Matt Ridley has out a new book, How Innovation Works.
Robert Zubrin reviews, “In the first half of the book, Ridley regales us with tales about the birth of numerous key innovations, ranging from agriculture and medicine to transport, power generation, communications, and computers, spanning human history from the Stone Age to the present.” Then he draws out a “general theory of innovation.” Zubrin continues, “In the final portion of the book, Ridley devotes himself to targeting pathological forms of social organization that have served to strangle innovation.”
Michael Shermer interviews Ridley for Science Salon. Shermer writes, “Ridley argues that we need to change the way we think about innovation, to see it as an incremental, bottom-up, fortuitous process that happens to society as a direct result of the human habit of exchange.”
Yaron Brook interviewed Ridley on June 6.