Daily bread 12/23/2017

• How did Europe become the richest part of the world? | Aeon Essays

  tags: europe

  • a classical emergent property
  • a complex and unintended outcome of simpler interactions on the whole.
  • the result of contingent institutional outcomes
  • a self-reinforcing dynamic of economic progress
  • Europe’s political fragmentation spurred productive competition
  • competing for the best and most productive intellectuals and artisans
  • the existence of multiple competing states encouraged scientific and technological innovation.
  • The ‘abuses of tyranny are restrained by the mutual influence of fear and shame’
  • meliorated
  • If conservative rulers clamped down on heretical and subversive (that is, original and creative) thought, their smartest citizens would just go elsewhere
  • The size of the ‘market’ that intellectual and technological innovators faced was one element of scientific and technological development
  • The structure of the medieval Christian Church also provided an element shared throughout the continent
  • the widespread use of Latin as their lingua franca.
  • ong before the term ‘Europe’ was commonly used, it was called ‘Christendom
  • Valencia-born Juan Luis Vives
  • If Europe’s intellectuals moved with unprecedented frequency and ease, their ideas travelled even faster.
  • the printing press and the much-improved postal system, written knowledge circulated rapidly
  • Europe’s divided and uncoordinated polities enhanced an intellectual freedom that simply could not exist in China or the Ottoman Empire.
  • It was a very competitive market.
  • time and again demonstrated a willingness to slaughter sacred cows
  • the best of two worlds, both the advantages of an integrated transnational academic community and a com­petitive states system
  • a belief in social and economic progress, a growing regard for scientific and intellectual innovation, and a commitment to a Baconian, ie a methodical and empirically grounded, research programme of knowledge in the service of economic growth
  • the appearance of better tools and instruments that faci­litated research in natural philosophy.
  • the micro­scope, telescope, barometer and modern thermometer.
  • developed in the first half of the 17th century.
  • Improved tools in physics, astronomy and biology refuted many misconceptions inherited from classical antiquity
  • Europe’s (and the world’s) Great Enrichment was in no way inevitable
  • Had political and military developments taken different turns in Europe, conservative forces might have prevailed and taken a more hostile attitude toward the new and more progressive interpretation of the world
  • the best is still to come

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