Transcripts For CSPAN2 Matt Ridley How Innovation Works 2024

Im just going to read a few sentences i cobbled together from your book. As i lead into my first question. You might in the book innovation is the most important fact of the modern world but one of the least well understood. It is the reason most people today live lives of prosperity and wisdom area and the main ingredient in the secret sauce and indeed innovation is freedom and freedom to exchange, experiments, imagine, investment fail. Liberals have argued since the 18th century that freedom needs prosperity but i would argue that they have never persuasively found a mechanism that drives change in which one causes the other. Innovation is that drives change, that missing link. Innovation is the child of freedom and apparent prosperity. Matt, do you think youve written a contrary and book your in 2020 because there seems to be a growing belief we havent innovated since the apollo space program. Living standards have been stagnant for decades and growth only help the elites, growth kills the climate and innovation comes from mark planners lamenting industrial policycarefully chosen sectors. Is this a contrary and book . It does post your views because i think innovation is a product of free people exchanging ideas freely and that yes, we are experiencing innovation. Although i do argue toward the end of the book that we are experiencing something of an innovation farming in the western world. There are areas that we have not been able to get enough innovation going in recently and the pandemic is rather reminded us of that and we havent been able to innovate in diagnosticdevices as much as we would have liked. I think if you asked these days assuming people think that innovation is good. And im not sure as many people as you see think innovation is good they say when they hear innovation they think of disruption and job loss and maybe a i run wild. But if you think innovation is good and we need more of it, im not sure getting back to my question how many people would say we just need more freedom area i think they would say we need more government , we need a more powerful innovation geared state. To work its magic on the private sector and on science. That seems to be where the energy is right now. I think youre right and i think, this is partly because people always have a sort of topdown view of the world that they think that the world is run by people , they dont think of it as being an organic and spontaneous effects of everybody reacting with each other read assume if something happens because imported it to happen and i very much argue thats not the case in this book read i argue innovation is something that bottles up inexorably and inevitably if you allow people the freedom to experiment and try new ideas. And that you cant as it were stopped, you cant directed and you cant planet but there is definitely a tendency these days to say that we must decide which innovations we want and which innovations are going to get in which innovations were going to subsidize from the public funds and i think that is a dangerous tendency of the history of innovation shows that you cant do that. You cant suddenly make supersonic flight street. There are physical limits to things. And you cant suddenly make low Carbon Economy easily. It might be possible over the long run will come about instantly and yes, we have beeninnovating. As a society, somewhere in the world at any one time and for Goodness Sake if we dont keep doing so, we will find that prosperity dries up pretty fast. I think one reason and im sure you remember that back in the 1980s there was a concern about the United States, about whether japan was going to be the leading economy of the future and people look at how japan, at least how we thought at the time how it fit innovation and that was through more bureaucrats, keyagencies and there were a lot of people back then we said we need to do what they do. Maybe Free Enterprise, that was the way to innovate in the past but now were much smarter and we need to have very smart people making decisions in government. It didnt work out so well, im not sure that was how japan was innovating and today we have a similar situation where were looking at china and its fast growth rate and we hear about huge advances in ai and ideas for the future its going to become the leader in ai and aerospace but Everything Else you canthink of. Now they figure out another model. They seem to be doinggreat. You think thats one reason people are sort of skeptical about the freedom arc but do they have a point . As china figure out a maybe better way to doinnovation . I think youre right, people misread japan in the 1980s. They said this has come about because the ministry of International Trade and industry as singled out sectors which are going to be the future and invested in them and thats why japan is such an innovative country but once you looked under the bonnet of what was happening in japan it wasnt because bureaucrats were telling people what to invest in and what to invent. It was because small firms, big firms, particularly middle sized firms were just going out there and trying new things and were developing new technologies at an extraordinary rate. The same mistake is being made about china today i believe. It is an innovative country and you cant deny that it has not just caught up with the United States in some areas as overtaken it in terms of consumer electronics, Consumer Digital behavior and so on. There are some front of the pack stuff happening in japan. Sorry, in china but to say that thats because its a communist regime with a centrally directed plan to innovate is simply wrong. Because if you look at what happens in china it has a very strong monopolistic and authoritarian political regime. But as long as you dont deny the communist party, below that level theres a huge amount of freedom. It is not directed on what entrepreneurs do and in fact an ordinary entrepreneur in china decides to build a factory to do something new, can do the whole thing in a matter of weeks which would take years in the west to get permission for all the various yurok procedures and regulations so in that sense chinese entrepreneurship is freer. That said, china is getting worse in terms of authoritarianism and it is becoming much more of a regime state and for a while it was drifting towards democracy and that has been reversed and i think you will find that the chinese bureaucrats will think they can direct and control exactly whats happened in innovation and if they do try that, they will kill the goose that lays the golden eggs and just like japan people will no longer be at the front of the pack for long so i wouldnt bet on china being the lead innovative country in the world for very long unless it can democratize and liberate itsregime. You think this is an ongoing debate whether china can over the long term the and innovative entrepreneurial state without being much freer . Right now it looks like theyve managed to do both. Theyve managed to be an authoritarian country with one Political Party and also be highly innovative. You think that is not sustainable . Theyre either going to become less innovative or they want to be innovative and they will have to move slowly toward being a freer more open democratic nation . In the long run i think thats right red china may pull the trigger off for a while yet it is simply, given the role that freedom plays in innovation as i argue, the ability of theentrepreneur to change his mind, to change direction. Two suddenly try one thing and then another. To do a lot of trial and error and make a lot of mistakes and an end tocome up with something new and impressive will change the world. Given the importance i feel in the long run it is not compatible with a regime that tries