SwampFox

Cultural and economic progress depends on ideas having sex.

Submitted by: John Warner on May 23, 2010 at 2:45 am Tagged with: Innovation Source: InnoVenture

Below is a excerpt from an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal, Humans: Why They Triumphed.

Creating "a collective brain" is the objective of InnoVenture. Join us for one of four upcoming planning sessions over the next couple of weeks where increased "specialization leads to mutually beneficial collective knowledge."

Trade is to culture as sex is to biology. Exchange makes cultural change collective and cumulative. It becomes possible to draw upon inventions made throughout society, not just in your neighborhood. The rate of cultural and economic progress depends on the rate at which ideas are having sex.

Dense populations don't produce innovation in other species. They only do so in human beings, because only human beings indulge in regular exchange of different items among unrelated, unmated individuals and even among strangers. So here is the answer to the puzzle of human takeoff. It was caused by the invention of a collective brain itself made possible by the invention of exchange.

Once human beings started swapping things and thoughts, they stumbled upon divisions of labor, in which specialization led to mutually beneficial collective knowledge. Specialization is the means by which exchange encourages innovation: In getting better at making your product or delivering your service, you come up with new tools. The story of the human race has been a gradual spread of specialization and exchange ever since: Prosperity consists of getting more and more narrow in what you make and more and more diverse in what you buy. Self-sufficiency—subsistence—is poverty.