I can proclaim myself to be an authority on innovation because I hold 23 US Patents, co-founded two successful electronics companies and co-founded two other intense learning experiences. Having, somewhat ironically, tried to establish my authority solely based on a few bits of evidence, let me suggest that a primary source of innovation is evidence based authority, and a primary stifling mechanism is tradition based authority.
The growth and application of evidence based authority was essential to the Industrial Revolution and its innovations in the 18th and 19th centuries. Evidence based authority came out of the development and spread of the scientific method in the early 17th Century; a method for finding and sifting evidence until a body of evidence established an authoritative principle, process or person which could be relied on thereafter to produce beneficial outcomes. Isaac Newton and successful applications of his work were particularly important to British thinking and helped to stimulate the necessary political innovations which separated economic authority from tradition based political and religious authority and allowed innovation to flourish.
Evidence based authority was universally seen as a threat by tradition based authorities and was quickly throttled in countries where traditions were strong and under tight control of a tiny elite such as Italy. This is probably a key reason why the Industrial Revolution, the flowering of innovation, never occurred in China or Spain.
The first successful separation of politics, religion and economics surfaced in Holland early in the 17th century and then in England in 1688 with the ascent of William of Orange (who migrated to England from Holland in a bloodless overthrow of James II) to the British throne with the support of a propertied Parliament. That Parliament made it clear that they held the purse strings, which he and all future kings accepted one way or another. It ended the tradition based rule by British kings and queens who combined in their person absolute political, religious and economic authority. (However, it didn’t end the random quality of royal succession by inheritance.) That decision making bottleneck had stifled England’s development with perpetual religious and political wars. The 1200 propertied families who effectively controlled Parliament until about 1850 used the purse strings (and creation of an ongoing national debt brokered by its banking system) to subordinate Kings’ execution of politics and the Church of England’s exercise of religious authority.
Innovation was usually encouraged because it created new wealth and new forms of “property” (corporations, stocks, intellectual property, etc.) which substantially increased the wealth of the 1200, spread the wealth, further decentralized authority on the basis of an evidence of competitive advantage, broadened the base of the political system and gave England advantage over France. It also destroyed old religious and cultural values and craft skills; a dark side of innovation which we tend to sweep under the rug as did the elite and most of the successful entrepreneurs. With the growth of the propertied class went a growth in the group that voted for Parliament.
Evidence based and professionally trained police forces and judicial systems eventually replaced those based on tradition and class. In specific but ever expanding areas, evidence based education became the norm. Of course the decisions of tradition based authority still trumped most of the time, as they do today, but there were enough innovative victories to produce the Industrial Revolution and a blossoming belief in the superiority of evidence based authority ; a belief from which we benefitted mightily in developing our Constitutional rights and separation of powers.
Authority, tradition and evidence are all essential to workable societies; authority enables decisions to be made and acted upon in a timely manner, tradition fosters stability and predictability and simplifies decision making while evidence is messy, decentralized and often drives change. However, there is a human tendency to favor stability and predictability which produces gravity like forces to centralize everything and to have tradition always trump evidence, usually by suppressing both the evidence and those who present it. (The sex-abuse crimes, co-conspiracies and cover-ups in the Roman Catholic Church is a typical example.) It makes things easier to run and less risky to support. It is the default structure for human society from which a few countries temporarily emerged when they participated in the Industrial Revolution.
Tradition enables people to select their leaders and make decisions without much thought or personal effort, and for leaders to manage based on traditional choices and their gut instincts which followers follow because they believe it leaves them blameless (not personally accountable) and the results are predictable. However, when tradition conflicts with evidence, adherents to tradition actively work to stifle innovation and innovative people because they threaten to change the system itself. To change a system while managing it is akin to modifying and rebuilding a car while driving it at 70mph on a crowded freeway. The possible consequences seem too scary for the leaders, and frankly they don’t appeal to the vast majority of their followers.
What kills innovation are things like dumbing down America by increasing class sizes and putting college out of reach of the middle class, reverting to religion over science, creating authority based rather than evidence based textbooks in Texas, supporting systems that are too big to fail, and centralizing wealth and its inheritance into the hands of fewer and fewer people. They are all part and parcel of a migration to tradition based authority and centralization. So too are the seniority system in Congress and the tribal process for selecting leaders of large corporations.
I am not optimistic about our future innovativeness as a nation, nor our willingness to maintain a separation of church, state and business. (The Supreme Court majority, in its Citizens United decision shows itself particularly oblivious to this point. See Supreme Court may strangle our democracy ) There is nothing magical about either objective. Each requires constant re-evaluation of old evidence in light of new evidence, enthusiastically embracing uncertainty by taking risks and failing more often, and celebrating failure as well as success. That process enabled Einstein to improve on Newton and later for Bohr and Heisenberg to improve on Einstein.
The default condition of centralized, tradition based leadership which dominates history, will only support a tiny fraction of today’s human population and most of that remnant will endure lives of quiet desperation serving an entitled, anti-innovative few.
