K^2 London Keynote, "Where Does Innovation Come From?" from Lord Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist, presented on April 2nd, 2014.

1. Where does innovation come from?
Matt Ridley
Kenshoo
2 April 2014

3. Are we better off?

4. World economic growth
World Economics

5. World GDP per capita
http://www.krusekronicle.com/2008/07/index.html

6. The fall of poverty
The Economist*At 2005 PPP

7. How long does it take to earn
an hour of reading light?
Tallow candle
1800 – 6 hrs
Kerosene lamp
1880 – 15 mins
Incandescent bulb
1950 – 8 secs
CF bulb
1997 – ½ sec
Labour cost of 1,200 lumen
hours at average US wage
Nordhaus 1997: http://www.nber.org/chapters/c6064.pdf

8. But are we healthier,
happier, safer, better
fed, cleverer, cleaner, kinder, freer
, more peaceful, more equal?

9. Healthier
http://www.unicef.org/progressforchildren/2007n6/index_41802.htm
Child mortality

10. Happier

11. http://www.thegwpf.org/the-observatory/1378-indur-m-goklany-global-death-toll-from-extreme-weather-events-declining.html
Safer
Deaths from extreme weather

12. http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2011/04/food-consumption-around-world.html
Better fed
N America
Europe
S America
Asia
Africa
Kilocalories per head per day

13. Cleverer
The Flynn Effect

14. Cleaner

15. BBC, ONS
Kinder

16. Freer

17. More peaceful

18. More equal
Hans Rosling https://twitter.com/HansRosling/status/400030634921312256/photo/1

19. How is this possible?

21. Hybrid ideas

22. ``No man ever saw a dog
make fair and deliberate
exchange of a bone with
another dog’’
Adam Smith 1776

23. Comparative advantage
David Ricardo
1817
Adam takes 4 hours to make a spear and
3 hours to make an axe
Oz takes 1 hour to make a spear and 2
hours to make an axe
If Oz makes 2 spears
And Adam makes 2 axes
And they trade…
Then they each save an hour of work

26. Division of labour in nature

27. Species working for each other

28. The earliest evidence of trade
Bouzougar et al. 2007. PNAS 2007 104:9964-9969; Barton et al 2009 doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.

29. Neanderthal localism
http://www.eva.mpg.de/evolution/staff/hublin/pdf/Hublin_Steele_2006_CurrAnth.pdf
Dzudzuana
cave, Georgia

30. Where does innovation come
from?

31. Ray Kurzweil

32. Descent with
modification

33. Art Fry, inventor of the
Post-it note at 3M
“Innovation is a
numbers game. You
have to go through
5,000 to 6,000 raw
ideas to find one
successful business.”
Trial and error

34. Variation

35. Convergent evolution
Egyptian
Australian

36. Competition

37. • New ideas, often serendipitous
Vinyl
Cassettes
CDs
Digital
1975 1985 1995 2005
Succession and extinction

38. Replication

39. Sexual
population
Asexual
population
Cumulative evolution requires sex

40. Tasmania
Henrich 2004 American Antiquity
Two Tasmanians repairing and making spears (B.
Duterrau, 1855)

41. Tierra del Fuego

42. The ancient cloud
Maori fishing tackle; Kline and Boyd 2010

44. Human migration routes

45. Shipping routes

46. Airline routes

47. Fibre-optic cable routes

48. The collective brain
internet traffic : the Opte Project. Licensed under Creative Commons.

50. Can it go on?

51. ``We cannot absolutely prove that those
are in error who say society has reached
a turning point, that we have seen our
best days, but so said all who came
before us and with just as much
apparent reason...On what principle is it
that with nothing but improvement
behind us we are to expect nothing but
deterioration before us?’’
Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1830

52. Population growth rate is falling…

53. http://phe.rockefeller.edu/docs/PDR.SUPP%20Final%20Paper.pdf
More food from less land

54. We’re using less land to produce
more food
After 50 years the world uses 65% less land
to produce the same amount of food
“Peak Farmland and the Prospect for Land Sparing”
Jesse H. Ausubel, Iddo K. WernIck, Paul E. Waggoner

55. The shale gas bonanza

56. http://www.climate4you.com/
Global temperatures –
up 0.35C in 35 years

57. Climate change is slower than
expected

58. 1900
2007
Change
Malaria
won’t
get
worse
P. Gething et al Nature 2010

59. 59
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50563/abstract
“Our work was able to tease-out the CO2 fertilization effect by using
mathematical modeling together with satellite data adjusted to take
out the observed effects of other influences such as precipitation, air
temperature, the amount of light, and land-use changes.”
R. Donohue, 2013
Change in greenery, 1981-2011

62. World economic growth

63. World economic growth

64. World economic growth
Global Real GDP