Summary: For centuries, “innovator” was a slur rather than a compliment. A new analysis of more than 23,000 books suggests that Western culture gradually became more receptive to new ideas, helping turn ingenuity into sustained prosperity. Countries where resistance to innovation declined earlier or further usually produced more notable scientists and inventors. Societies that learned to welcome new ideas grew richer, and living standards rose substantially, especially for the poor.

In 1548, the government of England’s 10-year-old Edward VI issued a proclamation against those who “doeth innovate.” Offenders would “suffer imprisonment, and other grievous punishments.” The target was unauthorized change to church ceremonies, but for more than two centuries, the word “innovator” remained an accusation. My research suggests that the gradual decline of this hostility to novelty helped the West turn new ideas into sustained economic progress.

An innovation is a new idea put to use: a better plow, a new crop rotation, a vaccine. Such ideas matter because, unlike a loaf of bread, they can be used by many people at once without being used up. A farmer who gives a neighbor a loaf no longer has it, but if he teaches the neighbor a better way of growing wheat, both can use the knowledge. Each farmer still needs his own land, seed, and labor, yet the method need only be discovered once; after that, others can adopt it, and later generations can improve it. Resisting the new method can deny its benefits to people far beyond the farm where it began.

But a useful invention can put someone out of work. The Roman historian Suetonius tells how an engineer offered Emperor Vespasian a cheap way to haul columns to the Capitol. The emperor paid him well but declined the device, saying he had to feed his poor. Seventeen centuries later, English textile workers known as Luddites smashed the machines they blamed for cutting their wages, and their name became a byword for technophobia. Today, leading mathematicians warn about AI’s effects on their profession. While their concerns about how mathematicians are trained and how the field builds understanding are serious, no profession enjoys contemplating its own replacement. Resistance cannot be dismissed as ignorance when the losses are immediate and personal, while many of the gains go to strangers or future generations.

How a society responds to innovation depends partly on its culture, the beliefs and values people learn from one another and pass between generations. An unfamiliar method can put a farmer’s crop at risk and, in a culture suspicious of novelty, his standing with his neighbors. Where obedience is prized, a scholar’s challenge to established teaching may be treated as insolence before anyone considers the evidence. When challenging accepted views becomes less costly, the same effort can yield more discoveries, and because each discovery becomes material for the next, the gains can compound over centuries.

To trace how attitudes toward innovation changed over time, I looked at what earlier generations praised and condemned in more than 23,000 books in the Western literary tradition, available in English or English translation through Project Gutenberg. They preserve the views of a literate minority, but one with an outsized role in teaching, government, and innovation.

First, I adapted a framework the Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede created to compare national cultures. Using AI, I scored each book on cultural values from the framework, focusing on the four most relevant to innovation: deference to authority, discomfort with uncertainty, individualism, and what I call patience, which covers saving, planning, and adapting inherited practices to changing circumstances. The AI read passages of several thousand words from each book and judged whether each passage endorsed, rejected, or took no clear side on each cultural value. Each book’s score reflects the share of passages supporting a value minus the share opposing it. Because the AI judges what each passage argues, rather than tallying how often it uses words linked to a value, the method distinguishes what a book endorses from what it merely depicts.

Fourteen scholars of literature and classics at the University of St Andrews compared pairs of books chosen for strong contrasts, judging which book in each pair leaned further toward a given value, without seeing the AI’s scores. Leaving aside cases where a scholar did not know both books or judged them about equal, they agreed with the AI 93 percent of the time. If you know the books, you can see whether you agree with the AI.

I then combined the four cultural values into a resistance index that rises with deference to authority and discomfort with uncertainty and falls with individualism and patience. Earlier books remain in the index as new ones appear, but gradually receive less weight. The index shows that resistance to innovation fell by about half between 1000 and 1920. I repeated the exercise on roughly 5,000 books from four collections outside Project Gutenberg and again found declining resistance between 1500 and 1890.

What might explain the decline? The economic historian Deirdre McCloskey argues that printing, religious reform, and political upheaval gave ordinary people a greater voice, so that commerce and innovation came to be admired rather than scorned. The Nobel laureate Joel Mokyr points to a related change among Europe’s educated elite, who began to challenge inherited authority and to share what they found. The motto of the Royal Society, founded in 1660, translates as “take nobody’s word for it.”

The books broadly support this timeline but suggest the change began earlier. The index fell sharply between about 1130 and 1230, centuries before the printing press or the Royal Society, though the early evidence is thin and that fall was partly reversed later. Most of the lasting decline came after 1500, with deference to authority retreating fastest in the 16th and early 17th centuries.

Did invention rise as resistance fell? To find out, I grouped books by country of origin and built a separate index for 13 countries. Between 1500 and 1900, countries whose index fell earlier or further produced more notable scientists and inventors, even after allowing for the fact that larger populations have more potential innovators. The pattern fits the cultural story, but it is an association rather than proof of causation, since prosperity and institutions can also change attitudes toward new ideas.

How much might these changing attitudes toward innovation matter for living standards? Suppose population had grown exactly as it did between 1000 and 1920, but the resistance index had stayed at its year-1000 level. My growth model, which depends on assumptions about how strongly culture affects invention, suggests that by 1920 productivity would have been about 44 percent lower, leaving the same workers and equipment to produce little more than half as much. The model attributes about two-thirds of the speed-up in productivity growth between 1500 and 1700 to falling resistance to new ideas.

Vespasian turned down the engineer’s device to protect the poor. Yet through cheaper food, better medicines, and less exhausting work, the poor have been the great beneficiaries of innovation. Nobody has to improve a crop to eat a cheaper loaf or understand a vaccine to be protected by it. We all gain from a culture in which “innovator” is no longer an insult.