The root cause of progress is precision in memetic transfer of information. In the past, knowledge was lost due to oral spread of information. Generations could inherit information from the past by telling the stories from the past, and we invented sacred canonical text to prevent too much informational loss in the most important domain of morals and cooperation, but we didn't have reliable mechanisms to copy information from one generation to the next. First writing, then manual copying, then printing and ultimately, the atomization of symbolic representa... (read more)
That's one important flywheel, but there are others. To paraphrase another comment I made here: If we lost all of our institutions, wealth, and infrastructure, except for our ability to precisely transfer information, growth would slow way down. So the only way to fully understand long-term growth is to understand all of these overlapping, interacting flywheels.
The root cause of progress is precision in memetic transfer of information. In the past, knowledge was lost due to oral spread of information. Generations could inherit information from the past by telling the stories from the past, and we invented sacred canonical text to prevent too much informational loss in the most important domain of morals and cooperation, but we didn't have reliable mechanisms to copy information from one generation to the next. First writing, then manual copying, then printing and ultimately, the atomization of symbolic representa... (read more)