“China’s economy has entered a state of new normal.”
– Premier Li Keqiang, 2015
“Success breeds a disregard of the possibility of failure.”
– Hyman Minsky
Welcome to the new, improved, faster-to-read, better yet still-free Thoughts from the Frontline. My team and I have been doing a lot of research on what my readers want. The reality is that my newsletter writing has experienced a sort of “mission creep” over the years. Bluntly, the letter is just a lot longer today than it was five or ten years ago. And when I’m out talking to readers and friends, especially those who give me their honest opinions, many tell me it’s just too much. There are some of you who love the length and wish it were even longer, but you are not the majority. Not even close. We all have time constraints, and I wish to honor those. So I am going to cut my letter back to its former size, which was about 50% of the length of more recent letters. (Note: this paragraph is going to open the letter for the next month or so, since not everybody clicks on every letter. Sigh. Surveys showed us it’s not because you don’t love me but because of demands on your time. I want you to understand that I get it.) Now to your letter…
Hollywood thrives on tropes. Most things that are possible to portray on film have been portrayed at some point in the last century. Today’s producers mostly just rearrange those tropes – and that’s OK.
Much of what we think is new and different is actually one variation or another on ancient themes. My favorite book genre, science fiction, has many archetypal tropes that can be traced back to Greek mythology, which itself must have grown out of tales that must have been told for millennia. Thus it’s little wonder that the “zeitgeist” of our time seems to produce a lot of zombie movies or asteroid movies or bad-alien movies. These and many other tropes just “get in the air” and take on a life of their own.
It’s not just storytelling; it’s inventions, too. You must take a minute to read this quote from Matt Ridley’s critically important book, The Evolution of Everything:
Suppose Thomas Edison had died of an electric shock before thinking up the light bulb. Would history have been radically different? Of course not. Somebody else would have come up with the idea. Others did. Where I live, we tend to call the Newcastle hero Joseph Swan the inventor of the incandescent bulb, and we are not wrong. He demonstrated his version slightly before Edison, and they settled their dispute by forming a joint company. In Russia, they credit Alexander Lodygin. In fact there are no fewer than twenty-three people who deserve the credit for inventing some version of the incandescent bulb before Edison, according to a history of the invention written by Robert Friedel, Paul Israel, and Bernard Finn. Though it may not seem obvious to many of us, it was utterly inevitable once electricity became commonplace that light bulbs would be invented when they were. For all his brilliance, Edison was wholly dispensable and unnecessary. Consider the fact that Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell filed for a patent on the telephone on the very same day. If one of them had been trampled by a horse en route to the patent office, history would have been much the same.
I am going to argue that invention is an evolutionary phenomenon. The way I was taught, technology was invented by god-like geniuses who stumbled upon ideas that changed the world. The steam engine, light bulb, jet engine, atom bomb, transistor – they came about because of Stephenson, Edison, Whittle, Oppenheimer, Shockley. These were the creators. We not only credit inventors with changing the world; we shower them with prizes and patents.