Nothing much (in percentage terms) got invented until the industrial revolution. The question is why the industrial revolution took so long. If you are interested in this topic I highly recommend A Farewell to Alms [0] - warning controversial hypothesis, but it raises lots of interesting topics to think about.
I agree on the importance of the industrial revolution. An alternative explanation, that argues more from political institutions, can be found in Acemoglu and Robinsons "Why Nations Fail" [0]. They basically argue that for most of our history, individual innovators. In most countries most of the time, a small minority, which is in power, would either profit from the innovation instead or would actively suppress innovation to protect the status quo. Only when institutions were developed that included a lot of people in the decision making process, would we also develop protections for individual innovators, that would allow them to profit from their work in a meaningful way.
I generally find it hard to pin down to what degree culture motivates people to action and think that explanations should be preferred, that show how single individuals or groups might directly profit from certain actions.
There is a lot of discussion online why the Romans didn't have an industrial revolution. One argument I heard was that they relied too much on slave labor and improvements in productivity weren't really sought after. See for example here
how do you quantify the inventions to say "nothing much" was invented?
I have the feeling we underestimate how much stuff has been invented and forgotten.
For example, if you consider architecture the romans used half a dozen kind of opus to build walls, different varieties of arches, cement mixtures, hollow bricks and sunken panels to allow for lighter domes, both rib and barrel vaults, and likely a bunch of other things I never heard about.
A lot of that stuff has been superseded, so we don't really care a about a dozen old cement mixtures, or pure wood techniques, but it doesn't mean they were not invented.
That's certainly depressing. I'm going to have to go w/ McCloskey and push some pencil on some of that.
I would have put it on the plague, the protestant revolution, the magna carta and the printing press. All pre-dated the industrial revolution - but that itself had to be enabled by something (otherwise - the Romans would have done it, right?)
I am not sure why you think it is depressing unless you mean what life was like for the vast majority of people before the industrial revolution.
I would really encourage you to read the book, not so much for the hypothesis Clark proposes, but for all the amazing background and data on this topic he provides in a way that is accessible to the layman.
I tend to agree. I've lived in Indonesia - when the Nike plants paying several cents/day and had hunreds of people line up for those horrible jobs that Americans were boycotting Nike for.
I've seen the jockeying at the line any time one of those factory workers committed suicide.
But does not that make us wonder if we could do better? (I'm not an equality warrier - more of a let's do better down here warrior - and I have to say Nike does pretty good in that regard)
Prior to 1790, Clark asserts that man faced a Malthusian trap: new technology enabled greater productivity and more food, but was quickly gobbled up by higher populations.
In Britain, however, as disease continually killed off poorer members of society, their positions in society were taken over by the sons of the wealthy. In that way, according to Clark, less violent, more literate and more hard-working behaviour - middle-class values - were spread culturally and biologically throughout the population. This process of "downward social mobility" eventually enabled Britain to attain a rate of productivity that allowed it to break out of the Malthusian trap.
The hypothesis Clark proposes is the least interesting part of his book - it is all the background and data on the industrial revolution that he provides that make it worth reading.
I am on the fence if "the rich outbred the rest" is valid, but I do know from the genetics side that an enormous amount of selection has taken place in the human population over the last few thousand years. We really are very different to the people living 5000 years ago.
Genetically there has been more evolution in the last 10,000 years (most of this in the last 5000 years) than in the preceding 500,000. This is tied to the change in environment (hunter-gather to agriculture) and the expansion in the population size.
An accessible book on this topic is the 10,000 Year Explosion [0]. It is a little dated (it is before all the amazing data that has come from sequencing ancient homo DNA), but what it does have is a very good overview of the topic.
0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Farewell_to_Alms