How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

by Matt Ridley

The EU had by now installed the precautionary principle as a guiding light. This superficially sensible idea – that we should worry about unintended consequences of innovation – morphed into a device by which activists prevent life-saving new technologies displacing more dangerous ones. As formally adopted by the European Union in the Lisbon Treaty, the principle holds the new to a higher standard than the old and is essentially a barrier to all innovations, however safe, on behalf of all existing practices, however dangerous. This is because it considers the potential hazards, but not the likely benefits of an innovation, shifting the burden of proof to an innovator to prove that its product will not cause harm, but not allowing that innovator to demonstrate that it might cause good, or might displace a technology that already causes harm. Thus organic farmers are free to use pesticides so long as they were invented in the first half of the twentieth century, even though the ones they do use, such as copper-based compounds, are significantly more harmful than modern ones – and not even ‘organic’ in any reasonable definition.