An emerging body of “New Progressivist” literature argues that the world is better off now than it ever has been in terms of a wide-variety measures of human well-being. This upward trend, suggest the new progressivists, has been present in developed countries since the Enlightenment but has manifest in recent decades in developing countries as well. This remarkable progress is attributed to the increasingly rapid diffusion of technological innovation through global trade, investment, communications, research and educational networks. This presentation will not dispute the fact that technological innovations have vastly improved human well-being in many countries in recent decades. However, this “arc of progress” is very uneven and “the new progressivist” literature offers little insight into the source(s) of that variation. A primary cause of this gap is that new progressivists pay insufficient attention to institutional determinants of development or the interaction between technological innovation and institutional capacity.

Based on a joint paper with Michael Trebilcock and Evan Rosevear, I will argue that an accurate account of the contribution of technological innovation to global development requires an account of the institutional dimension as well. To do so, I will sketch the different interactions between technological innovations and investment on one hand and institutional capacity on the other. I will then provide a series of examples from this matrix in three clusters relating to education, health, and wealth. The conclusion is that in many contexts technological innovations will never realize close to their full potential without serious attention being paid to institutional pre- or co-requisites. As such, technological innovation, by itself, provides no easy escape from the often admittedly daunting challenge of reforming dysfunctional institutions in developing countries.