… is from page 259 of Matt Ridley’s important 2020 book, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom:
Technology is absurdly predictable in retrospect, wholly unpredictable in prospect.
DBx: This reality is yet another that is predictably ignored by proponents of industrial policy as a means of improving the economic fortunes of the bulk of ordinary people within a country. These proponents fail to understand the importance of permissionless innovation – of open-ended, competitive trial-and-error – of emergent order. They are economic creationists, intellectually no more credible than are biological creationists who deny the reality of evolution by natural selection.
