It has been widely reported (with link to one of his previously videotaped speech) that top Chinese economist Justin Yifu Lin (林毅夫) is expected to be appointed as the World Bank’s chief economist. So the following is a fun research paper by Justin when he was younger (well, 16 years younger (smile)).
Here are the last few sentences of the abstract of Justin’s downloadable article, “The Needham Puzzle: Why the Industrial Revolution Did Not Originate in China” (emphasis mine),
“… societies with larger populations could be expected to achieve greater advances in science and technology. In premodern times, therefore, China’s large population gave it a comparative advantage over the western world. However, while Europe made a transition to the new experiment cum science method of technological invention with the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, technological invention in China still relied mainly on experience. Consequently, China has fallen behind the West in modern times. China’s failure to have a scientific revolution of its own may have resulted from the system of civil service examinations which prevented intellectuals from making the investment in human capital required for modern scientific research, thus reducing the probability of a quantum leap from primitive to modern science.”
P.S. I want to add an observation after typing the above text. Yes, the paper was a scanned typed paper so no “cut and paste”.
I think we are transitioning to the age of Creative Commons where sharing of knowledge in a clearly licensed manner will become the norm and the former practice of “information hogging” (hogging of information or knowledge as if they are power or advantage to rule over other people) may slowly fade away.
Of course, only time will tell but it is a bit of foolish fun for me to make this “prediction” here. (smile)
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