How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom by Matt Ridley
BOOK REVIEWS BY BINOD
BINOD’S RATING: 7.5/10
I normally limit my takeaways to 10 or max 20 but this book is simply bursting with insights.
My top 25 takeaways:
1. The first controlled conversion of heat to work is a key breakthrough that fueled the Industrial Revolution.
2. Before the last two centuries a person could live his whole life without once experiencing a new technology: carts, ploughs, axes, candles and corn looked the same when you died as when you were born.
3. Most innovation is a gradual process. The modern obsession with disruptive innovation is misleading.
4. Throughout history, technologies and invention have been deployed successfully without scientific understanding of why they work.
5. In the early years of computers, mobile phones and many other innovations, the inventors thought they were developing a luxury good for the upper-middle classes.
6. Innovation flourishes in wealthy, growing and well-connected places at a time of peace and relative prosperity.
7. Dense populations inevitably spur human technological change, because they create the conditions in which people can specialize.
8. Intellectual property is now a hindrance not a help to modern innovation.
9. The myth of the lonely inventor is hard to shake. Innovation is a collective phenomenon that happens between, not within, brains.
10.Cooking predigests food. It doubles the digestible energy of starches. Cooking allowed for natural selection to favor individuals with smaller guts and larger brains.
11.Low-tech innovations like safety checklists and crew member cross-checks are powerful ways to make significant improvements.
12. It was synthetic fertilizer that enabled Europe, the Americas, China, and India to escape mass starvation.
13. Technology is absurdly predictable in retrospect, wholly unpredictable in prospect.
14.In Europe, modern numerals, arithmetic and zero made mathematics more practical than Roman numerals. Arabic numerals have their origins in India.
15. People tend to overestimate the impact of a new technology in the short run, but to underestimate it in the long run.
16. It is the people who find ways to drive down the costs and simplify the product who make the biggest difference.
17. Every technology is a combination of other technologies.
18. Empires are bad at innovation.
19. Throughout the 19th century, as Europe developed new railways, steel, electricity, textiles etc, government played almost no role at all except as a belated regulator, standards creator or customer.
20. Italy’s most fertile inventive period was in the Renaissance, when it was the small city states that drove innovation: in Genoa, Florence, Venice, Luca, Siena and Milan. Fragmented polities proved better than united ones.
21. For at least a thousand years, innovation has disproportionately happened in cities
22. In Western countries, much of the inequality that exists—though not all—is about luxuries, rather than necessities.
23. Indefinite growth is possible for a simple reason: growth can take place through doing more with less
24. The government made the development of cellular service impossible for almost four decades. We use smartphones today not because of government regulators, but despite them.
25. The West may still do clever new things in finance, science, the arts and philanthropy, but it is slowing down in innovating the products and the processes that affect everyday life. Bureaucracy and superstition get in the way of anybody who tries.