The Electromagnetic Underpinning of
Economic Growth
The world doesn’t need another review of
Nancy Forbes’ and Basil Mahon’s wonderful book. However, after thinking about
it, I believe that the explosion in economic growth from 1870-1970 discussed by
Robert J. Gordon in his “The Rise and Fall of American Growth” would never have
happened were it not for Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell.
What Forbes and Mahon describe are the
lives of Faraday and Maxwell and how through their experiments they came to
discover some of the most fundamental secrets in nature. What Maxwell does in
his 1873 “Treatise and Electricity and Magnetism” is to put a mathematical
foundation underneath Faraday’s brilliant experiments. The rest is history. The
world became electrified, radio and mass communications became of age and only
32 years later, building on their foundations, Einstein publishes his essays on
relativity and the photoelectric effect.
The science is so monumental that it
offers support for Gordon’s thesis that the economic growth achieved from
1870-1970 was based on a series of one-off events.
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