… is from page 20 of Matt Ridley’s splendid 2018 Hayek Memorial Lecture at London’s Institute of Economic Affairs, as this lecture is printed (with comments by Stephen Davies) as How Many Lightbulbs Does It Take to Change the World? (2019):
So my message is that because innovation is a bottom-up evolutionary process deriving from dispersed knowledge, instead of messing around trying to find a magic way to create innovation, government should focus on removing things that stop it.
DBx: Yes! Oui! Si! Ja! Da! 是!
And one sure way to stifle innovation – including, but not only, by redirecting resources away from competition for the expenditures of consumers and toward competition for the favor of government officials – is to give power to government to direct and ‘encourage’ innovation through the likes of industrial policy.
