“Argentine President Javier Milei notched another economic victory Tuesday after data showed wholesale prices declined in May for the first time since the height of the pandemic, adding to his momentum before October midterm elections. 

The producer price index fell 0.3 percent from April and rose 22.4 percent on the year, according data from the INDEC national statistics bureau. It’s a sharp turnaround from December 2023, Milei’s first month in office, when wholesale monthly prices soared 54 percent. The libertarian often uses the indicator to warn that Argentina was nearing hyperinflation due to his predecessor’s policies. 

Local prices stayed constant while prices for imported products fell 4.1 percent, according to the monthly report. Economy Minister Luis Caputo celebrated the good news on X.

Discounting pandemic data that saw demand plummet, the May print is the lowest in the series, which begins in 2016, Caputo wrote.

In May, monthly consumer price increases also cooled to their slowest pace in five years to 1.5 percent.”

From Buenos Aires Times.

Summary: Throughout history, cities and nations have repeatedly sparked extraordinary—but relatively brief—periods of innovation. Cardwell’s Law is the idea that creative peaks are historically short-lived. Can any society sustain innovation over the long term? The conditions that support progress are fragile, but by identifying and safeguarding them, we can break out of this historical cage.

Donald Cardwell, a British historian of science and technology, famously observed that “no nation has been very creative for more than an historically short period.” Known as Cardwell’s Law, this dictum haunts many people concerned about the future of innovation. Can the United States, or any other country, break free of the cage of Cardwell’s Law and create an environment that fosters innovation indefinitely?

To better understand this challenge, it helps to zoom in from the level of nations to that of cities, which often function as engines of innovation. While intended to describe whole societies, Cardwell’s Law scales down well to the level of individual urban centers. After all, city-states were the first states and served as the sites of institutional experimentation. And for a long time, it was cities, not larger nations, that commanded loyalty.

A grim message from my otherwise uplifting book, Centers of Progress: 40 Cities That Changed the World is that a city’s creative peak tends to be—as Cardwell noted—brief. As the British science writer Matt Ridley observed in the foreword to the book, “Global progress depends on a sudden series of bush fires of innovation, bursting into life in unpredictable places, burning fiercely, and then dying rapidly.”

Are there any exceptions to that rule? Have any cities managed to maintain longer-than-expected golden ages of innovation, and what can we learn from them?

The cities from earlier eras that I profiled in my book tend to be featured for their achievements over longer periods of time. That is, unfortunately, because in the distant past, progress was often painfully slow—not because someone had cracked the code to break Cardwell’s Law.

Writing, for example, developed over multiple generations, as simple pictographs that accountants invented for record-keeping purposes evolved into a symbolic script and eventually into highly abstract, cuneiform characters. The birthplace of writing was Uruk, an ancient Sumerian city. The most noteworthy part of Uruk’s history lasted for many centuries, but only because the city’s great achievement took generations to accomplish. We should hardly want to emulate a society that advanced at such a pace.

In contrast, when we turn to modern history, the pace of progress accelerates—but the creative window narrows. Manchester, the so-called workshop of the world, led the way during the Industrial Revolution, but only for a few decades. Houston’s heyday helping drive forward space exploration also only lasted a few decades. Today, the youngest living person to have walked on the moon is 89. Tokyo went from being a world capital of technology in the 1980s to decades of economic stagnation. The San Francisco Bay Area that birthed Silicon Valley and the digital revolution has lost its crown, with many technological breakthroughs now occurring elsewhere. In the modern era, the golden age of innovation in any locale tends to last only a few decades, or even less.

To understand why this pattern repeats so consistently, consider the underlying conditions that support—or sabotage—sustained innovation. The economic historian Joel Mokyr, in an illuminating 1993 essay, describes the narrowness of the path that societies must walk to promote creativity, a veritable tightrope where one wrong move can lead to everything crashing down. “In retrospect, the most surprising thing is perhaps that we have come this far,” he concludes.

What causes the downfall of centers of progress, making Cardwell’s Law so seemingly prophetic? While world-changing innovations have come from an extraordinarily diverse set of places, from Song–era Hangzhou to post–World War II New York, sites of creativity almost always share certain key features. It is the loss of those factors that spells their doom. These feature are: conditions of relative peace, openness to new ideas, and economic freedom.

Free enterprise and healthy competition encourage innovation, and the freedom to trade across borders plays an important role by increasing that competition. At the same time, free exchange across borders must not be confused with the total dissolution of borders: vast empires under centralized control tend to stagnate technologically, and complete integration of countries under a global government would in all likelihood be a disaster. A certain type of international competition can be beneficial—just not the kind of rivalry that leads to war.

War redirects creative energies toward making deadlier weapons and away from technologies aimed at improving living standards. And, of course, losing a war can lead to a society’s complete destruction.

Moreover, war prevents innovators from collaborating across borders, and even thinkers within the same country often cannot put their heads together due to the secrecy inherent in war. While some credit WWII with speeding up the creation of the computer, a case can be made that the conflict actually delayed the computer’s invention by preventing collaboration between many innovators, from Konrad Zuse in Berlin to Alan Turing in Great Britain. Even in peacetime, innovation can be stifled when freedom and openness are curtailed.

In short, progress is threatened when peace is lost to war, openness is stifled by the suppression of speech, and freedom is undermined by restrictive or authoritarian laws.

Hong Kong provides a recent and illustrative example of how quickly the conditions for progress can disappear. During its whirlwind economic transformation in the 1960s, Hong Kong rose from one of the poorest countries in the world to one of the wealthiest. It accomplished this feat through policies of “noninterventionism”: simply allowing Hong Kongers to freely compete and collaborate to enrich themselves and their society. But the city’s proud tradition of limited government, the rule of law, and freedom has been abruptly extinguished by a harsh and unrelenting crackdown from the Chinese Communist Party.

Despite sobering examples such as that of Hong Kong, there is reason for hope. Centers of progress are often short-lived, but the fact that throughout history most societies remained creative for only a short time should not discourage us. To defy Cardwell’s Law, all that is needed is a clear-eyed willingness to learn from the mistakes of the past and to fiercely protect the conditions needed for further progress.

This article was published at Econlib on 5/17/2025.

“Secure land tenure transforms dormant assets into active capital—unlocking access to credit, encouraging investment, and spurring entrepreneurship. These are the building blocks of job creation and economic growth.

When landowners have secure property rights, they invest more in their land. Existing data shows that with secure property rights, agricultural output increases by 40% on average. Efficient land rental markets also significantly boost productivity, with up to 60% productivity gains and 25% welfare improvements for tenants…

Building on a long-term partnership with the World Bank, the Government of Côte d’Ivoire has dramatically accelerated delivery of formal land records to customary landholders in rural areas by implementing legal, regulatory, and institutional reforms and digitizing the customary rural land registration process, which is led by the Rural Land Agency (Agence Foncière Rurale – AFOR).

This has enabled a five-fold increase in the number of land certificates delivered in just five years compared to the previous 20 years.”

From World Bank.

“Consumer prices in Buenos Aires City rose 1.6 percent in May, lower than the expectations of most analysts and a slowdown from the previous month.

The news will be welcomed by President Javier Milei’s national government, which is awaiting the publishing of the INDEC national statistics bureau’s national figure later this week.

According to data from the Buenos Aires City Statistics Office, prices in the capital were up 1.6 percent, down from the 2.3 percent recorded in April. Most private consultancy firms expected a rate of around two percent.

Inflation so far this year in the capital totals 12.9 percent – a massive drop on the 48.3 percent recorded over the same period in 2024.”

From Buenos Aires Times.