The Gutenberg printing press was a transformative technology that had a profound impact on human development. The printing press, invented in the 1440s, has been (contentiously) heralded as the technology that unlocked mass literacy across the globe.
The printing press however, could not have had the impact it did, if it weren’t for another complementary invention — paper.
Prior to the invention of paper, books were made of animal skins (parchment) that made them prohibitively expensive. A parchment bible, for example, required the skins of something like 250 sheep. Because books were so expensive, so was reading. Literacy was thus a privilege enjoyed by just a select few elites.
Paper was significantly more affordable. Initially made from pulped cotton, innovation saw paper become increasingly cheaper to produce. By the early 1700s, paper was so cheap, it was used to make a product explicitly designed to be thrown away after only 24 hours, the world’s first daily newspaper.
Paper and the printing press reduced the cost of literacy dramatically. The ability to copy and share knowledge so cheaply had an immeasurable impact on the productivity of education, as well as professional services and creative industries. Even in this digital age, it’s difficult to imagine how the economy would function without them.
Most technological improvements are of the iPhone 7-to-iPhone 8 variety; incremental. Indeed technological developments like paper and the printing press are rare. New technologies with the potential have paper like effects include batteries, quantum computing, AI, and blockchain. (Actually, the paper story has some delicious parallels with the way people are talking about the democratising potential of blockchain.)
While rare, their impacts are great. Andrew McAfee demonstrates just how great when he answers the question: what have been the most important developments in human history?
It’s a wonderful question to ask and start an endless debate about, because some people are going to bring up systems of philosophy in both the West and the East that have changed how a lot of people think about the world. And then other people will say, “No, actually, the big stories, the big developments are the founding of the world’s major religions, which have changed civilizations and have changed and influenced how countless people are living their lives.” And then some other folk will say, “Actually, what changes civilizations, what modifies them and what changes people’s lives are empires, so the great developments in human history are stories of conquest and of war.”
He goes to mention other answers such as the Age of Exploration, the Renaissance, intellectual achievements, the Plague and so on.
Ultimately though, what he concludes is that, objectively speaking, “none of these things have mattered very much” at all. When you look at the data, he says, there’s been only one story that has really mattered for human development, and that’s technology. Over the very long run, it’s only been the technological developments that came with the industrial revolution that have registered on metrics to do with development or population.
Technology’s impact on the population and social development
Source: Population data is from a variety of lazy sources and the SDI comes from a study by Ian Morris.
TALES FROM THE LONG TAIL 
