The 'entry fee' to become a world leader in tech is getting so expensive that no new countries might ever be able to join the club.
March 30, 2026
Original Paper
Industrial System Depth and the Geography of Technological Leadership
SSRN · 6487436
The Takeaway
This paper proposes the 'Scale Threshold Hypothesis,' arguing that each technological revolution requires a more massive, vertically integrated industrial stack to maintain. This explains why, despite centuries of knowledge spreading, the same small group of countries continues to dominate global technology leadership.
From the abstract
Why does full-spectrum technological autonomy---the capacity to independently sustain frontier technologies across the complete industrial stack---concentrate in a small set of countries, even as niche leadership has become more distributed? This paper develops three interconnected constructs. Industrial System Depth (ISD) measures the degree to which a national economy possesses vertically integrated productive capabilities spanning four hierarchically ordered layers: materials and components,