2021: Year In Review
Ingenuism Weekly 35
“I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t be boring.” –David Bowie
MEDIA
Elon - Silicon Valley Examined 24
In this episode of the Silicon Valley Examined podcast, Robert Hendershott, Don Watkins, and Yaron Brook wrap up the year with a discussion of Elon Musk. Is he a hero of progress or a villain? What can we learn from him about the nature of innovation? What does the culture's attitude toward him say about its attitude toward progress?
INSIGHT
2021: Year In Review
Robert Hendershott and Don Watkins
The progress movement is one of the most energetic, innovative intellectual movements around. It’s also incredibly important and diverse.
Some defend the value of progress and the need to study it. Others are helping us understand the history of progress. Others are focused on assessing where we are and where we’re going.
Our focus is on understanding the foundations of progress, how progress will evolve in the 21st century, and the opportunities that this creates.
In April, we introduced Ingenuism with our first newsletter describing what we called the Miracle of the 21st Century: the rapid growth of the most valuable companies in history. We also laid out the three forces that explain the miracle:
Ingenuism is a new economic framework which holds that progress derives from ingenuity supported by the core principles of connection, exploration, and environment.
Connection is the ability for people to observe and learn from other people’s ideas and insights, and to collaborate in ways that generate better ideas and insights.
Exploration is our ability to test out ideas and engage in trial-and-error learning.
Environment is a culture (and legal framework) that not only allows for but encourages exploration, connection, and iterative learning.
When we get connection and exploration in a supportive environment, the result is rapid innovation, value creation, and progress.
We’ve been returning to these three key concepts again and again.
For example, we’ve seen how connection has helped conquer the problem of knowledge loss, enhanced the benefits of the division of labor, and turned Silicon Valley into America’s innovation engine.
We’ve seen how exploration made possible 3M’s success, how it could fundamentally alter the future of money, and how investors use exploration to funnel money to promising (but often high risk) new ideas.
We’ve seen how environment plays a crucial role in encouraging connection and exploration (e.g., patent protection), how environment can hold progress back (e.g., the precautionary principle), and areas in which it’s not clear exactly what kind of environmental factors maximize progress (e.g., government support for science).
We also published two major essays to delve more deeply into the forces that impact progress.
In “What COVID teaches us about the future of progress” we saw how the liberation of ingenuity brought us effective vaccines in record time—and how political barriers to ingenuity undermined the overall response to the pandemic.
In “The Failure Paradox,” we looked at the cousin of exploration: failure. To discover the new, certain kinds of failure are inevitable, and the success of an individual, a company, or a country depends on how they respond to those failures.
What’s next? One of the areas we’ve only started to explore is the intersection between Ingenuism and finance. And yet it’s one of the areas most important to explore. Both because it is so high-leverage in terms of supporting ingenuity and innovation—and because it has the potential to allow each of us as individuals to benefit even more from human progress.
Stay tuned.
Happy New Year,
Robert and Don
Thank you both for my regular dose of optimism and wonder. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!