Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

it was far more difficult to

If Mother Nature made such a splendidly diverse planet through an algorithm of ruthless competition between selfish agents, why shouldn’t our economic systems follow the same rules?

The natural state of ideas is flow and spillover and connection. It is society that keeps them in chains.

Efficiency is generally held to be a universal goal for any economy—unless the economy happens to traffic in ideas.

If ideas were fully liberated, then entrepreneurs wouldn’t be able to profit from their innovations, because their competitors would immediately adopt them.

is a matter of trade-offs

Does this mean

raise the stakes for

The same math applies to

it would have taken years