to control things from above and china has been here before and in the song industry was the most innovative place in the world and it was responsible for a series of extraordinary innovation. Printing and all those kinds of things and these came about because the song dynasty was not a very centralized regime. It was a fragmented regime in which there was a lot of local autonomy and there was a lot of freedom and then the mongols invaded and after that came the ming empire and the ming work quite the opposite of the song, they wanted centralized control of everything. A literally controlled where you could travel and they needed a report from every merchant on how much stock he held in his warehouse. At regular intervals. The mandarins. This was a recipe for killing innovation and sure enough, china into lack of innovation and eventually extreme poverty over the next few centuries. So the lesson there is that if you run an authoritarian regime and it gets more and more intrusive into the life of ordinary small businessman , then you will stop innovation. Its quite easy to do. I wonder if we worry to much about china being a leading technological power, that having an authoritarian country the technological frontier, if those are just two things are sustainable and i worry that we are so worried about it we figure maybe they figured out a different model and thats what we have to follow an already the United States theres more and more talk about industrial policy and we need to be picking this. Everybody knows ai is the future so we need to invest in a lot of ai and Everybody Knows biotech futures, we have to invest in biotech and i wonder if thats the question is not a lot of confidence in that space that freedom and Free Enterprise are ultimately the best path to being and staying and pushing forward that frontier. The government even in the us has a very poor track record of picking winners. Its not often as good as losers that picking the government to help them and if you go back to the 80s when the war wasabout japan all the emphasis was on having a policy or semiconductor manufacturing. For memory manufacturing in particular. This was going to be absolutely vital to have a strategic interest in giving memorymanufacturing onshore. They completely missed the fact that memory chips were turning into a commodity and the action was moving to microprocessors and eventually to software. And if you go back even further, go back to 1903 the Us Government poured an enormous amount of money for the time into a project to develop the first airplane. And it was a guy called Daniel Langley was head of the smithsonian and a distinguished astronomer and he went off in secret and built an enormous machine was likely into that first attempt and he didnt test but parts of the machine and he didnt talk to other people and it flopped straight into the potomac when it was launched. And there was a humiliation for the Us Government 10 days later on an island off north carolina, to bicycle mechanics from dayton ohio who had done it completely differently. They tested all the components separately again and again in gliders and kites and other devices. They talk to as many people as they could aroundthe world. A drawn on what birds do. They use windtunnel experiments and they share their ideas with as many people as possible. But in front of no crowd at all, they got an airplane into the air and for about five years no one believed them and they went to the Us Government and said we can give you a fantastic Technology Use in the military and the government said weve been there, we birds are fingers with mister langley so the governments record in this area is not great. People site internet coming out of darpa and there is some truth in the Internet Provider even in darpa it relied on a lot of privatesector input and even when it came out of dark into the outside world needed to go through a huge amount of innovation and development determines what we have now. Its getting darpa credit for the internet is like getting abeaver the credit for the hoover dam. You mentioned earlier that towards the end of the book you talk about this innovation famine, innovation desert. At least perceived to have been the case since 1970. At least if you look at government statistics, theres this downshift in productivity growth which is related to innovation in the early 1970s and it never really rebounded other than for the late 1990s early 2000 in the United States we look at all the productivity numbers. We didnt see what we saw in the 1950s and 1960s. The very highly debated still the question, what you think happened . Not just in the us but across the advanced economy we saw this downshift in productivity which perhaps Robert Gordon has written about famously in his book the end of american growth. What do you thinkhappened there activity downshifted and never really came back. I dont think its quite that bad. I hesitate to get into an argument about the statistics but i think when you take into account the sizes of all these kinds of things and you correct for that there is still a productivity improvement there. But youre right, there isnt as much as onewould expect. Weve had a tranny of enormous innovation, talking about most of my lifetime there and weve gone from paper to computers and telephones to mobile phones. Theres been an expert amount of innovation that period but as peter feel put it once, we wanted flying cars and we got 140 characters. In other words, most of the innovation has ended up being digital its been ended up being rather than atoms. And the old makes the argument that the reason for this is because its permission was to go out and start a new business on the internet. To start an ecommerce business you dontneed to ask anyones permission, you get out there and start doing it. And it the contrast was if you want to buy a new drum for a new medical device, or a new wayof building a bridge , theres going to be an enormous amount of regulation progress you have to make before youre allowed to start. And as a result, we have divergent the energy of entrepreneurs and innovators into Digital Innovation rather than innovation in atoms and real structures. And we get it or rather the us did it explicitly. The Clinton Administration passed a series of measures in the 1990s that very much were permissive to ecommerce. They deliberately cleared the undergrowth a way to make it possible for companies to Start Building Online Retail and communications platforms. And that worked really well. So weve diverted our energy i think online in the last few decades and im not sure thats what innovation is going to look like in the next few decades. Because we might get back to transport innovation or we might turn to biotechnology innovation as being the big wave coming next. But i dont myself feel that the america of 20 20 is no better than the america of 1970. I just cant see that argument. The quality of life is extraordinarily best when people are working shorter hours and living longer lives and eating better food and all these kinds of things so i think we are seeing the fruits of innovation. Its just theyre not showing up particularly in the productivity statistics, like they are elsewhere inthe world by the way. Countries are seeing spectacular increases in productivity. And in prosperity over the last 10 or 20 years. Explanation, the one you gave, one peter talks about that weve made it harder to do that sort of realworld, working with items, innovation. Due to regulation, not as someone who loves Free Enterprise and love market, i love that explanation in fact, im worried i love that explanation too much and its such a comfortable explanation for me that its so totally conforms to my inherent belief system and my biases that i wonder i love it too much and that im missing