Ridley, Simon, Population, and Innovation
Matt Ridley ends his excellent Julian Simon Award Lecture with a criticism:
Having paid homage to Julian Simon’s ideas, let me end by disagreeing with him on one thing. At least I think I am disagreeing with him, but I may be wrong. He made the argument, which was extraordinary and repulsive to me when I first heard it as a young and orthodox eco-pessimist, that the more people in the world, the more invention…
Now there is a version of this argument that – for some peculiar reason – is very popular among academics, namely that the more people there are, the greater the chance that one of them will be a genius, a scientific or technological Messiah.
Occasionally, Julian Simon sounds like he is in this camp. And if he were here today, — and by Zeus, I wish he were – I would try to persuade him that this is not the point, that what counts is not how many people there are but how well they are communicating.
A strange claim. Isn’t the correct position clearly that both population and communication matter? A two-person world linked by Skype wouldn’t be very creative. Neither would a world of a trillion people in solitary confinement. Creativity requires minds to generate ideas, and mouths to share them.
Ridley continues:
I would tell him about the new evidence from Paleolithic Tasmania, from Mesolithic Europe from the Neolithic Pacific, and from the internet today, that it’s trade and exchange that breeds innovation, through the meeting and mating of ideas. That the lonely inspired genius is a myth, promulgated by Nobel prizes and the patent system.
The importance of rare geniuses is an interesting question for discussion. But who ever even hinted that lonely geniuses are the crucial ingredient?
This means that stupid people are just as important as clever ones…
This is frankly an absurd leap. Geniuses are overrated? Maybe. Stupid people are “just as important” for progress as clever ones? Come on. Question for Ridley: Who’s the most creative person alive with an IQ under 100? Under 80?
…that the collective intelligence that gives us incredible improvements in living standards depends on people’s ideas meeting and mating, more than on how many people there are.
If “meeting and mating” are so important, doesn’t that suggest that creativity will be more than proportional to population? If so, isn’t population even more important than it seems?
That’s why a little country like Athens or Genoa or Holland can suddenly lead the world.
Can? Sure. But is it typical for little countries to lead the world in innovation? Hardly.
The post appeared first on Econlib.
When I think of a lone genius, I usually think of a lone scientist or engineer working in a lab to create or discover something, but the lab usually has a ton of reference books. The lone genius is still communicating with other people, they are just doing it by text instead of face-to-face.
On communication: coincidentally I've got an article coming out tomorrow on Open Office plans and the difficulties encountered by the Return To Office efforts. Open offices (and cublcles before them) are a misguided attempt to foster creativity. Supposedly these chance encounters are what really leads to innovation, and therefore getting people all in one big space will magically produce more of it!
Rubbish. The "lonely genius" might be a myth, but that's because he or she knows when to socialize and when to be alone and think. Forcing them to be "open" all the time is something that only extroverts who never had an original thought in their lives would believe in.