Tangoing with Schumpeter

Technological innovation affects nearly every aspect of a country’s economic and political relations, including its trade profile, industrial performance, national security, and military might. It thus comes to bear in profound ways on both the relative and absolute power of states. Joseph Schumpeter’s “gale of creative destruction” is also distributive in nature: innovation displaces the old with the new at the expense of vested interests (Schumpeter, pp. 84). Domestic political economies are thus prone to resist technological change. If innovation is at once vital and eschewed, under what conditions can this paradox be overcome? Why are some countries able to push and hug the innovation frontier while others struggle to advance or shrink from former prowess? These are Mark Z. Taylor’s principal inquiries in The Politics of Innovation, the research result of the author’s decade-long investigation into variance in national innovative performance. The book skillfully achieves a golden trifecta of academic publishing: it provides an exceptional survey and nuanced examination of the relevant literature, it challenges leading theories in the discipline, and it offers a novel argument buttressed by mixed-method statistical analysis and comparative case studies. In seeking answers to the question “why some countries are better than others at science and technology?,” Taylor has crafted a book of significant importance to the study of nations, ripe with insight and promising directions for future research

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