Aretae

The virtue of excellence

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Aretae's Question

How do you balance the reality that all new solutions to problems, and most old solutions in new situations fail against the reality that new methods/recipes are the whole of economic growth.
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3 comments:

Chris said...

All things come to he who waits, as long as he hustles like hell while he's waiting. Move forward or fall behind. Insert other cliches here:

In short, building the better mousetrap has always been the way to make money. The economics of scarcity demand that. And believing you can rest on you laurels is nuts in a competitive situation.

May 24, 2011 at 5:15 PM
drpat said...

I'd answer the question by noting that there is a vast difference between all and almost all.

And that the industrial revolution was basically the result of us vastly improving our search algorithms for finding that 0.01% of new solutions that do work.

(For one thing, we actually started looking.)

May 25, 2011 at 1:30 AM
Leonard said...

The "reality" that "all new solutions to problems... fail" is not real. You want "most" or "almost all".

Also, economic growth is not purely a function of innovation. The size of the economy is its total production, so growth is possible with more labor, land or capital.

Those stated, I second drpat.

May 25, 2011 at 12:05 PM

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