In the past, when societies gorged on innovation, they soon allowed their babies to grow too numerous for their land, reducing the leisure, wealth and market that inventors needed (in effect, the merchant’s sons became struggling peasants again). Or they allowed their bureaucrats to write too many rules, their chiefs to wage too many wars, or their priests to build too many monasteries (in effect, the merchants’ sons became soldiers, sybarites or monks). Or they sank into finance and became parasitic rentiers.
