I see there as being (at least) two potential drivers in your characterization, that seem to me like they would suggest very different plans for a time traveling intervention.
Here’s a thought experiment: you’re going to travel back in time and land near Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, who you know will (along with Marcus Licinius Crassus) repeal the constitutional reforms of Sulla (which occurred in roughly 82-80 BC and were repealed by roughly 70BC).
Your experimental manipulation is to visit the same timeline twice and either (1) hang out nearby and help draft a much better replacement to Sulla’s reforms in ~76 BC to ~70 BC (and maybe bring some gold to bribe some senators or whatever else is needed here to make it happen?) or else (2) bring along some gold, and simply go hire a bunch of honest hard-working smiths to help you build a printing press anywhere in the Roman world, and start printing dictionaries and romance novels and newspapers and so on, and keep at it until the printing business becomes profitable because lot of people picked up literacy because doing some was easier for them to cheaply get value from, because there was a bunch of good cheap written materials!
Then the experimental data you collect is to let various butterflies float around… and resample 100 chaotic instances each of “20 AD” (for a total of 200 samples of “20 AD”) and see which ones are closer to an industrial revolution and which ones are farther from one.
This is one set of things that might be missing (which could potentially be intervened on politically in the aftermath of Sulla):
All of the flywheels of progress — …large markets… financial institutions, corporate and IP law—were turning very slowly.
And this is a different thing that might be missing one (that could be intervened on any time, but doing it when the Sulla/Pompey/Crassus intervention is possible helps with a ceteris paribus comparison):
All of the flywheels of progress—surpluswealth, materials and manufacturing ability, scientific knowledge and methods, …communication networks...—were turning very slowly.
If the problem was bad and declining institutions, then the first intervention will help a lot more to get you to a prosperous ancient world without needing to go through the intervening dark age.
But if the problem was a lack of technologists with time and funding and skills to make the world better then the second intervention will probably help a lot more.
To be conceptually thorough, you could try to have a four way experimental design, and have two more time traveling trips, one of which is “both interventions” and the other just injects some random noise in a way that counts as “neither innovation”.
I think if “there is only the ONE BIG CATEGORY OF THING that’s really missing” then there will be enormous leaps in the “both” timelines, and all 300 other sampled “20 ADs” (that got the “neither”, “just tech”, or “just laws” intervention) will all still be on course for a dark age.
To be clear, I don’t mean to say that this is the only way to “divide your proposed flywheels of progress” into two chunks.
Maybe the only real flywheel is wealth (and it is just about doing an efficient build-out of good infrastructure), or maybe the only real flywheel is large markets (because maybe “specialization” is the magic thing to unlock), or maybe it is only knowledge (because going meta always wins eventually)?
There’s a lot of possibilities. And each possibility suggests different thought experiments! :-)
I see there as being (at least) two potential drivers in your characterization, that seem to me like they would suggest very different plans for a time traveling intervention.
Here’s a thought experiment: you’re going to travel back in time and land near Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, who you know will (along with Marcus Licinius Crassus) repeal the constitutional reforms of Sulla (which occurred in roughly 82-80 BC and were repealed by roughly 70BC).
Your experimental manipulation is to visit the same timeline twice and either (1) hang out nearby and help draft a much better replacement to Sulla’s reforms in ~76 BC to ~70 BC (and maybe bring some gold to bribe some senators or whatever else is needed here to make it happen?) or else (2) bring along some gold, and simply go hire a bunch of honest hard-working smiths to help you build a printing press anywhere in the Roman world, and start printing dictionaries and romance novels and newspapers and so on, and keep at it until the printing business becomes profitable because lot of people picked up literacy because doing some was easier for them to cheaply get value from, because there was a bunch of good cheap written materials!
Then the experimental data you collect is to let various butterflies float around… and resample 100 chaotic instances each of “20 AD” (for a total of 200 samples of “20 AD”) and see which ones are closer to an industrial revolution and which ones are farther from one.
This is one set of things that might be missing (which could potentially be intervened on politically in the aftermath of Sulla):
And this is a different thing that might be missing one (that could be intervened on any time, but doing it when the Sulla/Pompey/Crassus intervention is possible helps with a ceteris paribus comparison):
If the problem was bad and declining institutions, then the first intervention will help a lot more to get you to a prosperous ancient world without needing to go through the intervening dark age.
But if the problem was a lack of technologists with time and funding and skills to make the world better then the second intervention will probably help a lot more.
To be conceptually thorough, you could try to have a four way experimental design, and have two more time traveling trips, one of which is “both interventions” and the other just injects some random noise in a way that counts as “neither innovation”.
I think if “there is only the ONE BIG CATEGORY OF THING that’s really missing” then there will be enormous leaps in the “both” timelines, and all 300 other sampled “20 ADs” (that got the “neither”, “just tech”, or “just laws” intervention) will all still be on course for a dark age.
To be clear, I don’t mean to say that this is the only way to “divide your proposed flywheels of progress” into two chunks.
Maybe the only real flywheel is wealth (and it is just about doing an efficient build-out of good infrastructure), or maybe the only real flywheel is large markets (because maybe “specialization” is the magic thing to unlock), or maybe it is only knowledge (because going meta always wins eventually)?
There’s a lot of possibilities. And each possibility suggests different thought experiments! :-)