Timeline for What are the most important factors in determining how fast technology progresses?

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Sep 30, 2019 at 15:03	history	edited	Thucydides	CC BY-SA 4.0	deleted 7 characters in body
Sep 30, 2019 at 14:57	comment	added	Thucydides		The Arsenal of Venice was built for military purposes, and cast cannon and built warships for the Republic. Even that combined with the advanced economic structures of Venetian society was still not enough (and the Ottomans did work hard to steal Venetian technologies in cannon foundries).
Sep 30, 2019 at 4:15	comment	added	Mars		What about the military? An arms race is a solid way to invite increased productivity top-down instead of bottom-up. If I find out my neighbor King Bob is building this machine that moves faster than horses and is immune to arrows, I'm probably going to look for something that hurts more than arrows. (And of course steal his mechanical horses)
Sep 29, 2019 at 20:09	comment	added	Dan Hanson		Also upvoted. The keys to the explosion of the industrial revolution were intellectual diversity, specialization, and capital accumulation in the hands of private individuals who then had the incentive to improve their own productivity through invention and the means to invest in other promising inventions, expanding their scope.
Sep 29, 2019 at 13:07	comment	added	tbrookside		I upvoted this answer. Economics is really the key. No innovation will be implemented in practice unless the capital cost of implementing it is outweighed by the cost savings or increased production it creates. And non-market systems put severe limits on the ability of producers to reliably recapture capital costs. Investing in building a steam engine from scratch in ancient Rome would make no economic sense relative to other potential uses of the capital involved.
Sep 29, 2019 at 0:55	history	answered	Thucydides	CC BY-SA 4.0