden innovations, burning, fiercely and die rapidly in one predictable place.”
Are there any exceptions to that rule? Has the city become matininin longer than expected and more than its age of innovation? What can we learn from them?
The cities of the previous era I featured in my book were featured for long periods of success. That’s because, unfortunately, progress was painfully slow in the distant past, and the scholar’s subs didn’t crack the code to break Cardwell’s laws.
For example, writing evolved over multiple generations as a simple emoji invented by accountants for record purposes into iconic scripts and eventually evolved into a highly abstract, crown-shaped character. The birthplace of the writing was in Uruk, an ancient Sumerian city. The most notable part of Uruk’s history has continued for centuries, as the great achievements of the city have been able to achieve over generations. We shouldn’t want to emulate a society that has progressed at such a pace.
In contrast, when we look at modern history, the pace of progress accelerates, but the creative windows narrow. Manchester, the so-called workshop of the world, led the way during the Industrial Revolution, but only for decades. Houston’s heyday helped promote forward space exploration. It also lasted only a few decades. Today, the youngest living person to walk the moon is 89 years old. Tokyo has been a world capital in the 1980s and has been economics stagnant for decades. The San Francisco Gulf region, which created the Silicon Valley and the digital revolution, has lost its crown, and many technical breakthroughs have occurred elsewhere. In modern times, the golden age of innovation everywhere tends to be decades or even less.
To understand why this pattern is repeated so consistently, consider the underlying conditions that support support-supported innovation. In an illuminated 1993 essay, Joel Moker of Economic History explains the narrow paths that society must walk to promote creativity. “Looking back, the most surprising thing is probably having Como this much,” he concluded.
What causes the downfall of the center of progress and makes Cardwell’s laws look so prophetic? World-changing innovation comes from an extraordinary variety of places, from Song-Hangzhou to post-World War II New York, but creativity sites almost always share certain important features. It is the loss of those facts that spell out their fate. These characteristics are relative conditions of peace, openness to new ideas, and economic freedom.
Free businesses and healthy competition encourage innovation, freedom to trade across borders plays an important rally that betrays that competition. At the same time, free exchange across borders should not be confused with the complete dissolution of the border. A vast empire under centralized control tends to stagnate technology, and the complete integration of countries under global governments will likely be a disaster. International competition of the Cerelin type is beneficial – not the kind of rivalry that leads to war.
War redirects creative energy towards creating lethal weapons from technologies aimed at improving living standards. And of course, the loss to war can lead to the complete destruction of society.
Morover, war has moved forward from innovators working across borders, and even thinkers of the same country often fail to put together Putie for the inherent inheritance of secrets in war. Although it subdits World War II by speeding up the creation of computers, by preventing collaboration between many innovators, from Conrado Souse in Berlin to Alan Turing in the UK, we can create cases where competition actually slows down the invention of computers. Even in peacetime, innovation can be confirmed when freedom and openness are reduced.
In short, when peace is lost in war, progress is threatened, openness about opening is suppressed by the penetration of speech, and freedom is compromised by restrictive or authoritarian law.
Hong Kong offers a recent example of how quickly and quickly conditions of progress can be lifted. During the whirlwind economic changes of the 1960s, Hong Kong rose from one of the poorest countries in the world to one of the wealthiest countries. I accomplished this feat. This “non-stateism” police simply allowed Hong Kongers to compete freely and cooperate to enrich themselves and their society. But the city’s proud tradition of limited government, rule of law, and freedom suddenly disappeared due to a rigorous and relentless crackdown from the Chinese Commune Party.
There are reasons for hope, such as in Hong Kong. The centre of progress is often short-lived, but the fact that this is that most societies are creative for a short period of time should not discourage us. To go against Cardwell’s law, what is needed is a clear eye desire to learn from past mistakes and protect fiercelly the conditions necessary for further progress.
