too, but we became the specialists. Adaptation grades into innovation whenever it somehow becomes a norm. That too happens with other creatures, but not as often or as lastingly. Their new norms almost always revert to the old ones. Our
innovations collect and accrue. That’s why growth is our history.
Its costs are failure rates and learning curves. Many innovations are blind alleys, and most others need shakedown runs. But we're stuck with those as the cost of being human. And we're stuck with them whether the result right now is growth or not. They were our cost of survival during our million years as homo erectus, when the archeological record shows little overall change in the stone tools we made. Growth and lasting innovation picked up marginally with the emergence of Ancestral Eve and bigger brains about 200,000 years ago, and began accelerating about 50,000 years ago. Growth happened because the more or less constant cost of adaptation and innovation became less than the payoff. New ideas finally found traction at no added cost. Mill’s idea was that more payoff in growth need not presuppose more
sacrifce.
Does that mean that all we need for growth is new ideas and the courage to trust them? Well, no. We still have to plow back depreciation as the cost of holding even. We need practical savvy and patience too. Sometimes great new ideas must wait for an opening. That may be why our bigger brains showed little effect on the kinds of tools we made until about 50,000 years ago. And I will argue that innovations need laws and customs that welcome them. Otherwise they will make a few bucks for the local warlord rather than wealth for the originator and the world. But what they
don’t need, say Mill and I and the data, is tighter belts.
Adam Smith, in his Wealth of Nations published in 1776, proposed growth by belt tightening. Most tradition has agreed, with the proviso that new ideas must come first. Solow raised doubts about the role of consumption restraint, but stopped short of denying a need for it. Mill acknowledged both ways to grow. My charts and tables will confirm that only the kind that troubled Solow has actually happened, in every
Chapter 2: Fast Forward 1/06/16 5
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