Last Thursday, I had an interesting dinner with two prominent economists. Soon, the conversation turned to Joel Mokyr’s work and its relationship with @danwwang’s recent book, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. Mokyr has long argued that Europe’s Republic of Letters encouraged broad scientific and technological innovation by providing a setting where new ideas could be evaluated and disseminated. For him, Europe occupied the ideal midpoint between political fragmentation and cultural unity: enough polycentrism to prevent the suppression of ideas by heavy-handed rulers, but enough common ground to sustain serious dialogue and a deep pool of potential patrons and protectors. But what if, as Wang cautiously suggests, the institutions of an open society are no longer necessary for scientific and technological innovation? (To be fair, Wang does not assert this as fact—he only hints at it). Elaborating on Wang, one could construct the following argument: 1️⃣ Yes, the Republic of Letters was essential for the flourishing of the scientific method that had emerged in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. 2️⃣ Yes, the institutions of an open society were necessary in the 19th and 20th centuries to create today’s framework of universities, academic societies, and scientific journals. 3️⃣ But no, once the scientific method and its institutional architecture are established, an open society might no longer be needed. 4️⃣ Indeed, China possesses institutions such as Peking University and Tsinghua University, and it performs impressively in mathematics, engineering, and computer science—fields central to scientific and technological progress. 5️⃣ Lack of political freedom likely still harms the social sciences (including economics) and the humanities, but those fields may be of secondary importance for technological innovation. 6️⃣ By limiting the rise of anti-scientific movements—such as the “decolonize science” trend on many Western campuses—or by avoiding resource allocation to “useless” humanities, China might even gain a comparative advantage. 7️⃣ The historical episodes of anti-science in totalitarian regimes (e.g., Deutsche Physik in Nazi Germany or Lysenkoism in the USSR) are not inevitable in a modern, technocratic Confucian state such as China’s, which prizes pragmatism. 8️⃣ In fact, pragmatism might help China avoid some of the West’s current problems: the creeping politicization of the natural sciences, rising bureaucratization, and resource allocation driven more by lobbying than by scientific merit. In short, have science and technology grown so powerful and self-sustaining that they no longer depend on their historical institutional scaffolding? Let me stress that I am not endorsing points 3), 5), 6), 7), or 8). Points 1), 2), and 4) are hard to deny. My regular readers know that I would never call philosophy or history “useless.” Moreover, I believe deeply that the institutions of an open society have intrinsic value—an argument far stronger in their favor than any instrumental one. Still, as a researcher, I must separate what I want to be true (that open societies are better for innovation) from what the evidence actually shows. So, what kind of empirical evidence could one gather to disprove claims 3), 5), 6), 7), and 8)? Finally, it’s worth recalling that similar anxieties haunted the West in the 1950s and 1960s, back then focused on the Soviet Union. Would it surpass the West in economic growth and scientific innovation? It did not. Hence, my prior distribution still places a higher probability on China not overtaking the West than on the opposite outcome. Yet China is not the Soviet Union, and overfacile historical analogies are always dangerous.
