… is from pages 433-434 of Johan Norberg’s splendid 2025 book, Peak Human: What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages [footnote deleted; link added]:
The other requisites for inclusivity are free markets and free minds. To bring something new into the world, people must be allowed to experiment with and exchange new theories, arguments, goods and services. Every major technological innovation is an ‘act of rebellion against conventional wisdom and vested interests’, explains the economic historian Joel Mokyr, and if conventional wisdom and vested interest are in positions to command what can and can’t be pursued, the result is stagnation.
DBx: Pictured above is one of the many wonderful fruits of human creativity unleashed in an open, free economy. This particular fruit of human creativity isn’t a marvel of technological brilliance; it’s a box. Yet this box – and the logistical innovations that complement it – make it one of the most momentous inventions in human history. These productive innovations are forever under threat from rent-seekers, the economically ignorant, and the arrogant who (whatever their particular reason) oppose change.
