One of my predecessors at the World Bank as chief economist, Justin Lin, has a very interesting paper on this puzzle of why didn’t China develop the industrial revolution. His argument is basically that China — because there were so many people looking and discovering; they discovered a lot of things, like gunpowder, steel, printing, and so forth — but what China didn’t do was invent the social system we call science. They had some knowledge and some technology. They didn’t invent science. And what was different in Europe was the invention of science.
I found that argument really compelling, and I’ve taken it one step further and think that part of what the West benefited from were notions about integrity and individual responsibility for what we say that fostered trust, and that science indirectly gave us those things.
For any country around the world, it’s worth thinking about — if you’re short on that, if there’s a tendency for a lot of people to cheat on their taxes, to lie about what’s true, if there’s norms that hold a society back in those ways, I think it would be good to think about, how do we rebuild a system where we respect and admire people who consistently tell the truth, and where we look down on, disapprove of people who are found to have intentionally misled us?
There's a section near the beginning of Kim Stanley Robinson's Years of Rice and Salt (the best alternate history book ever written hands-down) where an alchemist - actually a shady huckster who is aware that what he is doing is just a con - gets caught "transmuting" lead into gold in a demonstration for a local potentate in some Persianate Central Asian state when his hollow, gold-containing ladle is discovered.
He gets his hands cut off in punishment, then swears that he will only work to advance knowledge from then on. This ends up being the start of something like what we recognize as science. Of note, the divergence point in this world is that the Black Plague wiped out all of Europe, turning history into a zero-sum contest between the Islamic world and China)* Because of the reformed con man, science advances much as it did in our history, except with different names (ie, qi for electricity.)
That said, while many hucksters have been caught at their game, few have so dramatically changed their internal incentive structure in response - though this passage highlights the importance of trust and an earnest search for knowledge that may better the world in general. The importance of developing a general background of trust is difficult to overstate.
*Interestingly enough, in Stirling's Conquistador, Alexander the Great lives to a ripe old age and succeeds in his dream of uniting the lands from Europe to the Indus into a macro-state; the resulting world is one of unity and stability, therefore stagnancy, where by what would have been the 20th century of the Christian era they are barely medieval, and China appears to have been overrun by the Tocharians.
