How Innovation Works

And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

Matt Ridley 2020 Beaverton Library 303.483 RID . . . Ridley website

This book doesn't footnote sources - which fact comes from which paper or book? Mant of the people who should learn from Ridley will reject him for ideological reasons, and some of his sources may inform those opponents while bypassing their ideological reflexes.

The usual story of innovation is The Great Inventor Working Alone. Ridley shows that most invention is incremental, a series of quick improvements by many technicians, either collaborating or competing. The Great Inventor myth is the justification for patents and monopoly, designed to hinder competition and maximize monopoly rents rather than rate of improvement.

• p4 global freefall of extreme poverty, from 50% in the late 1950s to 9% today. Deirdre McCloskey attributes this to "innovationism"

• p6 1917 inventor Otto Frederick Rohwedder and baker Frank Bench in Chillocothe: sliced and packaged bread.

• p9 "disruptive innovation" is misleading, most is gradual, overestimated in the short run and underestimated in the long run.
• p10 William Petty 1662 "Few new inventions were ever rewarded by a monopoly
• p13 Steam engines, incremental: Newcomen, Papin, Savery
• p27 Edison (and 20 others) independently invented the light bulb. Edison invented the whole systems (wires and generators) that made it semi-practical, though he resisted Tesla's AC invention, which made it scalable.
• p31 Shuji Nakamura and the GaN blue LED in 1993
• p37 1990 Bernard Cohen argued that nuclear power was stopped by regulation, not accidents and waste

• p38 Thorium reactors better? article IAEA

• p43 Shale gas
• p50 Ch2 Public health, variolization, vaccination, chlorination, penicillin, Salk/Sabin polio
• p80 Ch3 Trevethick Stephenson locomotive, Ericsson screw propeller, Otto/Benz internal combustion, Wrights
• p103 Smithsonian 1914 modified Langley's aerodrome so it could fly, and they could pretend it was first capable flier.
• p104 Jet engine: Whittle, Guillaume, German Ohain
• p107 1970 to 2020; ten times more miles, 10 times fewer fatalities ... 59 per trillion passenger-kilometers

• p128 Gluconacetobacter dizotrophicus bacteria fixes nitrogen in ordinary plants (developed by Nottingham University professor Ted Cocking, formed Azotic Technologies company with David Dent in 2018 ,p134 1970 W&P Paddock Famine 1975! abandon India

• p135 1970 Norman Borlaug Nobel Peace Prize 1970 for doubling India's wheat production (fertilizer plus dwarf varieties)

• p136 farmer suicides fake news, farmers less likely to commit suicide than average Indians mostly due to health problems not indebtedness

• p139 Genemod Bt, nitrogen fixing ... David R. Dent Fixed on Nitrogen

• p150 1202ad Leonardo of Pisa, Fibonacci, in Bugia North Africa: 9-1 indian figures plus Arabic 0 zephirum
• p155 1775ad S-bend water trap in toilets, Alexander Cumming, simplified by Joseph Bramah in 1778
• p159 Corrugated iron 1829

• p164 1956-9 cargo container Malcom McLean (also leveraged buyout), 1965 Sea-Land, 1986 bankrupt, died 2001 age 87

• p170 1970 Bernard Sadow rolling luggage patent granted 1972 - many anticipatory patents back to 1925
• p178-215 telegraph to AI
• p218 end of Ice Age 12Kya, climate varies less, agriculture emerges many places, CO2 190ppm, 30% yield for rice and wheat
• p223 40Kya dogs diverged from wolves, 20Kya euro/asia split, p225 Belyaev domesticated foxes
• p235 cooking predigests food, more nutrients, less metabolic energy
  • less room for guts, more room for birth canal and larger brain?
• p240 Innovation is incremental (gradual) and reduces cost and complexity

• p246 Joseph Schumpeter "Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy" 1942:

  • Electric Lighting is no great boon to anyone who has money enough to buy a sufficient number of candles and to pay servants to attend to them. It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabric, boots, motorcars, and so on that are the typical achievements of capital production, and not as a rule improvements that would mean much to the rich man. Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing silk stockings for queens, but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort.
• p247 Serendipity, Teflon, Kevlar, postits
• p250 Innovation is recombinant, involves trial and error (p253), team sport (p255), inexorable (p257)
• p260 Ballmer: no chance for !iPhone. Hjalmar Söderberg "you have to be an expert in order to not understand certain things"
• p260 Krugman 1998 "by 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy will have been no greater than the fax machine's."
• p260 1950s Asimov and Heinlein, moon colonies and interplanetary travel
• p261 Roy Amara's law, overestimate new tech in the short term, underestimate in the long term
• p265 Empires stifle innovation
• p268 most "growth" is actually shinkage; more with less. By 205, US using 15% less steel, 32% less aluminum, 40% less copper, 25% less farm fertilizer, 22% less farm water, 2% less energy.
• p269 Aluminum can from 85 grams in 1959 to 13 grams today
• p272 Schumpeter: increasing returns potentially infinite, 1957 Robert Solow 85% of growth from innovation, not inputs

• p275 Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State ... wrong for railroads

• p276 wrong before 1940 US - makes case for wrong after. Not clear, innovation is a patchwork
• p289 Innovation ≠ unemployment, instead job change.

• p291 Frey&Osborne 2013, 47% jobs at risk of automation in a decade or two, OECD revised to 9% (no obvious cite or timescale)

• p294 Kodak researcher Steven Sasson, 1975 electronic camera

• p297 GNU Linux
• p300 Fakes Frauds Fads and Failures: bomb detectors, Theranos, Nokia
• p313 1800 George Medhurst "Aeolian engine", 1865 London Pneumatic Dispatch, 1870 Alfred Ely Beach under Manhattan street, 1910 Goddard maglev from Boston to New York
• p316 Hyperloop, 5000 passengers per hour, 28 passengers per pod, three per minute
• p322 A high appetite for failure is crucial

• p327 Calestous Juma Innovation and Its Enemies

• p327 yellow margarine bans ... not in book Maurine Neuberger

• p328 - p335 anti-biotech
• p337 - p340 anti-mobile-phones
• p341 restrictions on drones

• p342 copyright extension 14y → 28y -> 1976 life+50, 1998 life+70 & no need to assert, automatic

• p344 Alex Tabarrok Launching the Innovation Renaissance pdf

• p366 Erixon ands Weigel The Innovation Illusion: How So Little is Created by So Many Working So Hard

• p368 China Innovation ... 72 hour workweeks