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.
