Bring Your Thinking Cap

The mysterious "Sammler" has a fascinating post on what he calls "the Initiative Hypothesis", which he states thusly:

The rate of both technological and material progress within a society inevitably increases with increasing freedom.

But does it?

Well worth reading.

Comments

[sammler]

Thanks! And I'll have you know that I blogrolled you independently, not because of the tip...

[Pouncer]

Arguing from aphorism: "Necessity is the mother of invention". It seems to me at some point being freed from the irritations constraints and bothers of the "is now" would leave one deprived of the inspiration to seek the "could be better" .

Do the experiment -- are the offspring of prosperous families under or over represented among list of sucessful innovators?

[Paul Zrimsek]

Sounds a mite over-ambitious to me. That is, unless Sammler's "inevitably" is the equivalent of Krugman's "mathematically impossible".

[Appalled Moderate]

Depends how you define "freedom". It's hard to innovate when the primary concern is making enough to live. Libertarian thought does not encompass FDR's "freedom from want" into its definition of freedom, but it's hard for me to understand how you event the next great thing, when you have to worry about getting something to eat instead of an education.

[TM]

It's hard to innovate when the primary concern is making enough to live.

Yes, but... viewed over a longer perspective, early innovations included things that increased the output of the agricultural sector. And even today, there are plenty of poor centrally planned economies - No Korea springs to mind.

[Appalled Moderate]

I concede your point, TM. I really am a small-government moderate (one of the reasons Bush makes me nuts, btw) But to accept this an axiom, we need some kind of proof that it explains events. And you do not get there without a definition of "freedom" that recognizes that government isn't the only entity that puts restraints on it. Sometimes, it is just circumstances. Sometimes, it's society, religion, "what people might think" or the threat of an active volcano. Of course, once you start expanding the definition of freedom, the axiom becomes less useful.

[ed]

Hmmm.

Sorry but completely incorrect!

The true connection is the one between genius and population. The logic is as follows:

1. Genius is the result of random chance.
2. Larger populations have a greater chance of creating geniuses.
3. Larger populations are only possible when there is sufficient food, prosperity and stability.
4. Tyrannies are generally very bad for property rights, which tends to undermine food production, prosperity and stability, c.f. Zimbabwe.
5. Democracies are generally very good for property rights, which tends to promote food production, prosperity and stability.

Increasing freedom can help progress, because it promotes food production, prosperity and stabililty, but it isn't necessarily the direct cause.

This also explains why abortion is bad.

And why the Malthusian theory population overflow is wrong.

...

Hey it's a slow day. And my personal philosophy requires me to irritate or annoy at least one person each day. *tag* You're it! :)

[Ken]

"Arguing from aphorism: "Necessity is the mother of invention". It seems to me at some point being freed from the irritations constraints and bothers of the "is now" would leave one deprived of the inspiration to seek the "could be better" "

Freedom doesn't preclude irritation with the status quo. It does allow people to solve their problems in novel ways and to get rich selling their solution to others similarly irritated. Without that freedom, you can either turn your creativity and dissatisfaction with the status quo to the task of overthrowing the state, or to the task of subverting the state's restrictions on your solution to the original problem, or to the task of learning to live with it, or to the task of committing suicide. This tends to slow down the rate at which actual solutions to problems are found.

"Depends how you define "freedom". It's hard to innovate when the primary concern is making enough to live. Libertarian thought does not encompass FDR's "freedom from want" into its definition of freedom"

Neither did the US government during the Robber Baron era, but an awful lot of technological advancement occured at that time.