Abstract philosophical essay on innovation and economic growth

We were paying them as homo habilis two million years ago. The cost went up, but the value of innovation just as much, when homo erectus arrived a little later. Both rose again with the emergence of Ancestral Eve 200,000 years ago. Adaptation is the human specialty. Its what gets us through the day. Innovation is adaptation that happens to become new norms. It started leaving a record of embodied growth about 50,000 years ago. That doubled pace about 400 years ago. The costs of being human are the same failure rates and learning curves whether the payoff in adaptation/innovation means faster gain in good times or slower decline in bad ones. We row ata Steady stroke, and gain against the shoreline when our new ideas are particularly good ones and the current is right. My idea, whether or not Mill’s, is that these costs might be about the same for breakthroughs or meta-ideas or paradigm shifts as for modest upgrades, or even for holding even in a world of daily surprises. Ideas trade in an inefficient market. Cost is dissociated from value, and cause is desynchronized from effect, by the vagaries of genius and the whim of circumstance. Now the tougher puzzle. How can consumption keep up with capital even in accelerations? That’s what Mill described, and that’s what happens. Can Achilles catch the tortoise even when the tortoise speeds up? Put your money on Achilles. Here it is Gunnar Myradal to the rescue. The apparent problem is that ex ante depreciation investment is never enough in acceleration. But the charts and tables show unanswerably that ex post depreciation investment is. We sow the first, but reap the second. Plowback of depreciation investment is up to us. Growth is whatever is added by genius or happenstance. The difference between market value and cost is sometimes luck, which neither loses nor gains in the long run, but sometimes imagination. Mother Nature and Gunnar Myrdal simultaneously say “Shazam”, and convert new ideas into embodied or disembodied growth without surcharge for the novelty. Chapter 4 Mill’s Idea 1/11/16 10 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011001