“There is a good chance that at some point the United States will at least have to share leadership with China, and possibly cede it to China … Cardwell's Law suggests that no country remains technologically creative for very long. Now, 'very long' might mean a century.”
The David Lin Report · September 2026
Mokyr, an economic historian who won the Nobel for work on technological change and growth, is answering whether America keeps its lead in innovation. He frames it as a handoff that has already happened repeatedly — Britain took it from the Netherlands, Europe lost it to the United States — and names it after Donald Cardwell, the historian of technology who first noticed the pattern. He was dismissive in the same answer of the idea that AI leadership is a horse race with a finish line.
Transcript
…one example. It's lost its global lead when the winners of one era organized to block the next. How do technological innovations lead to economic growth, broadly? And let's use the United States as an example today. Where does the United States sit on the curve, according to Cardwell's law, today?
Well, the United
States has been the world's technological leader basically for most of the 20th century. It essentially dethroned Europe for a variety of reasons. One of them, of course, was two world wars that tore Europe apart. And the other is, and not unrelated, that a very large number of major scientists and inventors and engineers pick up their suitcases and left Europe to go to America, you know, because of what was happening in Europe. And so the United States has been a world leader for most of the 20th century. And in some ways, you know, there are still areas in which they are leading. Everybody is talking about AI, everybody talking about computer, what digital, and so on and so forth. And it is all still made largely in America. But there are clouds on the horizon, and everybody's talking about those clouds. And of course, there is a considerable number of people who think that there is a good chance that at some point the United States will replace, well, it's China who replaced the United States, just as the United States replaced Europe, and much as…
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Yeah, so go ahead.
Let's use AI as an example, please. Well,
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