PERSON
David Landes
The economic historian who made culture the center of development theory—arguing across half a century of scholarship that what separates the wealthy from the poor, the innovative from the stagnant, and ultimately the nations that will thrive in the AI age from those that will not, is the accumulated habits of mind that no technology can supply and no resource can substitute for.
David Landes wrote the sentence that made his career and scandalized his profession: “If we learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes all the difference.” He did not say culture matters. He said culture makes
all the difference—and the emphasis was the argument, because what he was claiming is that two societies with identical access to the same technology will produce radically different outcomes depending on the values, attitudes, and institutional habits their citizens bring to that technology. Landes spent five decades at Harvard's Department of Economics and History building the empirical case: from the clock-making tradition that he argued in
Revolution in Time laid the cultural foundations of the Industrial Revolution, to the comparative political economy of
The Unbound Prometheus, to the synthesis of
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