Building on his national bestseller The Rational Optimist, Matt
Ridley chronicles the history of innovation, and how we need to change
our thinking on the subject.
Innovation is the main event of the modern age, the reason we experience
both dramatic improvements in our living standards and unsettling
changes in our society. Forget short-term symptoms like Donald Trump and
Brexit, it is innovation itself that explains them and that will itself
shape the 21st century for good and ill. Yet innovation remains a
mysterious process, poorly understood by policy makers and businessmen,
hard to summon into existence to order, yet inevitable and inexorable
when it does happen.
Matt Ridley argues in this book that we need to change the way we think
about innovation, to see it as an incremental, bottom-up, fortuitous
process that happens to society as a direct result of the human habit of
exchange, rather than an orderly, top-down process developing according
to a plan. Innovation is crucially different from invention, because it
is the turning of inventions into things of practical and affordable use
to people. It speeds up in some sectors and slows down in others. It is
always a collective, collaborative phenomenon, not a matter of lonely
genius. It is gradual, serendipitous, recombinant, inexorable,
contagious, experimental and unpredictable. It happens mainly in just a
few parts of the world at any one time. It still cannot be modelled
properly by economists, but it can easily be discouraged by politicians.
Far from there being too much innovation, we may be on the brink of an
innovation famine.
Ridley derives these and other lessons, not with abstract argument, but
from telling the lively stories of scores of innovations, how they
started and why they succeeded or in some cases failed. He goes back
millions of years and leaps forward into the near future. Some of the
innovation stories he tells are about steam engines, jet engines, search
engines, airships, coffee, potatoes, vaping, vaccines, cuisine,
antibiotics, mosquito nets, turbines, propellers, fertiliser, zero,
computers, dogs, farming, fire, genetic engineering, gene editing,
container shipping, railways, cars, safety rules, wheeled suitcases,
mobile phones, corrugated iron, powered flight, chlorinated water,
toilets, vacuum cleaners, shale gas, the telegraph, radio, social media,
block chain, the sharing economy, artificial intelligence, fake bomb
detectors, phantom games consoles, fraudulent blood tests, faddish
diets, hyperloop tubes, herbicides, copyright and even--a biological
innovation--life itself.
