The Skeptics Society & Skeptic magazine


SCIENCE SALON # 117

Michael Shermer with Matt Ridley — How Innovation Works: and Why It Flourishes in Freedom

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.

In his new book, How Innovation Works, Matt Ridley argues 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, fertilizer, 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. Shermer and Ridley discuss all this and:

  • why the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is the First Law of Life
  • why the patent/intellectual property rights concept is antithetical to innovation
  • why innovation is so much more important than invention
  • why the Chinese system of innovation works even though it’s government is anti-freedom
  • why musical innovation did not decline with the advent of Napster
  • the difference between scientific discoveries and artistic/musical creations
  • vaccine innovation in the era of COVID-19
  • why innovations are postdictable but not predictable, and
  • how the future may change after this pandemic.

Matt Ridley is the award-winning, bestselling author of several books, including The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves; Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters; and The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature. His books have sold more than one million copies in thirty languages worldwide. He writes regularly for The Times (London) and The Wall Street Journal, and is a member of the House of Lords. He lives in England.

Listen to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, and TuneIn.

Watch or listen now

You play a vital part in our commitment to promoting science and reason. If you enjoy the Science Salon Podcast, please show your support.


THE GREAT COURSES PLUS

Get your free trial today

The Great Courses Plus makes lifelong learning and personal enrichment available to anyone, anywhere. Content-rich, unique courses provide you with a world of knowledge designed to expand your horizons, and deepen your understanding of hundreds of subjects. The Great Courses Plus has helped millions of lifelong learners take their learning to the next level.

Every course is thoroughly researched, extensively examined, and beautifully produced. The Great Courses specializes in crafting customized and entertaining learning journeys that are comprehensive, factual, and fascinating.

Sign up now using my special URL: thegreatcoursesplus.com/salon.

Get unlimited access to engaging and immersive learning experiences when you start a free trial today. Listen or watch on your TV, laptop, tablet, and smartphone. Pause, rewind, fast forward, or re-watch as often as you, and never listen to commercials.

Get your free trial today

Skeptic Magazine App on iPhone

SKEPTIC App

Whether at home or on the go, the SKEPTIC App is the easiest way to read your favorite articles. Within the app, users can purchase the current issue and back issues. Download the app today and get a 30-day free trial subscription.

Download the Skeptic Magazine App for iOS, available on the App Store
Download the Skeptic Magazine App for Android, available on Google Play
Download the Skeptic Magazine App for iOS, available on the App Store
Download the Skeptic Magazine App for Android, available on Google Play
SKEPTIC • 3938 State St., Suite 101, Santa Barbara, CA, 93105-3114 • 1-805-576-9396 • Copyright © 1992–2023. All rights reserved • Privacy Policy