Eli5: what causes different societies to advance technologically?

Question

Whenever a modern uncontacted tribe is found, it seems curiously consistent that they are barely even agricultural at best-much less even up to pace with most of the world’s society. What makes it so we never seem to discover unheard of industrial societies? They had as much time as anyone else to have come to the same conclusions. What causes one group to be splitting atoms while the other is still using bows and arrows?

In: Other

Answer 1

There are a bunch of factors that determine a culture’s rate of technological development, to the point that whole books are needed to cover all of them. But as I see it, the biggest factor in your example of remote tribes is how globally-connected the society is.

First, there are “network” effects – the idea that if you double a population, you actually quadruple the number of possible relationships between members of that population. If technological advancement is determined by the size of a “network” (the ability to share ideas and technologies), then a country that’s 1% as populated will progress 0.01% as fast. This expands massively if the culture participates in the international community (e.g. has internet access).

Second, there’s the existence of international trade. A small tribe need not invent computers if they can buy them from a nation that already makes them. This also means that they don’t have to spend time reinventing the wheel, and can reach the cutting edge of technology far faster than if they had to redevelop everything from scratch.

The third effect globalization has is from wars being fought. As much as I hate war, most of our modern high-tech luxuries come from one country trying to stay technologically ahead of another country that they’re actively fighting. Occasionally small tribes do go to war with one another, and you’ll see the development of better forms of armor/weaponry during those periods, but it isn’t to the point of “we need to figure out how to shoot down a nuclear ICBM or we’re all dead” unless the wars are being fought on a global level.