Mark Zachary Taylor’s book succeeds brilliantly at demonstrating how we do not know as much as we should about cultivating science and technology. S&T advantages in economic and military affairs, after all, are central to folk wisdom about the Cold War—how it ended peacefully on terms favorable to the Americans without precipitating World War III. Few accomplishments could claim greater historical importance, and so citizens from diverse walks of life could be forgiven for presuming that nations across the globe desire to increase the volume and quality of technological innovation.

Using the highest quality data from the economics of innovation research in Politics of Innovation, Taylor unveils his enormously consequential puzzle: According to the data, what he frames as an implication of technology historian Donald Cardwell’s Law persists; that is, significant cross-national variation in per capita innovation output after 1945 defies the folk wisdom about the universal pursuit of S&T. Moreover, within the short space of half a century, certain countries—Taylor highlights Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Israel—manage dramatic surges in their S&T ranking while others suffer decline. He quotes Cardwell (Turning Points in Western Technology, 1972): “‘[N]o nation has been very creative for more than an historically short period. Fortunately as each leader has flagged there has always been, up to now, a nation or nations to take up the torch’” (p. 3).

In a subsequent book, Cardwell (Wheels, Clocks, and Rockets, 2001) followed philosopher-scientist Francis Bacon (1561–1626) in ranking the three human motivations for technological innovation. First was individual glory; second came advantages for one’s country; finally, and most praiseworthy, was the cosmopolitan and Christian obligation to improve the lot of mankind, to allow human beings some measure of ease, after their fall from Grace, before the fiercest trials of Nature. If I may take issue with Bacon, Cardwell, and now Taylor in the Politics of Innovation, my critique isolates the gap between the second and third motivations on Bacon’s list. The competition among nations, striving for leadership, building a world order that reflects both enduring interests of diverse societies and civilized values—what our discipline terms the politics of international relations—are also noble and existential. In gravitas, Man’s relation to Man rates alongside Man to Nature, the more so since states of men now fortify themselves with nuclear technology that can render great swaths of Nature uninhabitable.

Cardwell wrote that “fortunately” a nation or nations take up the torch when the leading innovator flags. The sentiment reflects Bacon’s third, cosmopolitan motivation for S&T to aid all mankind. Yet closer examination of Cardwell’s magisterial history reveals that his critical technologies for the twentieth century—the second half supplies much of the data for Taylor’s research—maps quite well onto Robert Gilpin’s list in France in the Age of the Scientific State (1968): Both include aviation, rockets, atomic energy, and computers. Gilpin’s thesis was that French independence in the mid-1960s was endangered, not so much from successful insurgencies in Vietnam and Algeria or from Soviet Army divisions massed in Western Europe’s frontier, but from the dominance of its close ally, the United States. Aforementioned technologies vaulted U.S. economic and military potential far ahead of the community of states. Not even the USSR could be considered a close rival. With no future check on U.S. power, the imbalance would only worsen. In the age of the scientific state, science and technology reinforced one another so that neither Cardwell’s Law nor Thucydides’ history of great powers’ rise and fall would survive.

Gilpin’s later work, War and Change in World Politics (1981), cited by Taylor, stepped back from a dystopian vision of U.S. subjugation of the state system, indeed presenting French patriots with the opposite problem: how to address the impending decline of American hegemony. Gilpin’s overarching point, however, stands to reason. The history of S&T, and therefore innovation, cannot be divorced easily from world politics. Ironically, this is precisely where Taylor’s otherwise comprehensive book has its weakest purchase. Although the author establishes his central puzzle by challenging the modern conceit that everybody loves S&T as something valuable to all, in solving the puzzle this same presumption at the international level is in some sense reaffirmed.

S&T elevates to the status of dependent variable, the end of the line for multivariate regression and well-crafted case comparisons. By methodological standards of social science, this work is painstaking and rigorous, triangulating across multiple operationalizations for innovation, as well as between quantitative and qualitative analyses. Following Taylor’s own words in his conclusion, however, research, here, is just the first, albeit important, step toward understanding the “political causality surrounding S&T” (p. 254; my emphasis). Given works by technology historians such as Cardwell and political scientists such as Gilpin, Etel Solingen, and Matthew Kroenig, when the next step is taken we can expect that S&T’s consequences as an independent variable for trade wars, militarized disputes, or jostling among great powers will refine how we model innovation. Taylor’s Politics delivers the state of the art, and yet the more that students of politics heed its emendations on innovation, the quicker this achievement must be surpassed.

Taylor acknowledges the will-o’-the-wisp character of innovation in his deft handling of the “first transistor,” as he justifies his commitment to technology patents for a firmly established output measure (pp. 34–37). Just when did the transistor become an important innovation? Julius Lilienfield patented foundational ideas in 1930, but even after Japan’s Sony corporation produced the first handheld radios in 1954, a couple of decades passed before the computer revolution in the United States. Arguably, it was not until the 1991 Gulf War that policymakers began to appreciate how the digital revolution in military affairs would alter the international balance of power. Aggregated national patent citations, as Taylor affirms, correlate with the latter, truly historic consequences of S&T, but they are not a high-fidelity measure. Accordingly, we find in Table 3.4 (pp. 52–53) that the United States ranks behind Switzerland and Sweden in a composite score of S&T productivity. China ends up tied with Malaysia in 27th place; Russia, Brazil, and India fare even worse, and Mexico—with manufactured exports expanding in recent times more than 10% per year—trails in 41st place. The conventional “Five Pillar” regression model to predict this cross-national harvest of innovation explains up to 90% of the variation across countries (p. 104), but it offers precious little insight into landmark shifts in the global political economy. To systematically evaluate real drivers for national S&T performance, S&T as an independent variable must be unplugged from much of what most matters to political scientists.