something. Could we be missing Something Else . Might it be that Government Spending less on investment or something has happened with schools or that it really isnt regulation, its some otherexplanation. Course and i think it i often make the point that we saw incredible changes in transportation in the first half of the 20th century almost no changes in communication and computing and in the second of the 20th century we saw the opposite, we saw very little change in transportation and a huge change in computing area so id like to show a parking published in 1958 of what life would be like in the 21st century and its a shot of an oldfashioned mailman delivering perfectly ordinary letter but hes doing so with a rocket on his back. Were not using letters much, where using emails that we dont have rockets on the back of individuals so we got the future wrong in that sense and didnt understand whereit was coming from. Was that because government regulation and interference made it hard to do innovation in transport . I dont think it was. It was because we had hit some kind of physical limits that were hard to break in terms of the efficiency of moving people and goods around on devices. Meaning that supersonic airline is possible on the whole it burns toomuch fuel and isnt very efficient. So i think that some of the reasons why innovation ships from one sector to another are not about obstruction of bureaucrats or things like that but some of them definitely are. And by the way, if you say we havent seen improvements in transport, one of the most spectacular improvements weve seen in recent years is actually in transport, its just not in speed. Its in safety. If you look at the fatalities in commercial passenger jets, they have gone down by some gigantic amount in the last 30, 40 years. Her revenue, per million revenue passenger kilometers. It gone from about 3000 a year to about 50 year. Thats an unbelievable change and in 2018, we had a year with euro fatalities in commercial passenger jets. Thats extraordinary when you think how many were flying around the world in the millions. So we are seeing improvements but they arent necessarily showing up at our pocketbook. There sometimes showing up in other aspects of our lives i think safety. Whenever i write about this or i is issue of innovation, whats gone wrong over the past, if we think somethingsgone wrong over the past decade , people are pointing out maybe theres a cultural reason. Maybe were just not sort of the future thinking, future oriented society. Theyll say how many of our films and books portray an optimistic future . Tell a story that technology can lead to a Carbon Economy<\/a> easily. It might be possible over the long run will come about instantly and yes, we have beeninnovating. As a society, somewhere in the world at any one time and for Goodness Sake<\/a> if we dont keep doing so, we will find that prosperity dries up pretty fast. I think one reason and im sure you remember that back in the 1980s there was a concern about the United States<\/a>, about whether japan was going to be the leading economy of the future and people look at how japan, at least how we thought at the time how it fit innovation and that was through more bureaucrats, keyagencies and there were a lot of people back then we said we need to do what they do. Maybe Free Enterprise<\/a>, that was the way to innovate in the past but now were much smarter and we need to have very smart people making decisions in government. It didnt work out so well, im not sure that was how japan was innovating and today we have a similar situation where were looking at china and its fast growth rate and we hear about huge advances in ai and ideas for the future its going to become the leader in ai and aerospace but Everything Else<\/a> you canthink of. Now they figure out another model. They seem to be doinggreat. You think thats one reason people are sort of skeptical about the freedom arc but do they have a point . As china figure out a maybe better way to doinnovation . I think youre right, people misread japan in the 1980s. They said this has come about because the ministry of International Trade<\/a> and industry as singled out sectors which are going to be the future and invested in them and thats why japan is such an innovative country but once you looked under the bonnet of what was happening in japan it wasnt because bureaucrats were telling people what to invest in and what to invent. It was because small firms, big firms, particularly middle sized firms were just going out there and trying new things and were developing new technologies at an extraordinary rate. The same mistake is being made about china today i believe. It is an innovative country and you cant deny that it has not just caught up with the United States<\/a> in some areas as overtaken it in terms of consumer electronics, Consumer Digital<\/a> behavior and so on. There are some front of the pack stuff happening in japan. Sorry, in china but to say that thats because its a communist regime with a centrally directed plan to innovate is simply wrong. Because if you look at what happens in china it has a very strong monopolistic and authoritarian political regime. But as long as you dont deny the communist party, below that level theres a huge amount of freedom. It is not directed on what entrepreneurs do and in fact an ordinary entrepreneur in china decides to build a factory to do something new, can do the whole thing in a matter of weeks which would take years in the west to get permission for all the various yurok procedures and regulations so in that sense chinese entrepreneurship is freer. That said, china is getting worse in terms of authoritarianism and it is becoming much more of a regime state and for a while it was drifting towards democracy and that has been reversed and i think you will find that the chinese bureaucrats will think they can direct and control exactly whats happened in innovation and if they do try that, they will kill the goose that lays the golden eggs and just like japan people will no longer be at the front of the pack for long so i wouldnt bet on china being the lead innovative country in the world for very long unless it can democratize and liberate itsregime. You think this is an ongoing debate whether china can over the long term the and innovative entrepreneurial state without being much freer . Right now it looks like theyve managed to do both. Theyve managed to be an authoritarian country with one Political Party<\/a> and also be highly innovative. You think that is not sustainable . Theyre either going to become less innovative or they want to be innovative and they will have to move slowly toward being a freer more open democratic nation . In the long run i think thats right red china may pull the trigger off for a while yet it is simply, given the role that freedom plays in innovation as i argue, the ability of theentrepreneur to change his mind, to change direction. Two suddenly try one thing and then another. To do a lot of trial and error and make a lot of mistakes and an end tocome up with something new and impressive will change the world. Given the importance i feel in the long run it is not compatible with a regime that tries to control things from above and china has been here before and in the song industry was the most innovative place in the world and it was responsible for a series of extraordinary innovation. Printing and all those kinds of things and these came about because the song dynasty was not a very centralized regime. It was a fragmented regime in which there was a lot of local autonomy and there was a lot of freedom and then the mongols invaded and after that came the ming empire and the ming work quite the opposite of the song, they wanted centralized control of everything. A literally controlled where you could