"America may appear an exception, but in fact it proves this rule. Its federal structure has always allowed experiment. Far from being a monolithic imperium, the states were for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a laboratory of different rules, taxes, policies and habits, with entrepreneurs moving freely to whichever state most suited their project. Recently the federal government has grown stronger, and at the same time many Americans are wondering why the country is not as fleet of foot at innovation as it once was."
Matt Ridley is a journalist, businessman and (somewhat apologetic) Libertarian. He's written for both The Economist and The Wall Street Journal, He's held various posts in private and public institutions within the United Kingdom, he was a staunch Brexit advocate, and has expressed some opposition to climate science. His best known book is probably 2010's The Rational Optimist.
In How Innovation Works Ridley describes various innovations throughout human history, explaining (or at least attempting to explain) how these innovations were less the product of individual genius than the result of ideas and technologies accumulating to the point where they would have surfaced regardless of the individuals involved.
So far so good I suppose, but I notice he carefully avoids certain disciplines. Painting, for instance, or fiction. And saying something like "Someone would have thought up the Theory of Relativity whether or not Einstein was born," requires a lot of explanation, and this author carefully avoids such discussions. Surely the individual counts for something, though in many cases (such as the invention of the light bulb), the role of the individual inventor has been overstated.
After his tour of human innovation the author tries to distill his preceding chapters into a "theory of innovation," or at least highlight characteristics of cultures that are innovative as opposed to cultures that aren't. This, for me, was where the wheels came off the bus, primarily because for almost every example given I could think of a counter-example. Generalizing over the "innovativeness" of societies is also a little too easy to do. Can we state, categorically, that any society is more innovative than any other? And if we could, wouldn't that lead to a kind of cultural chauvinism?
Whatever the case, I don't think Matt Ridley's arguments are that convincing. A lot of it only sounds like common sense until you think it over. There are certainly places where innovation is more welcome than in others, but I don't think the author has really defined what those places are and what makes them conducive to innovation.
Related Entries:
沒有留言:
張貼留言