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Imperial China, too, sent strong signals of discouragement to anybody whose inventiveness challenged the status quo.
Delve beneath the statistical surface though, and the picture changes. Far from being able to spend their way into novelty and growth, companies are perpetually discovering that their R&D budgets get captured by increasingly defensive and complacent corporate bureaucrats, who spend them on low-risk, dull projects and fail to notice gigantic new opportunities, which thereby turn into threats.
The great innovators are still usually outsiders.
The pioneer venture capitalist Georges Doriot said that the most dangerous moment in the life of a company was when it had succeeded, for then it stopped innovating.
Money is certainly important in driving innovation, but it is by no means paramount.
Even in the most entrepreneurial of economies, very little saving finds its way to innovators.
Today, plenty of money is wasted on research that does not develop, and plenty of discoveries are made without the application of much money.
so surely nobody will invest time and effort in developing a new tool or building a new kind of organisation if he cannot keep at least some of the rewards for himself.
Yet intellectual property is very different from real property, because it is useless if you keep it to yourself.
There are several ways to turn ideas into property. You can keep the recipe secret, as John Pemberton did for Coca-Cola in 1886.
Or, second, you can capture the first-mover advantage, as Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart,
Intel’s dominance of the microchip industry, and 3M’s of the diversified technology industry, were based not on protecting their inventions so much as on improving them faster than everyone else.
The way to keep your customers, if you are Michael Dell, Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, is to keep making your own products obsolete.
The third way to profit from invention is a patent, a copyright or a trademark.
Yet there is little evidence that patents are really what drive inventors to invent.
Most innovations are never patented.
Today, the biggest generators of new patents in the US system are ‘patent trolls’ – firms that buy up weak patent applications with no intention of making the products in question, but with every intention of making money by suing those who infringe them.
In one survey of 650 R&D executives from 130 different industries, only those in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries judged patents to be effective at stimulating innovation.
Intellectual property is an important ingredient of innovation, when innovation is happening, but it does very little to explain why some times and places are more innovative than others.
So although government can pay people to stumble upon new technologies – satnav and the internet were by-products of other projects – it is hardly the source of most innovation.
It is the ever-increasing exchange of ideas that causes the ever-increasing rate of innovation in the modern world.
And the one activity that got much easier to do after about 1800, and has got dramatically easier recently, is sharing.
Travel and communication disseminated information much faster and much further.
The secret of the modern world is its gigantic interconnectedness.
Ideas are having sex with other ideas from all over the planet with ever-increasing promiscuity.
Technologies emerge from the coming together of existing technologies into wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts.
The history of the modern world is a history of ideas meeting, mixing, mating and mutating. And the reason that economic growth has accelerated so in the past two centuries is down to the fact that ideas have been mixing more than ever before.
In other words, we may soon be living in a post-capitalist, post-corporate world, where individuals are free to come together in temporary aggregations to share, collaborate and innovate, where websites enable people to find employers, employees, customers and clients anywhere in the world.
The world is turning bottom-up again; the top-down years are coming to an end.
But so long as it can hop from country to country and from industry to industry, discovery is a fast-breeder chain reaction; innovation is a feedback loop; invention is a self-fulfilling prophecy. So equilibrium and stagnation are not only avoidable in a free-exchanging world; they are impossible.
Throughout history, though living standards might rise and fall, though population might boom and crash, knowledge was one thing that has showed inexorable upward progress.
The wonderful thing about knowledge is that it is genuinely limitless.
There is not even a theoretical possibility of exhausting the supply of ideas, discoveries and inventions. This is the biggest cause of all for my optimism.
The real danger comes from slowing down change.
is my proposition that the human race has become a collective problem-solving machine and it solves problems by changing its ways.
does so through invention driven often by the market: scarcity drives up price; that encourages the development of ...
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Despite the wars, in the half-century to 1950, the longevity, wealth and health of Europeans improved faster than ever before.
Yet surveys consistently reveal individuals to be personally optimistic yet socially pessimistic.
About the future of society and the human race people are naturally gloomy.
people much more viscerally dislike losing a sum of money than they like winning the same sum
And it seems that pessimism genes might quite literally be commoner than optimism genes:
But pessimism is not without its cost. If you teach children that things can only get worse, they will do less to make it untrue.
concluded that age-adjusted cancer rates were falling, that cancer is caused chiefly by cigarette smoke, infection, hormonal imbalance and unbalanced diet – and that chemical pollution causes less than 2 per cent of all cases of cancer. The premise on which much of the environmental movement had grown up – that cleaning up pollution would prevent cancer – proved false.
So Africa faces an especially stark dilemma: get rich by burning more carbon and then suffer the climate consequences; or join the rest of the world in taking action against climate change and continue to wallow in poverty.
That is the conventional wisdom. I think it is a false dilemma and that an honest appraisal of the facts leads to the conclusion that by far the most likely outcome of the next nine decades is both that Africa gets rich and that no catastrophic climate change happens.
Not only has Africa failed to join Asia’s boom since 1990, it has spent much of the time stagnant or going backwards. Between 1980 and 2000, the number of Africans living in poverty doubled.
War in the west of the continent, genocide in the east, AIDS in the south, hunger in the north, dictators in the middle, population growth all over: no part of the continent has escaped the horror.
Aid can save lives, reduce hunger, deliver a medicine, a mosquito net, a meal or a metalled road. But statistics, anecdotes and case histories all demonstrate that the one thing aid cannot reliably do is to start or accelerate economic growth.
They could find no evidence that aid resulted in growth in any countries. Ever.
Many African countries are more or less landlocked, which cuts them off from world trade. They have poor and deteriorating roads linking distant cities. They have exploding birth rates. They suffer from epidemic malaria, AIDS and other diseases such as sleeping sickness and guinea worm. Their institutions have never fully recovered from the disruptions caused by the slave trade.
