I just completed reading Abundance, the excellent new book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. It tries to provide the basis for a narrative to shape a new “political order” based on abundance to counter the current politics of scarcity with all its discontents and turmoil. It proposes a combination of deregulation, improving state capabilities, focusing on implementation, and generally using technology and innovation to produce more sustainably. Its essence boils down to this question: “Can we solve our problems with supply?”
I’ll blog more on the book itself later, for despite my reservations on its rather reductionist approach, it frames an agenda that deserves a wide readership and discussion.
This post is on one of the main insights of the book and the narrative it seeks to propagate. In the context of innovation, the authors say, “Implementation, not mere invention, determines the pace of progress.” Klein and Thompson write
“For many, progress appears to be a mere timeline of such eureka moments. Our mythology of invention treats the moment of discovery as a sacred scene. In schools, students memorise the dates of major inventions, along with the names of the people who made them – Edison, lightbulb, 1879; Wright Brothers, airplane, 1903. The great discoverers – Franklin, Bell, Curie, Tesla – get bestselling biographies, and millions of people know their names. It’s the story of progress you might expect to see in Hollywood or read in nonfiction books that hail the lonely hero whose flash of insight changes the world.
But this approach to history is worse than incomplete; it’s downright wrong. Inventions do matter greatly to progress. But too often, when we isolate these famous scenes, we leave out the most important chapters of the story – the ones that follow the initial lightning bolt of discovery... When a good idea is born, or when the first prototype of an invention is created, we should celebrate its potential to change the world. But progress is more about implementation than it is about invention. An idea going from nonexistence to existence – from zero to one – introduces the possibility of change. But the way individuals, companies, and governments take an idea from one to one billion is the story of how the world actually changes. And it doesn’t always change, even after a truly brilliant discovery. The ten-thousand-year story of human civilisation is mostly the story of things not getting better: diseases not being cured, freedoms not being extended, truths not being transmitted, technology not delivering on its promises…
The US has thrown tens of billions of dollars annually into scientific discovery. But it hasn’t brought as much progress as we’d expect… we have haphazardly burdened the scientific process with the same flavour of procedural kludge that has slowed down other critical parts of the economy… we have gotten worse at translating our inventions into domestic industries. To borrow some familiar language, it’s not just that ideas are getting harder to find. The problem is also that new ideas are getting harder to use... we have become too enthralled by the eureka myth and, more to the point, too inattentive to all the things that must follow a eureka moment.”
They point to the work of historian Joel Mokyr, one of the most important and profound social scientists of our times, in my opinion, in this regard. Tinkering, embodiment, and scaling are examples of what Mokyr calls microinventions, or the incremental improvements needed to turn a new idea into a significant product. These microinventions are often more important than the original breakthrough. Making technology useful often means building it at scale. Unfortunately, this insight has not been taken seriously. Mokyr says,
“Most major inventions initially don’t work very well. They have to be tweaked, the way the steam engine was tinkered with by many engineers over decades. They have to be embodied by infrastructure, the way nuclear fission can’t produce useful electricity until it’s contained inside a working reactor. And they have to be built at scale, the way Ford’s Model T came down in price before it made big difference to the country.”
The point that progress depends on implementation and not mere invention is borne out by Wright’s law of manufacturing. Named after Theodore Wright, who served as the vice chairman of NASA’s predecessor organisation, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, it states that some things get cheaper as we learn to build more.
“It says that innovation is not a two-stage process, where a loner genius conceives of a brilliant idea and then a bunch of thoughtless brutes manufacture it. Innovation is enmeshed in the act of making. Wright’s law is the story of penicillin, whose costs declined as the government learned to cook larger batches of the medicine. It is the story of the Model T automobile, which became more affordable as Ford built larger and larger factories. It is also the story of the computer chip. In the 1960s, Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel, wrote that the number of transistors on a chip might double every two years. His prediction became prophecy. Fifty years later, transistor costs declined by a factor of one billion.”
Wright’s law is best captured in China’s spectacular success across sectors in starting small and then continuously iterating and bringing down costs, while also continually moving up the value chain of manufacturing.
The best illustration of this insight comes from the folklore around antibiotics. Alexander Fleming may have discovered the value of penicillin to treat bacteria in 1928 by way of an accidental contamination of some of his staphylococcus bacterium samples with spores of mould that blew into his lab while he was on a holiday. But its commercialisation took several more years till 1942. Two Oxford University professors, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain were responsible for this commercial development by testing it on mice and then human beings. But they could not produce penicillin on a commercial scale. For scaling, they had to rely on a US OSRD-supported group of scientists in Peoria, Illinois, who discovered that adding “corn steep” (water soaked with corn) could increase penicillin production tenfold. Finally, it was the OSRD and War Production Board in the US that spent millions to establish penicillin plants. Pencillin production soared from 10 million units per plant per month in 1942 to 646 million per plant per month by June 1945. The cost of producing antibiotics plummeted by over 95%. This collaborative effort belies the simple story of attributing all credit to Alexander Fleming. Ideas are not what leads to progress, but workmanship on those ideas!
