The Creativity Conceit

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The lesson of history is that if America’s maximalist concept of individual freedom is a factor at all, it is hardly decisive. All the evidence shows that something else is much more important: money.

The wealthier a society is, the more inventive it tends to be. Just ask any of the thousands of brilliant Western European scientists and engineers who, in a phenomenon known as brain drain, began emigrating to the United States in the 1950s. They were not seeking freedom. They had that already. Rather, they wanted to work with the most advanced equipment and the largest research budgets. (Where relative economic laggards have sometimes punched above their weight—say, Japan in the 1930s or the Soviet Union in the 1950s—government leaders have gone out of their way to provide teams of handpicked scientists and engineers with massive support.)

Three centuries before Christ, the Chinese invented the magnetic compass. Contemporary Northern European hunter-gatherers could never have made such a breakthrough. They may have been equally brilliant, and they no doubt enjoyed greater liberty, but they lacked the advanced materials and knowledge already available to the much more affluent Chinese.

Similar factors explain the extraordinary inventiveness of the Muslim world during Europe’s Dark Ages. The Arabs were then one of the world’s richest peoples, and their craftsmen routinely worked with the rarest and most advanced materials. Their familiarity with glass-making techniques, for instance, helps explain why it was the Muslim polymath Abbas Ibn Firnas whom some credit with inventing eyeglasses in the ninth century.

It is hardly news that the United States has been in relative economic decline since the 1960s. What’s less obvious is that America has been losing relative position in inventiveness almost as fast. The correlation is not an accident. As other nations have prospered, they’ve spent more on educating scientists and engineers and put more of them to work on technol­ogy’s cutting edge.

For several years, Japan has dedicated more of its workforce and its gross domestic product to research and development than the United States. What’s more, while much of what passes for R&D in the United States now consists of lightweight activities such as website building and software customization, the Japanese focus their technological efforts on building a competitive advantage in export industries.

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