Innovation and the Failure of the Great Man Theory

Joakim Book Economics, , , , ,

We tend to think about innovation as inventions and particularly about the inventors associated with them: Newton, Edison, Jobs, Archimedes, Watt, Arkwright.  This Great Man Theory of incredible technical innovation is mostly implicitly held by quite a few of us, celebrating these great men and their deeds.

Matt Ridley, the author of The Rational Optimist and The Evolution of Everything among other credentials, has spent a lot of time and effort in recent years arguing against this theory. In his recent Hayek Lecture to the British Institute of Economic Affairs he convincingly outlines his case: so many independent innovations take place roughly at the same time by different people. The Great Man Theory leads us to believe that  hadn’t it been for Edison, we’ll all be in the dark and humanity deprived ofall the benefits that came with the innovation.

Not so. There were a great number of contemporary inventors who came upon versions of the lightbulb (Ridley cites 21 or 23 or them, depending on whom you include) around the same time as Edison. The story can be repeated for most other great inventions we know of: laws of thermodynamics, calculus, most metals, typewriting machines, jet engines, the ATM, Oxygen. Indeed, the phenomenon is so common that it has its own term: simultaneous invention.

It seems, in complete contrast to the Great Man Theory, that history provided a certain problem, a sufficient number of people working on solving it at a certain time, and eventually similar inventions taking place around the same time. The process is, Ridley concludes, “gradual, incremental, collective yet inescapable inevitable […] it was bound to happen when it did”.

Interestingly enough for those of us schooled and fascinated by spontaneous orders and bottom-up social and economic phenomena, the Great Man Theory is remarkably similar to other beliefs about the world. It is a symptom of the same reasoned short-comings that makes us humans susceptible to believing in zero-sum thinking, top-down organizing and “design-implies-a-designer”. Instead of grasping the deep insights of gains from trade, spontaneous order or evolution, we are tempted by the militaristically directed organizations that we believe we understand rather than the emergent order of many independently acting individuals’ trials and errors.

Precisely this bias makes us susceptible to the mistake Mariana Mazzucato has become famous for wholeheartedly embracing: the idea that, whatever the innovation, government probably did it. That government innovation is productive – or at least more productive than is commonly presumed – and indeed societies can greatly benefit from ramping up government R&D spending. Nevermind incentives, track records or statistical robustness.

Indeed, what Ridley points to is precisely that valuable and life-changing innovation cannot be directed. Admittedly, some innovation does occur in labs, but only a vanishingly small part. Mazzucato and other top-downers could have benefited greatly from listening to Ridley (or reading his book The Rational Optimist; or reading Demsetz’ devastating 1969 article ‘Information and Efficiency’).

Coming full circle and espousing the Hayekian insights, Ridley notes that the price is everything. Specifically the reduction in prices is what matters for innovations to be spread and adopted rather than the ideas themselves. Very little happens in terms of adoption and transmission until prices start to fall dramatically (hint, hint, Bitcoin… or nuclear energy, or renewable energy…). Like the printing press and the steam engine, interesting things start to happen when prices fall – not because an innovation is particularly cool in some subsection of society.

Innovation is a deeply decentralized yet deeply collective process. We face similar challenges that occassionally come to similar conclusions – and history would in all likelihood have progress exactly the same had we not had a Newton or Edison or Jobs.

17 thoughts on “Innovation and the Failure of the Great Man Theory”

    • A good question, Sam. I’m still thinking this through, so thanks for giving me food for thought for the weekend!

  4. As we approach the year’s end, this was one of my favorite posts of the year! I strongly agree that we are innately biased to see the world in both a zero sum and a top down fashion.

    I call the latter bias the Big Kahuna fallacy and it includes believing that design requires a designer (the fact that natural selection was only realized —albeit concurrently by two men— less than two centuries ago is mind boggling), the need for imposed government direction, and the belief in the great man theory of innovation. Decentralized order is simply something which we have trouble recognizing or adopting.

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  5. I believe that the Great Designer gave us free will, combining both ideas, and my understanding of God as the “Great Designer” would not be “Great” unless the gift of free will was bestowed. It is the most important purpose of the Great Designer to allow us to learn and grow. Your criticism of the “design implies designer” is logically equivalent to the Great Inventor position.

    Without the Great Designer, my enslaving you is just another of the many choices available to my power, and indeed, without a moral code, the results of freedom to contract cannot be effectively realized.

    You are as anxious to criticize top down as I, but proposing that ALL directed efforts are less effective is not supported by reality. One inventor cannot get to the moon or produce 8000 cars a day, in fact, the spontaneous cooperation of many individuals is the most effective method of progress ever.

    Orville and Wilber beat Langley, but Von Braun would have never reached space without 400000 other people.

    I am a manager in my company. WE have designed a system where everyone in the organization can see the opportunities and self-organize to get it done, with very little direction from me.

    Some musings, thanks for a great blog!

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