Has the world temporarily run out of big innovations?
The great blue satan's spectral minions, no.
The world -- the US, the UK, and that was effectively control of oil markets which was (and is) immense leverage, enough to make it the functional world -- made a decision around 1980 that the pause in innovation would become a freeze. Nothing that threatened an incumbent would be permitted.
That leaked -- nobody saw VLSI coming -- but it's interesting to note that it took at most a generation to bolt everything related to computers and telecom and so on into the incumbent consensus -- nothing that threatens an incumbent is permitted -- and that absolutely nothing even looks like it _could_ threaten the incumbent consensus today. It looks astonishingly as though demonstrating a willingness to kill people to maintain safe incumbency is a broad political positive in the Anglosphere.
That's not the same thing as no scope or capacity for innovation; there's been a revolution in materials science, there's been a revolution in fabrication of several sorts, there's a potential revolution in energy, there's another potential revolution in applied biology. There just isn't going to be any structural change (different people benefiting) or general trend to increase standards of living because incumbents with total control care solely about relative status among incumbents. Nothing else matters to them and they've just demonstrated that a big pile of corpses doesn't matter to politics.
Slavery and empire is an identity relationship, and the peril of empire is to be constructed as property. It doesn't matter where you start from nor what the governing philosophy is nor how your cultural myths are structured. Once you accept the core premise of empire -- that military advantage should be converted into commercial advantage -- you get incumbents, and once you've got secure incumbents you get expectations of ownership. Politics owned by the incumbents turns those expectations into laws and institutions and carceral states and complete failures of public education.
China is getting all this stick because they _do_ innovate. The CPC decided that solar was important and crashed the price/time curve, the great general benefit of themselves and the world. (trains, rapid construction, integrating identity into electronic devices to manage society...) That's the problem; China isn't participating in the established incumbent consensus.
Current incumbency never survives meaningful innovation; that's practically the definition of meaningful innovation. Did someone else get rich? No? Same shit, different day. Yes? this could have structural meaning. (It probably won't, but it _could_, and that's already rare.) And the existing incumbents are well aware that they're hyper-specialised for this specific environment; if they have to compete outside it, they'll fail.
Apply the capital without that "must principly benefit an existing incumbent" filter -- start a new game of monopoly, or, preferentially, end this one -- and there's immense innovation. But also, inevitably, a new world.
Tyler Cowen's Bads
Whut???!!! Said nothing about the Department of War.
A corrected link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse
Has the world temporarily run out of big innovations?
The great blue satan's spectral minions, no.
The world -- the US, the UK, and that was effectively control of oil markets which was (and is) immense leverage, enough to make it the functional world -- made a decision around 1980 that the pause in innovation would become a freeze. Nothing that threatened an incumbent would be permitted.
That leaked -- nobody saw VLSI coming -- but it's interesting to note that it took at most a generation to bolt everything related to computers and telecom and so on into the incumbent consensus -- nothing that threatens an incumbent is permitted -- and that absolutely nothing even looks like it _could_ threaten the incumbent consensus today. It looks astonishingly as though demonstrating a willingness to kill people to maintain safe incumbency is a broad political positive in the Anglosphere.
That's not the same thing as no scope or capacity for innovation; there's been a revolution in materials science, there's been a revolution in fabrication of several sorts, there's a potential revolution in energy, there's another potential revolution in applied biology. There just isn't going to be any structural change (different people benefiting) or general trend to increase standards of living because incumbents with total control care solely about relative status among incumbents. Nothing else matters to them and they've just demonstrated that a big pile of corpses doesn't matter to politics.
Slavery and empire is an identity relationship, and the peril of empire is to be constructed as property. It doesn't matter where you start from nor what the governing philosophy is nor how your cultural myths are structured. Once you accept the core premise of empire -- that military advantage should be converted into commercial advantage -- you get incumbents, and once you've got secure incumbents you get expectations of ownership. Politics owned by the incumbents turns those expectations into laws and institutions and carceral states and complete failures of public education.
China is getting all this stick because they _do_ innovate. The CPC decided that solar was important and crashed the price/time curve, the great general benefit of themselves and the world. (trains, rapid construction, integrating identity into electronic devices to manage society...) That's the problem; China isn't participating in the established incumbent consensus.
Current incumbency never survives meaningful innovation; that's practically the definition of meaningful innovation. Did someone else get rich? No? Same shit, different day. Yes? this could have structural meaning. (It probably won't, but it _could_, and that's already rare.) And the existing incumbents are well aware that they're hyper-specialised for this specific environment; if they have to compete outside it, they'll fail.
Apply the capital without that "must principly benefit an existing incumbent" filter -- start a new game of monopoly, or, preferentially, end this one -- and there's immense innovation. But also, inevitably, a new world.