When science and technology are plugged back into history, when their influence upon the high political competition among states is counted, it sharpens our perspective on Taylor’s signal accomplishment, which links politics and political science into a Five Pillar-plus model of innovation. Constructive dialogue with my own book on science and the bid for a second American century really takes off if and when Taylor’s audience, now broadened to join innovation economists and political scientists, adds dependent variables onto Politics of Innovation’s grand regression—to the right of S&T. In motivating his research, Taylor implies as key consequence the one enshrined in Cardwell’s Law: The good fortune of another nation always prepared to step into the breach whenever the leading innovator stumbled recalls the most cosmopolitan element of Bacon’s trinity. Invention of useful products and processes generally enriches all of mankind, expanding his empire over things. However, new vantage points arise if instead we emphasize Bacon’s second point, the one featured in Gilpin’s Scientific State. It makes a world of difference which state steps forward with leading technology, to use one of Cardwell’s examples, whether the United States or Nazi Germany in the 1940s takes up the torch from British atomic science.

Bringing in Gilpin to the right of S&T, as Taylor carefully inserts “creative insecurity” alongside widely nominated institutions and policies on the left, might lead to progress on two outstanding conundrums identified by Taylor. First, diffusion of S&T is distinct, conceptually, from indigenous innovation, and it plays a supporting, derivative role to the divine spark behind truly novel products and processes; yet in constructing a social science model, diffusion is hopelessly entangled with salient outputs of innovation, such as high-tech exports for national development. Taylor’s analytical approach incorporates multiple measures to cancel, as far as possible, noise in the numbers due to diffusion. Alternatively, if certain kinds of S&T productivity rock the international system by shifting the balance of power or, as emphasized in my book, modulating incentives for great-power cooperation and the costs of hegemony, then diffusion matters—it graduates, as Michael Horowitz (The Diffusion of Military Power, 2010) argues, to take its substantive part alongside indigenous technology creation in how S&T influences world affairs.

A second research question bequeathed by Taylor remarks on the curious innovation leadership of Scandinavia and the counterintuitive absence of rising BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China). Both sets of countries pose important anomalies for Taylor’s model. In descriptive terms, states like Sweden, Denmark, and Norway should not be leading the S&T sweepstakes because these countries, although they enjoy admirable levels of domestic peace (S&T push), are not typically embroiled in militarized disputes with their neighbors (external threat, or S&T pull). The creative insecurity vector in Taylor’s model requires both components in order to launch extraordinary S&T. Meanwhile, the creative potential of societies in BRIC countries inhabits fertile soil today, compared to their respective domestic politics of, say, 1970. Moreover, external demand for new products and processes by these countries ought to be skyrocketing, not so much due to fresh mobilization against territorial rivals but because of rising global concerns, along with the growing weight of their policy decisions in the international political economy.

The answer to Scandinavia’s prominence and the BRIC countries’ disappearance from Politics of Innovation may indeed lie to the right of S&T output in Taylor’s model. As they influence the global system and force shifts in regional balances of power, BRIC countries are innovating, but not in ways that ripple established patent counts. Future research on Taylor’s innovation model, for example, might examine the Green Revolution in Brazil, which combined technology diffusion and local adaptation in order to drive a boom in soy exports that registers more in world affairs than among the community of innovation economists. Sweden’s and Denmark’s prodigious capacity to enter the patent lists, on the other hand, may have something to do with the nature of their positive relationship with the United States and Western powers, which permits relatively free flow of science and technical knowledge while moderately favoring consumer demand over defense innovation.

This book properly highlights the significance of optimized competition for producing S&T. Taylor shows how informal networks function as lubricants, allowing formal mechanisms of government-sponsored institutions and policies to slip through cultural idiosyncrasies or barriers to communication and get to work on particular societies. Innovation in these primed societies may also benefit from Taylor’s creative insecurity, in which competition is fueled by external challenges at the same time it is moderated by political bargains among domestic constituencies who must cooperate to produce the best technology. Now, Taylor’s methodical analysis of Cardwell’s Law paves the way for a further round of interpretive study to explore the outer boundaries of optimal competition. Cardwell himself gestured in this direction, subtly, when he selected technologies that not only altered how man behaved toward nature but also changed the game as played by the world’s great powers. Cardwell may turn out to be correct that we ought not to divorce consequences of S&T for mankind from its consequences for international relations. Science and technology’s system effects on world affairs, international influence, and global leadership, to the extent they are anticipated by rival states, may circle back to constrain Taylor’s novel political inputs at the domestic level. System effects may shape how networks and creative insecurity catalyze history’s most significant innovations.