travel and they needed a report from every merchant on how much stock he held in his warehouse. At regular intervals. The mandarins. This was a recipe for killing innovation and sure enough, china into lack of innovation and eventually extreme poverty over the next few centuries. So the lesson there is that if you run an authoritarian regime and it gets more and more intrusive into the life of ordinary small businessman , then you will stop innovation. Its quite easy to do. I wonder if we worry to much about china being a leading technological power, that having an authoritarian country the technological frontier, if those are just two things are sustainable and i worry that we are so worried about it we figure maybe they figured out a different model and thats what we have to follow an already the United States<\/a> theres more and more talk about industrial policy and we need to be picking this. Everybody knows ai is the future so we need to invest in a lot of ai and Everybody Knows<\/a> biotech futures, we have to invest in biotech and i wonder if thats the question is not a lot of confidence in that space that freedom and Free Enterprise<\/a> are ultimately the best path to being and staying and pushing forward that frontier. The government even in the us has a very poor track record of picking winners. Its not often as good as losers that picking the government to help them and if you go back to the 80s when the war wasabout japan all the emphasis was on having a policy or semiconductor manufacturing. For memory manufacturing in particular. This was going to be absolutely vital to have a strategic interest in giving memorymanufacturing onshore. They completely missed the fact that memory chips were turning into a commodity and the action was moving to microprocessors and eventually to software. And if you go back even further, go back to 1903 the Us Government<\/a> poured an enormous amount of money for the time into a project to develop the first airplane. And it was a guy called Daniel Langley<\/a> was head of the smithsonian and a distinguished astronomer and he went off in secret and built an enormous machine was likely into that first attempt and he didnt test but parts of the machine and he didnt talk to other people and it flopped straight into the potomac when it was launched. And there was a humiliation for the Us Government<\/a> 10 days later on an island off north carolina, to bicycle mechanics from dayton ohio who had done it completely differently. They tested all the components separately again and again in gliders and kites and other devices. They talk to as many people as they could aroundthe world. A drawn on what birds do. They use windtunnel experiments and they share their ideas with as many people as possible. But in front of no crowd at all, they got an airplane into the air and for about five years no one believed them and they went to the Us Government<\/a> and said we can give you a fantastic Technology Use<\/a> in the military and the government said weve been there, we birds are fingers with mister langley so the governments record in this area is not great. People site internet coming out of darpa and there is some truth in the Internet Provider<\/a> even in darpa it relied on a lot of privatesector input and even when it came out of dark into the outside world needed to go through a huge amount of innovation and development determines what we have now. Its getting darpa credit for the internet is like getting abeaver the credit for the hoover dam. You mentioned earlier that towards the end of the book you talk about this innovation famine, innovation desert. At least perceived to have been the case since 1970. At least if you look at government statistics, theres this downshift in productivity growth which is related to innovation in the early 1970s and it never really rebounded other than for the late 1990s early 2000 in the United States<\/a> we look at all the productivity numbers. We didnt see what we saw in the 1950s and 1960s. The very highly debated still the question, what you think happened . Not just in the us but across the advanced economy we saw this downshift in productivity which perhaps Robert Gordon<\/a> has written about famously in his book the end of american growth. What do you thinkhappened there activity downshifted and never really came back. I dont think its quite that bad. I hesitate to get into an argument about the statistics but i think when you take into account the sizes of all these kinds of things and you correct for that there is still a productivity improvement there. But youre right, there isnt as much as onewould expect. Weve had a tranny of enormous innovation, talking about most of my lifetime there and weve gone from paper to computers and telephones to mobile phones. Theres been an expert amount of innovation that period but as peter feel put it once, we wanted flying cars and we got 140 characters. In other words, most of the innovation has ended up being digital its been ended up being rather than atoms. And the old makes the argument that the reason for this is because its permission was to go out and start a new business on the internet. To start an ecommerce business you dontneed to ask anyones permission, you get out there and start doing it. And it the contrast was if you want to buy a new drum for a new medical device, or a new wayof building a bridge , theres going to be an enormous amount of regulation progress you have to make before youre allowed to start. And as a result, we have divergent the energy of entrepreneurs and innovators into Digital Innovation<\/a> rather than innovation in atoms and real structures. And we get it or rather the us did it explicitly. The Clinton Administration<\/a> passed a series of measures in the 1990s that very much were permissive to ecommerce. They deliberately cleared the undergrowth a way to make it possible for companies to Start Building<\/a> Online Retail<\/a> and communications platforms. And that worked really well. So weve diverted our energy i think online in the last few decades and im not sure thats what innovation is going to look like in the next few decades. Because we might get back to transport innovation or we might turn to biotechnology innovation as being the big wave coming next. But i dont myself feel that the america of 20 20 is no better than the america of 1970. I just cant see that argument. The quality of life is extraordinarily best when people are working shorter hours and living longer lives and eating better food and all these kinds of things so i think we are seeing the fruits of innovation. Its just theyre not showing up particularly in the productivity statistics, like they are elsewhere inthe world by the way. Countries are seeing spectacular increases in productivity. And in prosperity over the last 10 or 20 years. Explanation, the one you gave, one peter talks about that weve made it harder to do that sort of realworld, working with items, innovation. Due to regulation, not as someone who loves Free Enterprise<\/a> and love market, i love that explanation in fact, im worried i love that explanation too much and its such a comfortable explanation for me that its so totally conforms to my inherent belief system and my biases that i wonder i love it too much and that im missing something. Could we be missing Something Else<\/a> . Might it be that Government Spending<\/a> less on investment or something has happened with schools or that it really isnt regulation, its some otherexplanation. Course and i think it i often make the point that we saw incredible changes in transportation in the first half of the 20th century almost no changes in communication and computing and in the second of the 20th century we saw the opposite, we saw very little change in transportation and a huge change in computing area so id like