The Earth's Learning Curve; The scientific revolution that began 300 years ago has accelerated exponentially. It is moving so fast that the spread of knowledge defines our times. Nations that learn faster will prosper. But it will take something else--wisdom--to endure.

Byline: Fareed Zakaria

Imagine a chart that begins when man first appeared on the planet and tracks the economic growth of societies from then forward. It would be a long, flat line until the late 16th or early 17th century, when it would start trending upward. Before then the fruits of productive labor were limited to a few elites--princes, merchants and priests. For most of humankind life was as the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously described it in 1651--"solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." But as Hobbes was writing those words, the world around him was changing. Put simply, human beings were getting smarter.

People have always sought knowledge, of course, but in Western Europe at that time, men like Galileo, Newton and Descartes began to search systematically for ways to understand and control their environment. The scientific revolution, followed by the Enlightenment, marked a fundamental shift. Humans were no longer searching for ways simply to fit into a natural or divine order, they were seeking to change it. Once people found ways to harness energy-- using steam engines--they were able to build machines that harnessed far more power than any human or horse could ever do. And people could work without ever getting tired. The rise of these machines drove the Industrial Revolution, and created a whole new system of life. Today the search for knowledge continues to produce an ongoing revolution in the health and wealth of humankind.

If the rise of science marks the first great trend in this story, the second is its diffusion. What was happening in Britain during the Industrial Revolution was not an isolated phenomenon. A succession of visitors to Britain would go back to report to their countries on the technological and commercial innovations they saw there. Sometimes societies were able to learn extremely fast, as in the United States. Others, like Germany, benefited from starting late, leapfrogging the long-drawn-out process that Britain went through.

This diffusion of knowledge accelerated dramatically in recent decades. Over the last 30 years we have watched countries like Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and now China grow at a pace that is three times that of Britain or the United States at the peak of the Industrial Revolution. They have been able to do this because of their energies and exertions, of course, but also because they cleverly and perhaps luckily adopted certain ideas about development that had worked in the West--reasonably free markets, open trade, a focus on science and technology, among them.

The diffusion of knowledge is the dominant trend of our time and goes well beyond the purely scientific. Consider the cases of Turkey and Brazil. If you had asked an economist 20 years ago how to think about these two countries, he would have explained that they were classic basket-case, Third World economies, with triple-digit inflation, soaring debt burdens, a weak private sector and snail's-pace growth. Today they are both remarkably well ...