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Jeffrey Ding, "Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Oct 5, 2024

Jeffrey Ding, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Georgetown University, dives into how technological diffusion shapes economic competition among great powers. He critiques traditional innovation theories, focusing instead on how some nations excel at adopting new technologies. The conversation spans historical industrial revolutions, revealing how Britain, the U.S., and Japan navigated technological advances. Ding also discusses current U.S.-China dynamics in AI, emphasizing the role of skill formation and institutional adaptability in maintaining competitive edges.

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INSIGHT

Focus on Diffusion, Not Just Innovation

Jeffrey Ding's book analyzes how technological advances affect great power competition.
He focuses on how nations adopt and scale new technologies, not just initial innovation.

INSIGHT

GPTs and Industrial Revolutions

General Purpose Technologies (GPTs), like electricity or computers, transform entire economies.
Industrial revolutions are periods of accelerated technological change, often driven by GPTs.

INSIGHT

Diffusion vs. Innovation

Ding argues that widespread diffusion of GPTs, not just initial innovation, drives economic growth.
He emphasizes institutional adaptations for diffusion, like skill formation, over controlling secrets.

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When scholars and policymakers consider how technological advances affect the rise and fall of great powers, they draw on theories that center the moment of innovation—the eureka moment that sparks astonishing technological feats. In Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition (Princeton UP, 2024), Jeffrey Ding offers a different explanation of how technological revolutions affect competition among great powers. Rather than focusing on which state first introduced major innovations, he investigates why some states were more successful than others at adapting and embracing new technologies at scale. Drawing on historical case studies of past industrial revolutions as well as statistical analysis, Ding develops a theory that emphasizes institutional adaptations oriented around diffusing technological advances throughout the entire economy.

Examining Britain’s rise to preeminence in the First Industrial Revolution, America and Germany’s overtaking of Britain in the Second Industrial Revolution, and Japan’s challenge to America’s technological dominance in the Third Industrial Revolution (also known as the “information revolution”), Ding illuminates the pathway by which these technological revolutions influenced the global distribution of power and explores the generalizability of his theory beyond the given set of great powers. His findings bear directly on current concerns about how emerging technologies such as AI could influence the US-China power balance.

Our guest today is: Jeffrey Ding, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Georgetown University.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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