It takes more than prosperity for innovation to happen. It takes a combination of factors that nobody really understands.
I don’t know about that. People have been discussing how does an innovation hub (like Silicon Valley) appear and how one might create one—that is a difficult problem, partially because starting a virtuous circle is hard.
But general innovation in a society? Lemme throw in some factors off the top of my mind:
Low barriers to entry (to experimentation, to starting up businesses, etc.). That includes a permissive legal environment and a light regulatory hand.
A properly Darwinian environment where you live or die (quickly) by market success and not by whether you managed to bribe the right bureaucrat.
Relatively low stigma attached to failure
Sufficient numbers of high-IQ people who are secure enough to take risks
Enough money floating around to fund high-risk ventures
For basic science, enough money coupled with the willingness to throw it at very high-IQ people and say “Make something interesting with it”
That’s a partial list. It also takes good universities, a culture that produces a willingness to take risks, a sufficient market for good products, and I suspect a litany of other things.
I think once you’ve got a society that genuinely innovates started, it can be hard to kill that off, but it can be and has been done. The problem is, as you mentioned, very few societies have ever been particularly innovative.
It’s easy to use established technology to build a very prosperous first world society. For example: Australia, Canada, Sweden. But it’s much harder for a society to genuinely drive humanity forwards and in the history of humanity it has only happened a few times. We forget that for a very long time, very little invention happened in human society anywhere.
very few societies have ever been particularly innovative
This implies that there are good reasons for it. You can look at it in the exploit/explore framework and going full explore is rarely a good choice. Notably, betting on innovation produces a large variance of outcomes and you need to be sure you can survive that variance.
The Mojave Spaceport private space project is coming together, with lots of innovation and high-tech machine tooling driving a small seed of development, and that could enable lots of support and design help for the high profile private space projects.
I don’t know about that. People have been discussing how does an innovation hub (like Silicon Valley) appear and how one might create one—that is a difficult problem, partially because starting a virtuous circle is hard.
But general innovation in a society? Lemme throw in some factors off the top of my mind:
Low barriers to entry (to experimentation, to starting up businesses, etc.). That includes a permissive legal environment and a light regulatory hand.
A properly Darwinian environment where you live or die (quickly) by market success and not by whether you managed to bribe the right bureaucrat.
Relatively low stigma attached to failure
Sufficient numbers of high-IQ people who are secure enough to take risks
Enough money floating around to fund high-risk ventures
For basic science, enough money coupled with the willingness to throw it at very high-IQ people and say “Make something interesting with it”
That’s a partial list. It also takes good universities, a culture that produces a willingness to take risks, a sufficient market for good products, and I suspect a litany of other things.
I think once you’ve got a society that genuinely innovates started, it can be hard to kill that off, but it can be and has been done. The problem is, as you mentioned, very few societies have ever been particularly innovative.
It’s easy to use established technology to build a very prosperous first world society. For example: Australia, Canada, Sweden. But it’s much harder for a society to genuinely drive humanity forwards and in the history of humanity it has only happened a few times. We forget that for a very long time, very little invention happened in human society anywhere.
Yes, of course.
This implies that there are good reasons for it. You can look at it in the exploit/explore framework and going full explore is rarely a good choice. Notably, betting on innovation produces a large variance of outcomes and you need to be sure you can survive that variance.
yes, to those.
The Mojave Spaceport private space project is coming together, with lots of innovation and high-tech machine tooling driving a small seed of development, and that could enable lots of support and design help for the high profile private space projects.