A New Age of Nations: Power and Advantage in the AI Era | Rand Corporation

Excerpt from the report:

By the late 1860s, the leaders of Japan began taking seriously trends around their region and the world and recognized that they were in deep trouble. A scientific, technological, economic, and industrial revolution was transforming several leading powers, most especially the United Kingdom. In the nations that led this conversion, groups of scientists, entrepreneurs, engineers, and self-taught tinkerers—working alone and in communities of knowledge and innovation—drove spectacular progress in such areas as metallurgy, steampower, textiles, and transportation. Those conceptual advances, in turn, provided the basis for potent new military technologies.

This accelerating process had already delivered astonishing scientific marvels: the spinning jenny, the steam engine, the power loom, the McAdam technique for road construction, railroads, the cotton gin, and dozens more.** It generated unheard-of advances in economic productivity and growth. If the birth of the First Industrial Revolution is dated as 1760, this growth took some time to emerge. But once it really took off, as Figure 1.1 suggests, England’s gross domestic product (GDP) rose in spectacular terms. As the economic historian Joel Mokyr puts it,

The British Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century unleashed a phenomenon never before even remotely experienced by any society. . . . Measured economic growth in the industrializing economies .