Why are some countries perennial leaders in science and technology (S&T) while others are perennial laggards? That is the question that Mark Zachary Taylor tackles in his well-written and exciting book that I read cover-to-cover as if it were a detective novel. If this research question does not sound mysterious, Taylor's book is likely to convince you otherwise. Taylor succeeds in showing that we really do not know quite why countries as disparate as the US, Israel, Sweden, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Canada excel in S&T whereas countries like Spain, Greece and Brazil do not.
We think we know why. Scholarly wisdom tells us the answer must lie in policies and institutions. Countries that excel in S&T have policies that channel resources into the right programs. They have institutions to create the right incentives and to compensate for market failure problems.
Only a scholar with chutzpah and a passion for mystery would claim otherwise. Taylor is just such a sleuth and in a series of well-written opening chapters he argues that policies and institutions do not explain nearly as much as you would think. Many countries excelling in S&T had unimaginative policies and mediocre political institutions, while many prosperous democracies with all the right policies and institutions on paper are not nearly so successful.
Then the plot thickens. If policies and institutions do not explain why some countries lead the world in S&T, then what does? A new suspect is brought forward, and her name is politics. It is politics that explain global leadership in S&T at a national level. But surely, the reader protests, politics is simply that which produces the policies and institutions that determine how good a country's science and technology system is! The bewildered reader involuntarily thinks of causal chain (a) to defend the conventional wisdom.
Developing a fascinating line of argument, Taylor trots out causal chain (b) with politics as a powerful mediating variable. The point is that many different types of policies and institutions can result in powerful national S&T systems: ‘As long as institutions and policies solve the basic market failures and network problems that impede innovation, then which particular institutions a government selects may not be so important’ (p. 18). If you look at the leading S&T nations, you will be hard put to identify many constants in their policies or institutions. And Taylor tries to show that many different theories, on the surface so convincing, actually explain rather little: national innovation systems, varieties of capitalism, political decentralization, free market democracy, etc. All these theories fail to grasp that ‘institutions and policies are influential, but they are not causal’ (p. 17). Fighting words indeed.
What Taylor calls politics is really the geopolitical background of the country. The key explanatory variable he develops is ‘creative insecurity’. It is not the foreground of S&T policies and institutions that determine how potent its S&T system is, but rather the background of external threats and internal dissension that determine whether policymakers and other S&T actors get serious about science and technology or whether they just go through the motions. It is externally challenged nations like Israel, Taiwan and the United States of the Cold War era that were truly able to mobilize their S&T resources to produce above-average results on the global stage.
Specifically, the key explanatory variable can be operationalized as the difference between the degree of external threats to the nation on the one hand (positive influence) and the degree of the nation's purely domestic rivalries (negative influence) on the other. Taylor illustrates his thesis with four national case studies: Israel, Taiwan, Ireland and Mexico. He uses his thesis of creative insecurity in two ways, cross-sectional and longitudinal. Israel and Taiwan ultimately excel in S&T because of the external threats they confront. But the degree of these external threats was not constant over time. As long as these countries were more occupied with internal struggles than with external threats, their S&T systems did not amount to anything special. Mexico's S&T, for all its potential and resources, remains mired too much in a context of internal rivalries, according to Taylor's thesis. It is only when external threats became ascendant over internal dissensions that national S&T can begin to take off. As for Ireland, it is a country in the middle of the spectrum: a moderate level of creative insecurity leads to a moderate level of success in S&T. Clearly, as Taylor himself recognizes, his explanatory variable of creative insecurity cannot explain all the variance in leadership and non-leadership in national S&T systems. Reading through the book, it is easy to see many countries and historical periods that the thesis does not illuminate nearly so well. Taylor argues simply that if you had to pick one explanatory variable alone, you should pick creative insecurity. It does not explain everything, it simply explains more than any other single variable does. Thus, the book is the story of a missing variable in the S&T discussion rather than a complicated theory of why some countries excel in S&T and others do not.
The book is written for a very wide audience, for both scholars and laymen, both professors and policymakers. Taylor includes appendices to outline key terms and review key findings for novice readers. His knowledge of the literature, and of the history of science and technology, is commendable.
Taylor makes a tremendous effort to be interesting and relevant. Regrets? Just one. He could have defended his thesis better and illustrated the causal mechanisms at work more convincingly if he had drawn less on political science and more on sociology. He writes at length about the distributional politics of winners and losers, whereas his thesis about the geopolitical background of countries cries out for more discussion of bonding, trust, and social capital. It is not just Israeli security politics that make a difference. It is also the experience of high-tech entrepreneurs having served three years in the Israeli army.
