Thus, in Florence, the epicenter of the Renaissance, we see five factors propelling that city's innovation: patents, prizes, education, global markets, and cosmopolitanism, an openness to ideas from around the world. How do these factors apply today? What combination of incentives and foundation will bring the greatest innovation to the modern world? How can we create a 21st-century Renaissance?And what was the economic growth like in renaissance Italy (or more specifically, Tuscany)? Per this,
These questions are especially important now because the early 21st century has not been kind to the United States. The new century dawned with the destruction of the World Trade Center, and its first decade closed with the worst recession since the Great Depression. We face continuing wars, significant debt and divisive politics. Not all of our problems are recent in origin or likely to be resolved quickly. Most significantly, productivity growth, our best measure of innovation, fell dramatically in the United States in the post-1973 era and has not yet picked up again.
| Year | GDP (1420-40 = 1) | Per capita GDP (1420-40 = 1) |
| 1310 | 1.63 | .87 |
| 1325 | 1.57 | .83 |
| 1350 | 1.21 | .91 (plague does wonders) |
| 1375 | .96 | .87 |
| 1400 | 1.06 | .94 |
| 1425 | 1.01 | 1.01 |
| 1450 | 1.03 | .98 (uh-oh, wrong direction) |
| 1475 | 1.05 | .87 |
| 1500 | 1.04 | .82 |
Going from 1310 to the 2 peaks of GDP per capita (1 in 1365 and 1.13 in 1413), that's a yearly growth rate of .25%. Go innovation! (Yes, that's just barely lower than the growth rate of median U.S. household income from 1978, before the Volcker recession, to 2009, during the current recession.)
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