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topics

	Use of computer models to prove that things will work which
makes innovation depend less on status.

importance and rarity of freedom to innovate

limited scope of freedom to innovate

	Effective freedom to invent has been rare in human history.
History shows that the Chinese and Japanese are as capable
intellectually as the Europeans, but for many hundreds of years their
Confucian society discouraged invention, while post-renaissance
European and American society encouraged it.  England in the
eighteenth century and American in the nineteenth were the pre-eminent
inventors.

	Now the inventor and those who contemplate backing him have
also to worry about "technology assessment" and other planners of
the future.  They may think his invention a bad idea or it may
simply not fit into their plans for the future, and they may try
to suppress his invention.

	Who can get a proposal for an innovation seriously considered
depends on the subject matter.  In 1905, Albert Einstein, an unknown
employee of the Swiss patent office, submitted a paper to the
prestigious German journal %2Annalen der Physik%1 proposing that
the laws of mechanics, accepted for 200 years, needed fundamental
revision to account for behavior of matter moving at high relative
velocities.  Within a few years Einstein's theory was accepted by
most physicists even though the most famous physicists were very
doubtful about it.  This is because the relation between theory an
experiment is very objective in physics, and experiments and
observations were readily made that confirmed Einstein's theory.
In the 1920s, when Einstein was the world's most famous physicist,
his attempts at unified field theory were not accepted and neither
were his objections to the uncertainty principle in quantum
mechanics.

	Contrast this with the reception of
the idea that traffic will flow better
if cars are allowed to make right turns on red lights after stopping.
This innovation was tried in California and found to be successful
in the 1930s.  It gradually spread and forty years later it had
been adopted by all but two states.  The Federal highway officials
then coerced the remaining two states into adopting it.  Highway
rules are less objectively decidable than the laws of physics and
more subject to politics.  Incidentally, in coercing the last two
states, the Feds were killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
The experiment of letting cars make right turns on red would probably
have been never tried if each state hadn't been free to make its
own rules, thus giving the rule 48 chances rather than one of being
adopted in the 1930s.

Maybe it should be organized by particular current proposed innovations
and the opposition to them and then generalized.

	One example of the advantage of products over services
is the telephone answering machine.

	Everyone is familiar with telephone answering machines.
The same service can be offered by telephone companies, since
they already can divert calls to answering services with human
operators.  While answering machines have been available for
(I guess) fifteen years, telephone companies are only beginning
to offer the equivalent service, which has the advantage of avoiding
equipment in the subscribers home that can break down.  It would
be interesting to know the detailed reasons for the delay

	Telephone companies are just beginning to offer the same
service provided by telephone answering machines.  It has the advantage
of not requiring maintenance or space in the home and applying
to all phones in the home and not just the one to which the machine
is attached.  Bell Telephone Laboratories have had the capability
to develop the necessary equipment longer than anyone else.  Why then
are the telephone companies fifteen years behind the independent
manufacturers.  Indeed, one can suspect that without the competition,
the service still wouldn't be offered.  Basically, an answering machine
is a transaction between a seller and a buyer.  A buyer can benefit
himself whether anyone else buys the machine, and a manufacturer
can win if the world market is large enough.  Moreover, the product
can be pioneered by any one of hundreds of manufacturers.  Answering as telephone
company service requires requires a large enough local market, action
by the monopolist, deciding to compete with the manual answering
services who are customers, and persuading a government agency
to ignore protests of the competitors and set a tariff.  Thus we
see that a product can often beat a system even when the latter
is technologically superior.

	Another important computer-based innovation is the cashless
society.  Violent crime for money will become almost impossible, since
the robber cannot get away with forcing someone to transfer money to
his account.  Already the use of checks has reduced the take from
robberies.  When all money is transferred from one account to another,
it will also be difficult to sell stolen goods.
When people receive bills by computer mail, one can pay
a bill by pressing one key.

bb The Regulatory Ethic

	There is reason to hope that the U.S. is beginning to
recover from what might be called the regulatory ethic.  It was
the idea that every ill of society

	What are the reasons given for the suppression of innovation?
Are they sound?  Are they the real reasons?

	The most straightforward reason given is that a particular
innovation represents a danger to the public.  This could even
be true, but I can think of no absolutely clear-cut case of an
innovation that would be pursued except for legal obstacles where
I would agree that the obstacles are justified.  

	#. The specific proposal is dangerous.

	#. It is socially undesirable.

	#. Here is how the promoter of the innovation will use it to harm
or overcharge the public.  All possibilities for this must be
foreclosed by regulation before the innovation can be allowed
to proceed.

	#. It doesn't fit into the plan.

	#. It hasn't been proved safe and effective.

	#. It doesn't suit public convenience and necessity.


	Part of the fascination that liberals have with dictatorships
of various kinds is that it arouses the reformist imagination
to contemplate the shortcut of persuading the dictator or the party to adopt a
reform that the reformer sees as entangled in conflicting
interests or bureaucracy in his own country.

	The most immediately apparent way of making an innovation
is to get the ear of the king.

	We have almost lost our ability to make new systems, because
franchises can't be obtained.
	To most Americans, new