Another example is that of Edison and the incandescent light bulb. In 1800, the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta reportedly built the first battery with an electric current. In 1809, Humphry Davy built the first practical “arc lamp” that sent a span of sparks across two rods. In 1841, the English investor Frederick de Moelyns was granted the first patent for a charcoal-powered incandescent lamp. So what did Edison do? In his Menlo Park lab in 1879, Edison burned hundreds of materials inside a glass vacuum until he settled on a carbonised bamboo to serve as an efficient lightbulb filament. Understanding the need for steady delivery of electricity, he also built a system of generators to make power, wires to carry it, sockets and switches to turn it on and off, and meters to measure usage and allow for the billing of customers. His microinventions were useful to illuminate the scaling path. “Through exhaustive tinkering, embodying, and scaling, he made electric light useful.”
All this has significance in the debates on international development.
In the context of development interventions, I blogged here highlighting the obsession in international development circles with new ideas and innovations and neglect of implementation of regular development interventions; herequestioning the belief that there are several new ideas and innovations waiting to make a transformative impact; and herethat ideas and policies in most of the development matter very little and it's mostly about implementation. A long paper is here.
The fundamental insight is that it’s not ideas that lead to development but their implementation, and that implementation is almost always far more daunting than the process of discovery of the idea itself. In fact, only a fraction of the pipeline of ideas ever finds its way into successful implementation.
It goes back to a deep philosophical point. The most valuable individual and collective attributes for progress and development may be the desire and skills to tinker and embody (or institutionalise) to solve problems. In development in particular, they are far more important than the ability to ideate and innovate. Persistence and not mutation is what drives development (and much else in life).
This insight is borne out in Mokyr’s work around the idea of useful knowledge. He describes useful knowledge as that which promotes material progress. It consists of propositional knowledge (“what”) and prescriptive knowledge (“how”). It’s a distinction between people who know things (savants) and who make things (fabricants). A feature of the Age of Enlightenment, which led to the Industrial Revolution, especially pronounced in England (as against the contintental Europe), was the generation of useful knowledge by the creation of incentives (patents, awards, prizes, medals, pensions, memberships in Royal Societies, and generally higher social status, etc.). It became easier and cheaper to access existing knowledge through written compilations like libraries, book indexes, alphabetisation, compilations based on topic, etc.
I’m inclined to argue that the narrative generated by the innovations and innovators in information and communication technology (ICT) in the US over the last three decades may have led to the diminution of persistence and implementation, and elevated ideas and eureka moments as the defining values and skills of progress. This narrative has also been fueled by venture capital and ideologues on
It’s a different matter that this narrative of college drop-outs working in isolation in garages and inventing their eureka moments is itself highly misleading and inaccurate. The story of Amazon is a good example of how success emerged from a confluence of factors - being at the right moment in time at the right place; bringing together and building on technologies that were already available; long duration of tinkering, iteration, failures, persistence, and deferred gratification; the nature of the market with its network effects induced entry barriers that allowed for iteration and growth; regulatory arbitrage that allowed harvesting of first-mover windfalls and rents, etc. Similar stories in varying degrees apply to all the Big Tech firms of today.
It’s therefore apposite that development embraces and elevates the attributes, skills, and values of problem-solving through the process of tinkering, embodying, iterating, and scaling, instead of the current fetish with new ideas and innovation. This is an important message for international development organisations, philanthropic donors, US-based academic researchers, and Western think tanks, who have been most culpable for development straying from focusing on implementation and instead getting hooked on ideas and innovation.
Update 1 (17.05.2025)
The Economist has a Boss Class podcast, which examines the process of innovation and comes to some conclusions.
One, forget the 1980s earworms. Breakthroughs very rarely come from aha moments. You often have to work towards something for years, and you don’t know when the market will be ready for it. Iterate and innovate. A portfolio approach pays dividends. Whether you do it formally or not, give people space to work on big new ideas, as well as improvements to existing ones. Three, test and learn. Whether it’s a building site or London streets or playing children, get feedback and be ready to change course. There’s a phrase that I found useful. “Fall in love with the problem, not the solution.”
The Economist’s Bartelby columnist writes
“The biggest bullshit is eureka ideas where you just wake up and have an idea that solves things,” says Mr Alex Kendall, co-founder of Wayve, a self-driving software company… The myths of lone geniuses and moments of inspiration undoubtedly capture the imagination. But the reality—of problems solved by groups of determined people over many years—is an even better story.
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