Mises Wire

Has Innovation Reached Its Breaking Point?

Writing for Entrepreneur, Per Bylund offers three arguments for why innovation skeptics are wrong.

With the Tesla 3 hitting the markets, innovation is on everybody’s minds. However, an electric car is hardly revolutionary: It’s at best an evolution of what already exists. While Elon Musk’s venture is touted as innovative, it can be seen as a symptom of the very condition that many have observed lately: innovation inactivity.

In Tyler Cowen’s “The Great Stagnation,” he argues that we’ve already picked all the low-hanging fruit available as far as innovation goes. PayPal co-founder and Facebook investor Peter Thiel has a similar outlook, famously stating, “We wanted flying cars; instead, we got 140 characters.”

Thiel is right: We certainly don’t have flying cars. We don’t even have self-driving cars, even though it looks like we’ll soon get there. And we have flying drones, though they are still used more for our personal entertainment than transportation.

While things haven’t turned out as we had hoped, it doesn’t mean we have run out of innovation. “Stagnation” is probably a poor word choice for what we’ll see in the near future. 

Click here for the full article. 

image/svg+xml
Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.
What is the Mises Institute?

The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. 

Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.

Become a Member
Mises Institute