In the comments to a previous post there was some discussion of inventions that affect atoms (physical things) vs. electrons (information).
I’d like to add: inventions that affect ideas — their development and dissemination.
This thanks to this post by Matthew Yglesias (bold is mine; hat tip to my sis):
…the Movable Type printing press was a transformative moment in human technological progress. It changed everything. And yet if you try to take a rigorous look at the economic statistics, it doesn’t show up. It’s invisible. There was no sustained increase in material living standards associated with the printing press. Or with clockmaking. Or with the sextant or the barometer or the reflecting telescope. Indeed, in terms of sustained increases in per capita living standards all the scientific and technical innovations of the 16th and 17th centuries produced absolutely nothing.
…When better machines for making clothes were in invented, overall productivity surged.
…economically significant technological progress and technological progress that’s significant in a broader sense. What’s really needed in terms of economic growth are innovations that massively increase productivity in sectors of the economy that account for large shares of consumption….
The development and distribution of ideas (think: the interwebs) can certainly result in better/more productive manipulation of atoms, realized in more/cheaper goods and services — to mankind’s great benefit.
But:
1. It’s a second-order effect (at best), and
2. It often only affects control over who gets those goods and services — not the efficiency of production. Knowledge is power is money. (Think: Wall Street.) That may result in utility-maximizing allocation of resources, or it may result in suboptimal allocation.
Then there are the idea/knowledge improvements that only affect the market of ideas and knowledge. Ideas are goods too, of course — people will pay good money for them, even if they aren’t “productive.” But it’s darned hard to measure their contribution to human well-being. (I value/enjoy ideas greatly for their own sake, but I think I’m in the tiny minority, worldwide.)
As a rather extreme example, consider the Hinman Collator — developed by Charlton Hinman based on his WWII work analyzing aerial photographs, and used to compare dozens of copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio to discover press variants.
It was a huge technological leap forward compared to manual cross-referencing by eye. But it only affected ideas; his collation had no impact outside that world. (And sadly, Hinman’s rather gargantuan effort seems to have resulted in one — count ’em, one — materially significant discovery of a Folio press variant. Four were already known. It also delivered a great deal of understanding re: the early modern printing and production of books.)
Nevertheless, all his efforts — and those of his successors using his machine and knock-offs, plus the work of those who built those machines — did contribute to GDP…
Update 2/3/2010: Just noticed this, couldn’t resist adding: 2.5% of U. S. nonresidential structures (by value) are “religious.” Religion is all about ideas for their own sake — not their economic value. Seems that many others value ideas for their own sake as highly as I do…
Comments
8 responses to “Invention and Innovation: Atoms vs. Electrons vs. Ideas”
Religion is all about ideas for their own sake — not their economic value.
Evidently you’ve never heard of Jimmy Swaggert, Jim and Tammi Baker, Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson . . .
Oh, prairie shit — EVERYBODY!
JzB
Your distinguishing between electrons and atoms is extremely odd to my eyes. Electrons are a critical component of atoms and how they function. We can only manipulate electrons through the manipulation of atoms and vice versa (the entire field of chemistry is devoted to practically nothing but the study and manipulation of electron states).
But it’s darned hard to measure their contribution to human well-being.
No it’s not, material growth cannot happen in the absence of rapid and wide dissemination of ideas. The printing press laid the groundwork for the scientific revolution which directly led to the rapid growth in material well being. Material well being itself is a function of the ideas and institutions created to use it.
Current global gains in well-being from globalization are a direct result of the twin revolutions in computation and information. Modern corporations simply could not function in their absence.
This brings up an extremely crucial point:
Innovation in human institutions and behavior are just as important to material progress as directly manipulating matter. The separation you and Matt suggest does not and cannot exist.
Chris –
Innovation in human institutions and behavior are just as important to material progress
Intriguing. Care to elaborate? Human behavior is a function of human nature. Do you think that is changing?
Cheers!
JzB
Just because it’s important doesn’t mean it’s easy (or possible) to measure. cf the value of government services, or the contribution of training to fixed capital.
I’m suggesting that the ideas that deliver greatest utility are or at least were those that improve(d) manipulation of matter. As I said, a second-order effect
I should have highlighted what I thought was the key point, making it the subject of the post: many ideas/innovations in the digital/information realm give people the means to control resources — as in who gets them. I’m not at all convinced those greatly increase human well-being.
Financial innovations being the best example. Since — as Fama and French demonstrated long ago — it takes very few traders to make an efficient market and set prices properly, those innovations may contribute very little or nothing to market efficiency.
@jazzbumpa
True, human behavior stems from human nature, but what behavior is shown is heavily dependent on circumstances.
The usefulness of a technology is determined in large part by the social framework in which it is used. ie: The European colonization of the Americas was driven by heavy competition between states in a politically fractured Europe. China actually had better ship technology at the time and made limited forays, but, in the absence of external competition, allowed it to atrophy.
Gunpowder technology showed a similar trajectory.
The United States’s modern economy requires far more resources than it alone is able to provide. Without global trade institutions and frameworks, we would not be able to be nearly the size we are and our technological advance would have stalled long ago.
I’m afraid the interest is essentially a worthless “invention” and does not represent a revolution in communication. Prior the invention of the telegraph a 300 word message would take 3 week to cross the continents but after the telegraph that time was reduced to 7.5 minutes a time reduction factor of over 2500 times whereas the internet reduced the time to spending messages by 5 over fax.
The internet is merely increasing the rate our society move from the text based Renaissance and subsequent Enlightenment and scientific revolutions into a image based society. The result is a is devolution of language culture toward a primitive logographic language driven by making emotional mass manipulation objective whereas a scientific culture relies on concentration improving textual argument and paradoxical counter position ala classical poetry.
The impact the internet has almost entirely negative. Now, don’t get me started on the mass schizophrenia induced by “social networking” sites and MMO gaming where people create a fictive personality to live vicariously.
The adjustment period will be difficult as inducing the learning and long form logical constructs needed for science via a logographic system will take a long time to develop. Until then politics and culture continue to grow more hysterical, paranoid, atomized, and nihilist.
The entire library of congress would fit on a two terabyte hard drive. With a 10 Gigabit Ethernet connection you could download it in slightly under 27 minutes. A 100 Gigabit connection would take under 3 minutes. The average novel contains between 80,000 to 120,000 words. There are close to 22 million books in the library (There is a lot of other items actually, so this is going to be dramatically understated). If we use the average novel length as the average book length, that’s 2.2 trillion words. Using your figure of 7.5 minutes for 300 words, it would take over 104,642 years to transmit by telegraph.
Using a standard 10 GB Ethernet is faster than a telegraph by a minimum of 9 orders of magnitude. Accounting for all items besides books would vastly increase the difference. A fax transmitting over a 56k would take almost 9 years to transmit 2 terabytes. A 10 GB Ethernet is faster than the fax by five orders of magnitude compared to the improvement of 3 orders for the telegraph over land.
You might want to rethink how much of an improvement the internet is in information transfer.
@Chris T
As they say, “size does matter.”