(Roughly) Daily

For years, people have bemoaned the sorry state of innovation. Compared with the great inventions of the industrial era, the inventions of our own time seem pathetic. In a short essay reprised from 2012, the estimable Nicholas Carr offers a different take: We’re as innovative as ever, but the focus of innovation has shifted…

… The original inspiration for such grousing… came from Robert J. Gordon, a Northwestern University economist. His influential 2000 paper “Does the ‘New Economy’ Measure Up to the Great Inventions of the Past?” included a damning comparison of the flood of inventions of a century ago with the seeming trickle we see today. Consider the products invented in just the ten years between 1876 and 1886: the internal combustion engine, the electric lightbulb, the electric transformer, the steam turbine, the electric railroad, the automobile, the telephone, the movie camera, the phonograph, the linotype machine, the film roll for cameras, the dictaphone, the cash register, vaccines, reinforced concrete, the flush toilet. The typewriter had arrived a few years earlier, and the punch-card tabulator, the computer’s precursor, would appear a few years later. And then, in short order, came the airplane, the radio, air conditioning, the vacuum tube, jet aircraft, the television, the refrigerator, and a raft of other home appliances, as well as revolutionary advances in manufacturing processes. (And let’s not forget The Bomb.)

The conditions of life changed utterly between 1890 and 1950, observed Gordon. Between 1950 and today? Not so much.

So why is innovation less impressive today?… maybe it’s crappy education. Or a lack of corporate investment in research. Or short-sighted venture capitalists. Or monopolistic business practices. Or overaggressive lawyers. Or imagination-challenged entrepreneurs. Or maybe it’s a catastrophic loss of mojo. None of these explanations makes much sense. The aperture of science grows ever wider, after all, even as the commercial and reputational rewards for innovation grow ever larger and the ability to share ideas grows ever stronger. Any barrier to innovation should be swept away by such forces.

Let me float an alternative explanation: There has been no decline in innovation; there has just been a shift in its focus. We’re as creative as ever, but we’ve funneled our creativity into areas that produce smaller-scale, less far-reaching, less visible breakthroughs. And we’ve done that for entirely rational reasons. We’re getting precisely the kind of innovation we desire — and deserve.

My idea is that there’s a hierarchy of innovation that runs in parallel with Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs. Maslow argued that human needs progress through five stages, with each new stage requiring the fulfillment of lower-level, or more basic, needs. So first we have to meet our most primitive Physiological needs, and that frees us to focus on our needs for Safety, and once our needs for Safety are met, we can attend to our needs for Belongingness, and then on to our needs for personal Esteem, and finally, at the peak of Maslow’s pyramid, to our needs for Self-Actualization.

If you look at Maslow’s hierarchy as an inflexible structure, with clear boundaries between its levels, it falls apart. Our needs are messy, and the boundaries between them are porous. A caveman probably pursued esteem and self-actualization, to some degree, just as we today spend time and effort fulfilling our physical needs. But if you look at the hierarchy as a map of human focus, then it makes sense — and seems to be borne out by history.

In short: The more comfortable you are, the more time you spend thinking about yourself.

If technological progress is shaped by human needs, as it surely is, then general shifts in needs would also bring shifts in the nature of innovation. The tools we invent would move through the hierarchy of needs, from tools that help safeguard our bodies or coordinate social groups on up to tools that allow us to modify our moods or express our individuality — from tools of survival to tools of the self. Here’s my crack at what the hierarchy of innovation looks like:

Innovation’s focus moves up through five stages, propelled by shifts in the needs we seek to fulfill. In the beginning come Technologies of Survival (think bow-and-arrow), then Technologies of Social Organization (think cathedral), then Technologies of Prosperity (think assembly line), then technologies of leisure (think TV), and finally Technologies of the Self (think Facebook, or Prozac).

As with Maslow’s hierarchy, you shouldn’t look at my hierarchy as a rigid one. Innovation today continues at all five levels. But the rewards, both monetary and reputational, are greatest at the top level (Technologies of the Self), which has the effect of shunting investment, attention, and activity in that direction. We’re already physically comfortable, so getting a little more physically comfortable doesn’t seem particularly pressing. We’ve become inward looking, and what we crave are more powerful tools for modifying our internal states or projecting those states outward to an audience. An entrepreneur today has a greater prospect of fame and riches if he or she creates a popular social-networking app than a faster, more efficient system for mass transit. Innovation, to put a dark spin on it, arcs toward decadence…

One might wonder why Carr doesn’t focus more (and more affirmatively) on information technologies– the emergence of personal computing in all of its form factors, the knitting together of the web and the advent of turbocharged connectivity, and on its back, the emergence of social media– all of which have been hugely impactful, perhaps especially in the 12 years since this essay was written: a “TikTok/YouTube/influencer election,” a social media fueled mental health concern, the proliferation of meme investing and online gambling, etc., etc… But then, one might conclude that they simply underline his point.

Why our innovations seem so small: “The Arc of Innovation Bends toward Decadence.”

Pair with Ted Gioia‘s painfully apposite “The State of the Culture, 2024.”

* Robert J. Gordon

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As we ponder progress, we might recall that it was on this date that an acute observer of this phenomenon, The Simpsons, made its debut as a full-length show. Originally a part of The Tracey Ullman Show, The Simpsons got their own Christmas special, which aired on FOX on this day in 1989.  “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire” (AKA “The Simpsons Christmas Special”– the first of an annual tradition) was created by Matt Groening and written by Mimi Pond (who only wrote the one episode). It was viewed by 13.4 million viewers, was nominated for two Emmy Awards, and hasn’t left the airwaves since.

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