to show a parking published in 1958 of what life would be like in the 21st century and its a shot of an oldfashioned mailman delivering perfectly ordinary letter but hes doing so with a rocket on his back. Were not using letters much, where using emails that we dont have rockets on the back of individuals so we got the future wrong in that sense and didnt understand whereit was coming from. Was that because government regulation and interference made it hard to do innovation in transport . I dont think it was. It was because we had hit some kind of physical limits that were hard to break in terms of the efficiency of moving people and goods around on devices. Meaning that supersonic airline is possible on the whole it burns toomuch fuel and isnt very efficient. So i think that some of the reasons why innovation ships from one sector to another are not about obstruction of bureaucrats or things like that but some of them definitely are. And by the way, if you say we havent seen improvements in transport, one of the most spectacular improvements weve seen in recent years is actually in transport, its just not in speed. Its in safety. If you look at the fatalities in commercial passenger jets, they have gone down by some gigantic amount in the last 30, 40 years. Her revenue, per million revenue passenger kilometers. It gone from about 3000 a year to about 50 year. Thats an unbelievable change and in 2018, we had a year with euro fatalities in commercial passenger jets. Thats extraordinary when you think how many were flying around the world in the millions. So we are seeing improvements but they arent necessarily showing up at our pocketbook. There sometimes showing up in other aspects of our lives i think safety. Whenever i write about this or i is issue of innovation, whats gone wrong over the past, if we think somethingsgone wrong over the past decade , people are pointing out maybe theres a cultural reason. Maybe were just not sort of the future thinking, future oriented society. Theyll say how many of our films and books portray an optimistic future . Tell a story that technology can lead to a Better Future<\/a> versus a picture of a ruined planet or ai taking over the earth or some other dystopian system scenario and if i said down and quickly write out a bunch ofoptimistic movies , it would be way easier to write the opposite whereas it is all terrible and we should fear the future. This is something ive been complaining about for years is that i just cannot remember a hollywood film in which the future is portrayed positively. There might be some but i cant remember one. Or in which an innovative business that is portrayed positively. Only kind of businessman whos ever portrayed positively in hollywood as far as i can account as an architect for some reason, maybe because hes not really a businessman, is more of an artist. The bistro session dystopian future which by the way, theres nothing new. Fiction as this service in brave new world. We always told ourselves the future is eternal in the future always been fine and i am quite passionate about this. When i was 12, 13 years old was the Environmental Movement<\/a> was just Getting Started<\/a> and i was very interested in National History<\/a> and interested in all this and i became extremely pessimistic about the future because the grownups were telling me that the oil was running out and the population explosion, famine was inevitable and our lifespans were going to shrink , etc. And i thought well, it be nice to be alive and its been great but now im thinking eight. I better work out what ill do in the last few years before i got a poisonous debt. And so when the 1980s came along my country and others darted prospering quite mightily i was genuinely shocked. So one of the things i try and do today is tell 12yearold and 14yearold kids in schools they are telling you that you have no future. Weve stolen your future. Whatever a great book says, its just not true. Even the Climate Change<\/a> projections showed that we are going to get richer in this century really its just we might not get quite so rich if we have Climate Change<\/a> as if we dont. That is literally what the models they area. I wonder if it matters. Im sort of worried it does matter, the stories we tell ourselves and particularly people seem to be really worried that ai is about to take all our jobs. And we need a robot cast maybe or we need to somehow slow down Technology Even<\/a> though we spent 10 minutes talking better than this downshift in the official statistics and innovation, the same time we never been more worried that everyone will be, there will be three people who will own all the robots and the rest of us will be living in on universal bases or something so i kind of think it matters now. Maybe in a way that it didnt in the past for somereason. The stories we tell ourselves. I think the idea that automation and innovation deals jobs is an old idea. That has been around for more than 200 years what i were smashing textile machinery in written and its been wrong all along. Weve said throughout that automation is going to kill jobs and in the early 1960s the us had a president ial commission to look into the inevitable mass unemployment that was going to come about as a result of the introduction of computers into factories. It didnt happen. We nowhave more people in employment than ever before. We did before this Current Crisis<\/a> i should say. And thats because what innovation does is it creates new jobs, new opportunities and create a prosperity with which the consumers buy these new services other people. And there will always be things we want other people to do for us if where consumers and we canacquire it. But its also worth considering i think that we are sharing out more leisure, we are working less hard. If you take someone in the early 20th century when Life Expectancy<\/a> was less then 60, there was no such thing as retirement. Most people left school at 14, 15 and went straight into the workforce. The average workweek was about 60 hours. You didnt get much holiday. They were spending 25 percent of their entire life on the planet at work. The rest was sleeping or eating or weekends or childhood or something. Today less than 10 percent area and it some would say 85 and theyre in education or retirement for half of their life which is quite probable and theyre working five days a week, 5 7 of every week and theyre working eight hours every day so one third of every day and theyre taking normal holidays and so on, its less than 10 percent of their life that they will spend at work so for 10 percent of your life you can earn enough to support your life and to give other people a living. That is what technology and automation and innovation has done for us and we shared it out pretty equitably. Weve not goingto the point where a few people are working incredibly hard and a lot of people are not. The current worry about automation and automated Artificial Intelligence<\/a> taking jobs is a surprisingly sort of uppermiddleclass worry. In other words the reason were hearing so much about it at the moment is because in the past it was just farm labor alluding that jobs or factoryworkers but now its lawyers and doctors who might be automated. Thats really scary. This almost puzzled me as this idea that robots are about to take all the jobs at the same time as we i think in my view havent had nearly enoughinnovation. Whenever i read about europe and european economies, they seem to be desperate to be more innovative. They seem desperate to have more Technology Companies<\/a> and bigger Technology Companies<\/a>. I dont know how many white papers ive seen about the entrepreneurial deficit, the innovation deficit and in this countrywhere we have these big Technology Companies<\/a> which seem to be innovative , we sort of