All day
Cumulative culture is arguably the crucial evolutionary characteristic of humanity and the foundation of long-run economic growth. But what exactly accumulates? From an economic perspective, what accumulates over history is a growing stock of knowledge or ideas, raising productivity, expanding feasible technologies, and reshaping institutions. This stock is inherently informational: societies store, transmit, compress, and recombine ideas across generations, but the constraints change sharply as scale increases. In small societies, transmission is largely interpersonal and oral; in large societies, cumulative culture in knowledge production, allocation, and coordination is mostly codified and sustained through markets, firms, states, and scientific institutions. Economics has long recognized ideas as non-rival inputs to growth yet has only partly theorized the informational mechanisms governing their creation and circulation. Could the integration of computer science theory (its formalisms for measuring information and conceptualizing notions of search, storage, compression, look-up, algorithms, computational complexity, etc.) with economic history and anthropology offer a richer framework for understanding how the stock of knowledge accumulates? Might it help us understand why modern systems of science, technology, and governance seem to obey dynamics different from those emphasized in gene–culture coevolution or small-scale social models. This conversation is meant to shed light on big questions about long-run determinants of innovation, the historical importance of a “culture of growth” (? la Mokyr), and whether ideas are “getting harder to find” and what it means for human trajectories.