The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [196]
p. 264 ‘the Wright brothers effectively grounded the nascent aircraft industry’. Heller, M. 2008. The Gridlock Economy. Basic Books.
p. 264 ‘a logjam in the manufacture of radios caused by the blocking patents held by four firms’. Benkler, Y. 2006. The Wealth of Networks. Yale University Press.
p. 265 ‘the biggest generators of new patents in the US system are “patent trolls” – firms that buy up weak patent applications’. I am indebted to R. Litan for this information.
p. 265 ‘Research in Motion, the Canadian company that manufactures BlackBerries’. Baumol, W.J., Litan, R.E. and Schramm, C.J. 2007. Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism. Yale University Press.
p. 265 ‘Michael Heller’s analogy for the patent trolls is to the state of the river Rhine between the decay of Holy Roman imperial power and the emergence of modern states’. Heller, M. 2008. The Gridlock Economy. Basic Books.
p. 266 ‘In one survey of 650 R&D executives from 130 different industries’. Von Hippel, E. 2005. Democratizing Innovation. MIT Press.
p. 266 ‘most of the money goes towards me-too drugs for diseases of Westerners’. Boldrin, M. and Levine, D.K. 2009. Against intellectual monopoly. Available online: http://www.micheleboldrin.com/research/aim.html.
p. 267 ‘only one country had allowed the copyrighting of music’. Boldrin, M. and Levine, D.K. 2009. Against intellectual monopoly. Available online: http://www.micheleboldrin.com/research/aim.html.
p. 267 ‘Just as newspapers have derived little of their income from licensing copyrights’. Benkler, Y. 2006. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. Yale University Press. (Benkler’s book, true to his argument, is available free online.)
p. 268 ‘chronically entrepreneurial’. Audretsch, D.B. 2007. The Entrepreneurial Society. Oxford University Press.
p. 268 ‘laying the foundations for their global dominance at the expense of precisely the big companies dirigistes admired’. Postrel, V. 1998. The Future and Its Enemies. Free Press.
p. 269 ‘A large study by the OECD’. Quoted in Kealey, T. 2007. Sex, Science and Profits. William Heinemann.
p. 270 ‘a recent survey of forty-six major inventions’. Agarwal, R. and Gort, M. 2001. First mover advantage and the speed of competitive entry: 1887–1986. Journal of Law and Economics 44:161–78.
p. 270 ‘sired by the bicycle out of the horse carriage’. Rolt, L.T.C. 1967. The Mechanicals. Heinemann.
p. 271 ‘cross-fertilisation ... does ... happen between species of bacteria, 80 per cent of whose genes have been borrowed from other species’. Dagan, T., Artzy-Randrup, Y. and Martin, W. 2008. Modular networks and cumulative impact of lateral transfer in prokaryote genome evolution. PNAS 105:10039–44: ‘At least 81 +- 15% of the genes in each genome studied were involved in lateral gene transfer at some point in their history.’
p. 271 ‘able to produce only sterile offspring’. The sterility of hybrids was a problem that greatly exercised Charles Darwin, chiefly because it was being claimed by some American anthropologists that black people were a separately created species, which justified slavery, and even that hybrids between blacks and whites were sterile. See Desmond, A. and Moore, J. 2009. Darwin’s Sacred Cause. Penguin.
p. 271 ‘Technologies emerge from the coming together of existing technologies into wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts.’ Arthur, B. and Polak, W. 2004. The Evolution of Technology within a Simple Computer Model. Santa Fe working paper 2004-12-042.
p. 271 ‘Henry Ford once candidly admitted’. Evans, H. 2004. They Made America. Little, Brown.
p. 272 ‘in the historian George Basalla’s words’. Basalla, G. 1988. The Evolution of Technology. Cambridge University Press.
p. 272 ‘an invention looking for a job’. http://laserstars.org/history/ruby.html.
p. 273 ‘Eric von Hippel, incidentally, practises what he preaches’. Von Hippel, E. 2005. Democratizing Innovation. MIT Press.
p. 274 ‘as Geoffrey Miller reminds us’. Miller, G. 2009. Spent. Heinemann.