have very mixed views about them and you imagine, you mentioned peter thiel talking about we have to have all the innovation we would like but some people blame Silicon Valley<\/a>. They think Silicon Valley<\/a> has held us because they havent thought big enough and the reason i dont have flying cars is because all they want to do is kind of modify Consumer Services<\/a> so instead of getting a flying car we got uber. Is there a problem with Silicon Valley<\/a> that itdoesnt dream big enough . I think seeing from europe, Silicon Valley<\/a> has been a spectacular success and if youre grumbling over there about the fact that youve got facebook and amazon and google in your backyard delivering extraordinary benefits. Online shopping, whatever it might be. We would kill for a bit of that in europe. Europe has failed to produce a single digital giant to rival facebook, amazon, google or indeed their chineserifles. Companies all the time in europe theyre trying to take google down a peg or facebook down of page at tempe. Its not true that we are keen on innovation in europe and you are not in the u. S. I think that is a myth. We talk about it a bit, but then we introduce policies that get it right. I write in the book about britains most innovative entrepreneur, he invented a bag list vacuum cleaner. He came up against the new regulation of the European Union<\/a> which said that all vacuum cleaners must be tested as to how much power they use because we worry about energy usage. And this must be published, you are not allowed to use more than a certain amount of power. But, all vacuum cleaners must be tested without dust. And he said what is this all about . How do you test a vacuum cleaner without dust . And it turned out that the big german goods manufacturers that made back in place with bags in them did not want the regulations to favor dysons products works fine with us in it. There is has to use more power when there is dust in it. They have been designed to increase their power and john power usage when they have dust and they did not want to have to reveal the facts. They wanted to bring in the regulation which was quite different than regulation elsewhere in the world. So dyson went to court, they found against him, dyson did information act to see whod been lobbing the court and dug up a treasure trove of appalling corporate and he won his appeal and by now five years had passed and the chinese competitors had caught up. That is the kind of straitjacket within european innovators have to work. And that, by the way is one of the reasons james dyson was one of the leaders for breakfast. Thats what we could the world in his world standards rather than european standards. And have a competitive, open, free trading system. Thats or planning to do and we are fully out of the European Union<\/a>. That story you just told relates to me one of my concerns about this recent enthusiasm with the United States<\/a> on industrial policy is that they assume were going to have these very smart independent selfless bureaucrats and the new department of innovation the department of technology would ever you want to call it and it will be purely on their best estimate of science and Technology Make<\/a> these decisions about what technologies to fund or maybe what companies to funds. I think with the history of politics that is not how its going to work for there will be lobbying of the government, companies that are friendly with the government might get help and those who arent well, forget about them making the wrong decision pretty think of you hard for them to make the right decision of the trying to make the right decisions much less if the decisions being influenced by politics. Theres a very good book called the captured economy which is about how things like regulations, but also intellectual property system, on things like occupational licensing have created barriers to entry that help incumbent businesses and dont help insurgent businesses. This is an increasing problem in the u. S. And increasing problem in the u uk. We need to find ways of encouraging small insurgent businesses to come along. Theyre not good innovation if you look at what happened to kodak, they were mugged by digital photography prayed they actually invented digital photography at one point they did not like the look of it, it was not very efficient and they did not want to disturb their near monopoly on film. Likewise, nokia became the biggest mobile phone company in the world with more r d than the rest of the industry put together a normatively successful company. Then it was so invested in voice that it didnt see the Data Revolution<\/a> coming did not want to know about it. It was mugged by their competitor, basically apple, and ended up being sold for a pittance some years later. We need to allow Small Companies<\/a>, small entrepreneurs to challenge big ones. Thats the big thing we need to be able to do. The freedom to go out there and take on the Big Government<\/a> who is helping them. And washington youll very soon be hearing from the Big Companies<\/a> out the Small Companies<\/a> effort not careful. Host one other question about china just popped in my head and i want to ask you, you think it is necessary for a country to have some big external threat to wake up their country and say oh we need to innovate mother spending more and researcher getting rid of bad regulation or do need to have the threat order people just end up not wanting to spend the money, politics dont want to spend the money to longterm thinking. Are people worry about the disruption of technology. Some people sort of welcome, now that we have china to replace the soviet union, now we have this new external threat of a can talk about innovating again thanks to china. Do we need that . Or is there some other way to persuade people that we need innovation to be at the heart of government policy or the string more in some areas and a lot less in others. Guest if the reaction to sputnik is the classic example of a government panicking about its failure to base sufficiently innovative when threatened by a rival that appears to overtaken in the the technology were thought it was leading it. The u. S. Government saw sputnik in the air and thought oh my goodness, we need to revolutionize the way we do rnd, when he did catch up, et cetera. Actually, the response that came with a lot of military spending and so on, delivered something it was bound too, but it did not really it wasnt really what change america. What changed america what was bubbling along in the Fairchild Semiconductor<\/a> on something southern california. Some had links to the Defense Department<\/a> and Stanford University<\/a> and so on. But really miss read history to think it is because russia put a satellite into earth orbit that america came off became a technological leader. I talked quite a bit in the book about the role the Second World War<\/a> made an innovation. I made the case except for the Nuclear Weapons<\/a> that would not have been developed to the 1940s if not had been a worry that jeremy germany might be developing them too, with that exception, the other technologies we often think about having been accelerated by warfare, actually worked. The computer, antibiotics, the jet engine, these were developed long before the war in the case of the computer, at least the ingredient technologies were developed before the war. In the case of the computer, the amazing year when all of these ideas come togethers 1937. And then, because of the war, the projects all go off into secrecy and theyre not able to talk with each other and all theyre doing is calculating the trajectory of artillery shells or trying to crack enemy codes. Theyre not trying to do anything else. And so its not until the world war ends that they can share ideas and get going