"Incentive to invent" is sometimes difficult for students to
grasp because they assume that all societies are equally inventive,
or that "necessity is the mother of invention," or
that invention is somehow related to innate, hereditary biological
talent (so that there are "inventive races" and "noninventive
races").
None of these things is true.
Some societies, like Mesopotamian civilization or our own
Western civilization, are very inventive. Others, like many
primitive tribes, or civilizations like the Egyptian, are very
uninventive. Nor does "necessity" have much to do with
inventiveness.
If it did, those peoples who are pressed down upon the
subsistence level, or even below it, in their standards of living,
like some of the Indian tribes of the Matto Grosso, would be very
inventive, which they are not. Or, if invention were in any way
related to necessity, the povertystricken fellahin of Egypt or
Trans-Jordan or the equally hard-pressed coolies of China or the
peasants of India would have devised some new and helpful methods
for exploiting their available resources. This is far from being
the case.
Or, again, if biologically inherited talent had anything to do
with inventiveness we would not have seen the great decrease in
invention by the Chinese in the last thousand years, or the
decrease in inventiveness among Anglo-Saxon Americans in the last
hundred years, or the sudden appearance of inventiveness among
noninventive peoples of eastern European stock when they migrated
to America.
Inventiveness
depends very largely on the way a society is
organized.
Some societies
have powerful incentives to invent, because they are organized in
such a way that innovation is encouraged and
rewarded. This was true of Mesopotamian
civilization before 2700 B.C., of Chinese civilizations before A.D.
1200, and of Western civilization during much of its history.
On the other
hand, many societies are organized so that they have very weak
incentives to invent. Suppose that a primitive
tribe believes that its social organization was established by a
deity who went away leaving strict instructions that nothing be
changed.
Such a society would invent very little. Egyptian civilization
was something like this. Or any society that had ancestor worship
would probably have weak incentives to invent.
Or a society whose productive system was based on slavery would
probably be uninventive, because the slaves, who knew the
productive process most intimately, would have little incentive to
devise new methods since these would be unlikely to benefit
themselves, while the slaveowners would have only a distant
acquaintance with the productive processes and would be reluctant
to invent any new methods that might well require the ending of
slavery for their successful exploitation.
For these
reasons, slave societies, such as Classical civilization or the
Southern states of the United States in the period before 1860,
have been notoriously uninventive.
No major inventions in the field of production came from either
of these cultures. The significance of this can be realized when we
recall that at the very time that the South was inventing so
little, the North, and especially the people of the Connecticut
River Valley, were passing through one of the greatest periods of
invention in history (cotton gin, mass production and
interchangeable parts, steamboat, screw propeller, revolver,
electric motor, vulcanizing rubber, sewing machine, anesthesia, and
so forth)...
http://www.archive.org/details/CarrollQuigley-TheEvolution
Is Singapore society organised to promote innovation and
creativity?
Or is it organised so as to destroy innovative thinking and
creativity and to conform to the norm?
