by Per Bylund
Mises.org
Writing for Entrepreneur, Per Bylund offers three arguments for why innovation skeptics are wrong.
With the Tesla 3 hitting the markets, innovation is on everybody’s minds. However, an electric car is hardly revolutionary: It’s at best an evolution of what already exists. While Elon Musk’s venture is touted as innovative, it can be seen as a symptom of the very condition that many have observed lately: innovation inactivity.
In Tyler Cowen’s “The Great Stagnation,” he argues that we’ve already picked all the low-hanging fruit available as far as innovation goes. PayPal co-founder and Facebook investor Peter Thiel has a similar outlook, famously stating, “We wanted flying cars; instead, we got 140 characters.”
Thiel is right: We certainly don’t have flying cars. We don’t even have self-driving cars, even though it looks like we’ll soon get there. And we have flying drones, though they are still used more for our personal entertainment than transportation.