again. So i think acts of the war retarded the development of that technology, wheres we often think of it as accelerating it. So im a bit of a skeptic about the idea that geopolitics plays a part in innovation. The 1930s were very desperate time for america. Huge unemployment, poverty and misery yet at the time of Great Innovation<\/a> from nylon to radar or whatever it was theres all sorts of things developed in that decade. So, i dont myself think that a country needs to feel threatened report does any innovating. Host do you think that this could be an innovation moment for the United States<\/a> and other events economies because of the pandemic . Because of this economic shock that will begin to focus a lot more on making our country more efficient . Getting people going with innovations. Think thats a positive scenario. I think we become more risk reverse retreating or worrying about foreign competition, worrying about immigrants, worrying about trade, i kind of see it going both ways. What you think . Guest i think on balance i am an optimist. I think this will turn into a moment or we take seriously the need for innovation. If you look at what has happened and the last couple of months, and terms of stripping away the requirements to take months to a new if not years to approve a new medical device. All sorts of rules and rags that were extremely, slowly implemented. Killing entrepreneurship by taking to long all sorts of things have changed in that respect. Weve seen just how damaged we were by this overregulation of certain things. So example diagnostic test, new medical devices taking up to six years from getting approval and that is deterred a lot of innovators. That is why we have not been ready and waiting for this pandemic the sort of point of care, instant dna diagnostic machines that frankly we could have invented half a decade ago. So i do think we have had a wakeup call about the fact that it is not painless to stifle innovation by overregulation and by slow decisions by bureaucrats. That said, i do also agree with you that we do possibly face the threat of shutting down the World Economy<\/a> and shutting down world trade for example. A trade war would be disastrous. The whole point of trade is this someone produces in innovation somewhere else in the world, you dont have to say oh bad luck i dont live in that country cant have it. We dont say that about neighboring towns, why should we save about neighboring countrie countries . If, for example, the first vaccine is developed not in america but in another country, for this disease, would you really like to feel its just bad luck that americans are not going to get access to it . Of course not. So vaccines were not for every other innovation. So, i hope we learn the lesson from this that we are connected, trade does have to be done equitably. There are aspects of trade with their other diseases we have to be careful about their other aspects we should encourage trade as possible so we get access to the ingenuity of people all over the world. Host why do innovators innovate . Theres a lot of discussion lately about the very wealthy entrepreneurs, whether its jeff baize owes, elon musk, other guys ensure they are providing very valuable services to many people. You know what . They did not need to become multibillionaires. They did not even need to become billionaires. To be justified if there a lot less wealthy if we had big wealth taxes. It would not really affect the amount of innovation in the United States<\/a>. When you look at innovators do think thats true based on your experience . And more broadly why do people Start Companies<\/a> . Why do they invent why did they. Guest the ones that want to make it big success would make a bigger success and so i think that is in the nature of human beings. If you look at people like Thomas Edison<\/a> or jeff baeza sivan, you find certain common themes. One of them is ambition extremely hard work the other stallions tolerance for failure that is a key ingredient. Edison was constantly trying things that did not work. And he knew that trial and error was the way he was going to solve most of his problem so when he was looking for mchale uriel t is for the filament of a light bulb the 20 other people around the world who had also developed lightbulbs independently tried one or two materials and set i found one thats good enough. Edison kept going. He kept trying Different Things<\/a> he tried over 5000 different types of material until he liked the japanese bamboo so his lightbulb lasted longer than other peoples. That is what marks the great entrepreneur from other people. I have talked with jeff bezos about this. He likes trial and error as a key ingredient he wants to make mistakes and he did make mistakes. If you look at the history of amazon its a series of disasters. But it series of successes as well and eventually a very big success. He is on record as saying if you are not trying lots of Different Things<\/a>, youre not going to succeed. Key ingredient all of these lives keep trying things and eventually you will succeed. Dont expect to get it right the first time and dont be discouraged by failure. Yet, i see at least today people exult in the failure of entrepreneurs if they are already wealthy. I think if elon musk, hopefully tomorrow his spacex will launch two americans into orbit 2011. Except when it doesnt work, when theres a problem with his one of his space launches, they love it. Youre not an american but youre speaking about the United States<\/a>, do you see that in the United Kingdom<\/a> as well . Do they want to see that failure . Its far worse over here. Anyone who succeeds in the uk is automatically targeted by the media and everyone else there longing to find that in a successful person. In america the entrepreneurs have it easy yes, sure, elon musk its a few brickbats sorted him. Try living in the uk you would find our immediate much worse over here. I think it is a general problem around the world that we present success. But it can be pretty bad in some countries but im not pretending we should feel sorry for these guys they got billions we dont eat away star the on them. It would be nice that if occasionally a country like yours or mine regarded a good oldfashioned engineer who built up a business as a hero all these 14th century things the real heroes of the world are the people who did innovations. And by the way, its not always about money and gain. My favorite story in the whole wide workbook is about the mosquito nets impregnated with insecticide which is changed Malaria Control<\/a> spectacularly released help with malaria its incredibly lowtech technology. I tracked down where it came from i didnt know who had invented it. Found that the key experiment was a 1983 when a bunch of french and vietnamese scientists said a lot of very controlled carefully controlled experiments to see whether a mosquito net prevented mosquitoes biting you to see with her tearing hull and then it made any difference. At found out in impregnated net is a very, very good at deterring mosquitoes. Even if its got hull in it. So eventually the Gates Foundation<\/a> picked up on this billions of nets have been distributed nobody is made in penny out of it its a wonderful story. So lets hear it for the innovators, they do change the world for the better part. You mentioned edison. Im guessing its not very much maybe its the same way in great britain. Talking about how we got from there to here. Think if you asked most people i think most people would say i dont know, maybe cold, or we discovered oil, or maybe we exploited after colonization with took the wealth of other countries or something. Sort of that story broadly is much like the key people played a role. You mentioned edison the other great inventors throughout history. I feel this is