Path-dependent boat designs locked Chinese and European shipwrights onto separate trajectories
Evidence
Needham (1988) has documented the parallel evolution of boats in Asia and Europe. Chinese junks and European sailing ships show a number of major differences, despite the similar goals of their builders, which can be traced backward through a gradual accumulation of innovations, with each new innovation built on top of previous innovations. For example, early European boats used a heavy keel as the main structural support, whereas the early Chinese solved this problem by using flat-bottomed rafts reinforced with cross-wise ribs or bulkheads. This early difference in how boat builders solved the problem of structural integrity led these groups to increasingly diverge, leading them up different adaptive peaks. Later, when European and Chinese sailors came into close and repeated contact, neither group adopted the hull design of the other. Although as many believe, the Chinese design was superior (at a higher adaptive peak), European ship builders could not readily adopt these designs because they already relied on an immense amount of specialized construction knowledge, specific carpentry skills, and reliable trade networks for particular raw materials (what economists called network externalities). — Joe Henrich and Robert Boyd, The Evolution of Conformist…, 114
Categorization
- XREF: Network-externality lock-in of boat hull designs parallels my base-reading work on institutional path dependence (e.g., QWERTY, Milgrom on fairs) and the earlier MOC thread on what actually transmits these trajectories. — connects to: Cultural accumulation locks groups into local optima because traits are integrated
- CANDY: Chinese junks and European keel-boats diverged for centuries even in contact; neither adopted the other’s demonstrably better hull — a crisp conversation fact.
- SHARE: Would go to a maritime-history-minded friend; needle to them is that the European ‘heavy keel’ invention locked out the superior Chinese cross-ribbed hull via network externalities, an economist’s term for why boats look the way they do.
- recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source