Other Related Posts:
First Law: Embrace Uncertainty!
Economic over-centralization driven by tactics and weak executives!
“Too Big to Fail” is Un-American
Edwin Lee
edwinlee@znet.com
Web page: http:// www.elew.com
Might I suggest Britian supressed innovation on purpose?They like their class system and its alive and well,dont kid yourself.A few may make it through but on whole they like keeping the power intact and any threat to that is eliminated.
Conservatives dont lie countries into war for profit.
Conseravtives dont cut taxes and start wars.
Conservatives dont allow mortgage companies to get away with massive fraud and irresponsible lending.
Conservatives dont allow international banks to destroy world economies.
Oh I forgot they do.
“From Henry Carey’s Harmony of Interests, 1851
Henry C. Carey, adviser to Abraham Lincoln, and perhaps the leading American System economist, wrote extensively exposing the failure of the British free trade approach and demonstrating the success of the American System.
“One looks to underworking the Hindoo, and sinking the rest of the world to his level; the other to raising the standard of man throughout the world to our level. One looks to pauperism, ignorance, depopulation, and barbarism; the other in increasing wealth, comfort, intelligence, combination of action, and civilization. One looks towards universal war; the other towards universal peace. One is the English system; the other we may be proud to call the American system, for it is the only one ever devised the tendency of which was that of elevating while equalizing the condition of man throughout the world. ” almanac.tripod.com/carey95.htmrey95.htm – Cached
Which system do you think we are living under?
Which system are conservatives for? I think I know and I dont like it.
Republicans created ZERO jobs the last decade..ZERO!! And the jobs we had were fueled by credit and low interest rates.The best ideas dont win…ask Henry Ford he planned to run his cars on ethonol and hemp..till oil companies took over.And you think microsoft is the best system?..Also we had the EVI1 electric car how many years ago?They killed it and planned to build it in china.Thats why they went bancrupt in the U.S.
So ask yourself how do we get to a place where monied interests dont monopolize great ideas and kill them.
shivasquest:
I sense your anger and frustration and share some of it. However, I’ll confine myself to two points you raise: Britain suppressing innovation and how do we get to a place where monied interest don’t monopolize great ideas and kill them.
The British Parliament, controlled by 1200 families from 1688 until about 1850, had a policy of controlling the spread of innovation and in controlling their “free markets”, which were actually but a tiny fraction of overall commerce. Corn laws (all grains) protected domestic markets from cheap imports, other laws protected finished goods and established monopolies in various industries. They deliberately set out to keep the North American Colonies agrarian, supplying Britain cheap food, cotton and tobacco in exchange for finished goods at rates controlled by Britain. They prevented the development of domestic banks in the colonies and any migration of technical people to the colonies. The spread of education, new forms of property (intellectual property in particular) and global trade enabled our revolution in 1776 and by 1850 broke their domestic stranglehold on membership in Parliament.
How do we prevent a return to oligarchical rule based on inherited wealth? or even worse then proceeding to Dictatorship based on inherited power? First, I think the last scenario is the default condition of all societies (look around the world and back into history), just as the default condition of a building is to eventually be a pile of rubble. The industrial revolution is a blip of organized activity that built the mental and physical infrastructure of our modern economic system. But we are drawn to that default condition by gravitylike forces, not by conspiracies….. which makes it all the more difficult to resist. The short answer is to effectively tax wealth sufficient to balance government budgets, rather than merely taxing income. That answer, without lots of systematic explanation will cause such emotional reactions as to be useless, but it is a very considered statement which I will explain in time.
A hint as to what I’m suggesting can be found by looking at the income tax rates from the 1930s until the early 1970s when the tax rate on incomes over $250,000 was around 90%. It didn’t tax wealth, but it severly slowed the flow of wealth into the hands of the top 0.01% (1 in 10,000) of our population, and it balanced government budgets after WWII. Of course, with time people learned how to game this system with tax loopholes, and later by focusing on how “unfair” a graduated income tax was and lower the taxes on the upper brackets. However, as the tax rates were lowered, it became ever more profitable for CEOs and other hired hands in businesses to fatten their paychecks and take money out. As tax rates went down, salaries and bonuses for executives skyrocketed from 3-4 times median incomes of employees to hundreds of times. (First, I would simply implement a 90% tax on all incomes over $3 million per year… whether salaries, bonuses or capital gains. No loopholes. This bandaid would stop the bleeding… the top 1 in 10,000 people in 2007 received over 6% of all incomes including salaries, bonuses and capital gains. At that rate it will only be a decade before this elite accumulates over 40% of all this nation’s private property!)
A second bandaid would be to re-institute and increase inheritance taxes… up to 70% on wealth over $10 million. I have little concern about those who “earn” wealth managing it, but to have the next generation manage it strictly on biological inheritance means that the average competence in managing wealth will drop, thereby further undermining the system as a whole.
The complete answer is too long for now, but this is just to provide a glimpse of a much larger problem and a much more comprehensive solution.
Ed Lee