Quote of the Day: The Incompatibility of Innovation and Governments

It seems that as a general rule, then, the weaker the government, the better it is for innovation. With some notable exceptions, autocratic rulers have tended to be hostile or indifferent to technological change. The instinctive need for stability and the suspicion of nonconformism and shocks usually dominated the possible gains that could be attained from technological progress.

That’s from Joel Mokyr’s 1990 book, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (page 180) as excerpted by Professor Don Boudreaux

The fundamental objective of any government is the preservation of their political power through the sustainment of their political base.

And any activities that has the tendency to undermine this position will always be viewed as a threat. Thus government’s role, as pointed above, has mostly been about imposing conformity through control, and instituting dependency through political measures—such as safety nets or the welfare state—to shield against “shocks” (resistance to change) and or guard against social failure (fear of loss) through redistributive “stability” policies.

All these have been built upon the platform of centralized political institutions.

Meanwhile innovation stands at the opposite end. Innovation embraces the virtues of failure or losses through repeated trial and errors or experimentation or through the encouragement of bottom up based risk activities, which mainly operates on change-oriented and or highly competitive environments. Since innovation is about dynamism and diversity, they are usually products of decentralized institutions.

So governments approve of innovation only if it benefits them. Governments become “hostile” to innovation, if change threatens their power (this has been evident by repeated attempts to control the internet which has been counteracted by digital activists), and are “indifferent to technological change ” when innovation is seen as having neutral effects on them.

The bottom line is that innovation and the current welfare based governments represent as diametrically opposing forces, and therefore, incompatible with each other.