Techdirt Reading List: The Lever of Riches

from the it's-about-economic-progress dept

We're back again with another in our weekly reading list posts of books we think our community will find interesting and thought provoking. Once again, buying the book via the Amazon links in this story also help support Techdirt.

This week we have another one that's an older book, Joel Mokyr's The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress from 1992. Mokyr is an absolutely wonderful economic historian, and the Lever of Riches is one of my favorite books by him. If you want to understand the history of technological process, you owe it to yourself to read some of Mokyr's books -- and this is a good place to start. I've reread it many times, and have taken tons of notes on little passages and amazing factoids from history, that often remind me that the thoughts and battles today around innovation often have historical precedents.

For example, we've often talked about things like "infinite goods" and using such things to expand knowledge and innovation. But I had no idea that such thoughts go back long in history. In "Lever of Riches," I learned that Galileo himself once talked about how he hoped "in the invention of an infinitude of artifices which would allow us to enjoy without trouble the fruits of the earth and all its commodities." I may be strange in that I really like books looking at the history of economics and innovation, but this one definitely tops my list of recommendations.

Filed Under: economic history, innovation, joel mokyr, lever of riches, reading list, techdirt reading list