Where does innovation come from?

Matt RidleyKenshoo

2 April 2014

Are we better off?

World economic growth

World Economics

World GDP per capita

http://www.krusekronicle.com/2008/07/index.html

2100

The fall of poverty

The Economist*At 2005 PPP

How long does it take to earn an hour of reading light?

Tallow candle 1800 – 6 hrs

Kerosene lamp1880 – 15 mins

Incandescent bulb1950 – 8 secs

CF bulb1997 – ½ sec

Labour cost of 1,200 lumen hours at average US wage

Nordhaus 1997: http://www.nber.org/chapters/c6064.pdf

But are we healthier,happier, safer, better fed,

cleverer, cleaner, kinder, freer, more peaceful, more equal?

Healthier

http://www.unicef.org/progressforchildren/2007n6/index_41802.htm

Child mortality

Happier

http://www.thegwpf.org/the-observatory/1378-indur-m-goklany-global-death-toll-from-extreme-weather-events-declining.html

SaferDeaths from extreme weather

http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2011/04/food-consumption-around-world.html

Better fed

N America

Europe

S AmericaAsia

Africa

Kilocalories per head per day

Cleverer

The Flynn Effect

Cleaner

BBC, ONS

Kinder

Freer

More peaceful

More equal

Hans Rosling https://twitter.com/HansRosling/status/400030634921312256/photo/1

How is this possible?

Hybrid ideas

``No man ever saw a dog make fair and deliberate exchange of a bone with

another dog’’

Adam Smith 1776

Comparative advantage

David Ricardo 1817

Adam takes 4 hours to make a spear and 3 hours to make an axe

Oz takes 1 hour to make a spear and 2 hours to make an axe

If Oz makes 2 spears

And Adam makes 2 axes

And they trade…Then they each save an hour of work

Division of labour in nature

Species working for each other

The earliest evidence of trade

Bouzougar et al. 2007. PNAS 2007 104:9964-9969; Barton et al 2009 doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.

Neanderthal localism

http://www.eva.mpg.de/evolution/staff/hublin/pdf/Hublin_Steele_2006_CurrAnth.pdf

Dzudzuana cave, Georgia

Where does innovation come from?

Ray Kurzweil

Descent with modification

Art Fry, inventor of the Post-it note at 3M

“Innovation is a numbers game. You have to go through 5,000 to 6,000 raw ideas to find one successful business.”

Trial and error

Variation

Convergent evolution

Egyptian

Australian

Competition

• New ideas, often serendipitous

VinylCassettes

CDs

Digital

1975 1985 1995 2005

Succession and extinction

Replication

Sexualpopulation

Asexualpopulation

Cumulative evolution requires sex

Tasmania

Henrich 2004 American AntiquityTwo Tasmanians repairing and making spears(B. Duterrau, 1855)

Tierra del Fuego

The ancient cloud

Maori fishing tackle; Kline and Boyd 2010

Human migration routes

Shipping routes

Airline routes

Fibre-optic cable routes

The collective brain

internet traffic : the Opte Project. Licensed under Creative Commons.

Can it go on?

``We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who say society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days, but so said all who came before us and with just as much apparent reason...On what principle is it that with nothing but improvement behind us we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?’’

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1830

Population growth rate is falling…

http://phe.rockefeller.edu/docs/PDR.SUPP%20Final%20Paper.pdf

More food from less land

We’re using less land to produce more food

After 50 years the world uses 65% less land to produce the same amount of food

“Peak Farmland and the Prospect for Land Sparing”Jesse H. Ausubel, Iddo K. WernIck, Paul E. Waggoner

The shale gas bonanza

http://www.climate4you.com/

Global temperatures – up 0.35C in 35 years

Climate change is slower than expected

1900

2007

Change

Malaria won’t get worse

P. Gething et al Nature 2010

59http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50563/abstract

“Our work was able to tease-out the CO2 fertilization effect by using mathematical modeling together with satellite data adjusted to take out the observed effects of other influences such as precipitation, air temperature, the amount of light, and land-use changes.” R. Donohue, 2013

Change in greenery, 1981-2011

World economic growth

World economic growth

World economic growth

Global Real GDP