Matt Ridley: How Innovation Works, Part 2

The faster you can read a book, the worse a book it is. If you can speed read a book, you should just put that book away. It doesn't deserve to be a book.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us quite starkly that we haven't been doing enough innovation. We've haven't been developing enough vaccines. We haven't been searching for ways to expedite vaccine development. We haven't been developing enough diagnostic devices.

We've been here before. We've expected innovation and automation to destroy jobs, but it never does. It always creates new kinds of opportunity for employment. It creates the wealth that enables people to employ others.

All failures and sins are just ignorance—it's just a lack of knowledge. If we were to speed up the accumulation and application of knowledge through innovation, we would be able to solve all of humanity's problems.

We're building a decentralized finance infrastructure for borrowing, lending, derivatives, trading, custody—all of that stuff. The things that Wall Street does for 20% of the United States GDP will be done for 1% of GDP in crypto land.

We tend to over-lionize and remember a few inventors as being the creators when it's actually much more of a team and distributed process.

The effects of innovation are overestimated in the short-term and underestimated in the long-term.

Innovation is the child of freedom because it's a free and creative attempt to satisfy freely expressed human desires.

If we can innovate more, we're not going to destroy the planet. It's the reverse—innovation is the safest way of saving the planet. It's the poorest countries that are seeing the most damage to the environment at the moment.