terribly important. I think we teach far too little about the history of technology, the history of invention, we used to, we dont anymore. Thats part of the motivation for writing this book was to write down a lot of stories, the story of the wright brothers. With Thomas Edison<\/a> stories of fox nation stories of failure as well stories of success. Stories about people tinkering with with machines coming up with better machines. Think they are much more interesting than people winning battles or people falling in love those are fun to elect to read those books as well, how many books are there about that kind of stuff compared to the stuff that really change the world . Which was invention and technology. Sometimes you talk to a 12yearold, 13yearold, 14yearold, can you think of a story that maybe they heard of medicine is theres a story why you should know the story because you havent heard it . Guest i tell the story in the book of a remarkable woman she was a rich literary person an early 1700s london. She went off to constantinople as the wife of the ambassador there. While she was there she got to know women in the empire and she discovered they were deliberately giving their kids very small doses of smallpox from those who had recovered from the disease. Shed barely nearly died of smallpox or self she was terrified her children would as well. So she brought an grafting back to britain. And try to persuade people this was a good thing to do. She inoculated her own children, vaccinated we call it today. She was almost killed by the mo mob. She was savaged by the medical establishment this irresponsible, dangerous experiment how dared ignorant will and bring this idea back et cetera. Something similar happened in north america around the same time. Thank got the notion of fox nation and he set out to vaccinate 300 people in boston. And the mob went after him and he had to hide for 14 days in the closet otherwise he would have been killed. In fact he was saving lives on the grand scale. I think that is a good story to tell people. To remind them that innovation is often unpopular. This is policy advice portion of our conversation. [laughter] where i ask you forget about world leaders, states and cities, they all went more innovation they want their cities to be innovation hubs. What policy advice would you give National Leaders<\/a> about being more innovative . Is it deregulation is it spending a trillion new dollars on r d . Guest have actually argued one of the things we should be doing is buying up patents because they tend to get in the way of innovation instead of helping it when you see when they expired the 3d printing fervent of new innovation as well so buying up patents prematurely to their less easy to get in they do less harm. But i also think the government should try prizes more. Governments can dangle a prize in front of a problem and lure people into trying to tackle it. Thats why you are not specifying which team you are backing. You are only after words decide who shall win the prize by reaching the goal that you set. In the prize does not have to be a lump sum it could be a future contractor the Gates Foundation<\/a> is on this quite wellin recent years. It offered a huge reward for the First Companies<\/a> that produce a vaccine just killing a lot of children it was not a lumpsum was a contract to have the virus at a certain price of they could be rewarded for doing so think that is an imaginative way of doing things. If i was government instead of giving grants and subsidies to people to do specific things, having sat through committees deciding what they should be given grants for, i think i would set up a prize like the uk has actually set one up anyone can find a good solution for this will get a large reward that something we could try which is much less specific and trying to pick a technologys more agnostic on how theyre going to reach these rewards. And finally wonder if you could do something that hollywood has failed to do. I wonder if you could tell me about an optimistic future 20 or 30 years from now which people hear about will think thats a future i would like to live i hope i make it i want my children to grow up and that future. But with that future look like if we continue to push forward with the technological frontier . In 30 years time i will be 92 years old. I fully expect to be living quite comfortably and probably an old persons home with much Better Technology<\/a> to help me do that than is available today in much better medicine. I hope to be which will slow down not just the symptoms of my aging but the cause of my aging. So i would not be deteriorating but i do expect to die before i am 100 i am not expecting life extension to go much beyond that. At the same time, i am a naturalist. I will fully expect fact im confident that by then we will have Larger National<\/a> parks less of the planet devoted to growing food and shrinking at the moment, have more force lives saved not only many of the species that are going extinct but bringing them back into abundance. In my own life ive seen humpback whales go from 5000, all because of technological improvements and things like agriculture. Also in conservation because the other thing i want to see when i am 92 years old is that we have used gene editing to bring back some of the extinct species that have gone extinct. I want to see flocks of Carrier Pigeons<\/a> flying around again so ask me back, please, james and see if im right. So thanks for having a conversation again the new book which im going to put right in front of my face here how Innovation Works<\/a> and why it flourishes. Thanks a lot. Here are some of the current bestselling nonfiction books according to new york citys bookstore. Topping the list as the late historian, a hit peoples history of the of knighted states. Followed by why are all of the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria . The psychology of racism after that america must choose to be antiracist and work towards building a more Equitable Society<\/a> in how to be an antiracist. Then with an Indigenous Peoples<\/a> history of the United States<\/a>, we examine the history of america through the lens of native americans experience. And repping up our look at some of the bestselling nonfiction books according to new york citys bookstore is the autobiography of black panther member, most of these authors have appeared on book tv and you can watch them online booktv. Org. You are watching book tv on cspan2, television for serious readers here are some programs look out for this weekend author and robin hood ceo, west more talks of the 2015 baltimore uprising through the lens of several City Residents<\/a> who witness the unrest following the death of freddie gray. Former National Security<\/a> adviser john bolton accounts his time in the trump administration, faith and Freedom Coalition<\/a> on why evangelical christians should support President Trump<\/a> and former defense secretary since end of world war ii parties join in conversation by former defense secretary james mattis or consult your program guide. its my honor to welcome you to what i i believe will be a very provocative discussion about a compelling new book how to educate an american the conservative vision for tomorrows schools published by","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"archive.org","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","width":"800","height":"600","url":"\/\/ia601909.us.archive.org\/7\/items\/CSPAN2_20200628_133000_Matt_Ridley_How_Innovation_Works\/CSPAN2_20200628_133000_Matt_Ridley_How_Innovation_Works.thumbs\/CSPAN2_20200628_133000_Matt_Ridley_How_Innovation_Works_000001.jpg"}},"autauthor":{"@type":"Organization"},"author":{"sameAs":"archive.org","name":"archive.org"}}],"coverageEndTime":"20240716T12:35:10+00:00"}