My current most interesting read is Joel Mokyr's The Lever of Riches.
Having read roughly a quarter of the book...first, I find it fascinating. What has actually made a difference in tech growth over the last 2000 years. More interestingly in the first 5-6 chapters...what was the tech growth between 0 AD and 1900 AD.
Aretae summary:
Economic growth has primarily been constrained by 3 things over the last 2000 years:
Materials: You can't make good, lasting clockwork watches or gun barrels out of wood.
Power: How much energy output can an average person exert to productive purpose in a day?
Innovation: How much improvement do people do?
These things are fascinating...in the post-roman years before 1000AD, for instance, it's arguable that the 2 most important inventions were the non-choking horse collar (which quintupled a horse's effective output) and the heavy plow (which tripled the effective yield of an acre of grain, in typical european soil). I also heard it argued that the heavy plow itself is the single technology responsible for the manorial life: The amount of calories that can be produced by 1 person with a heavy plow is ~3x the amount of calories that could be produced by a person without. However, the capital investment of a heavy plow is far too much for most individuals.
On this line of analysis...we still have these 3 lines running.
Materials science still has the potential to give us room-temperature, or even liquid nitrogen superconductivity.
Shale oil/Shale gas is pushing the price of energy down right now...and solar is expected, at historical rates of Moore's law-ish increase, to cross the petroleum threshold in ~20 years.
And Artificial Stupids, even without AI, threaten to give us a serious force multiplier on Innovation sometime in the next 30 years..
Fun times.
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Two points:
1. Materials science has ALREADY given us liquid nitrogen superconductors. Already as in they are commercially available.
No confirmed room temperature SC yet :( Wait till we reach Pandora.
2. The heavy (mouldboard) plow, combined with the horse and horse collar, did vastly improve the output of NORTHERN European farms (in heavy clays). The light, sandy soil of Southern Europe was already served fairly well by the light plows of antiquity.
Which is a big part of why Southern Europe, the Middle East, even North Africa were the rich, "breadbasket" areas of the Roman Empire and before, whereas these days the reverse is true.
When the Roman Emperors gave up on the Western Empire and kept the Eastern Half, they were keeping the rich half.
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