The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [56]
So while it is true that institutional innovators in the public sphere are just as vital as technological innovators in the private, I suspect that specialisation is the key to both. Just as becoming a specialist axe maker for the whole tribe gives you the time, the capital and the market to develop a new and better form of axe, so becoming the specialist bicycle racer enables you to make up rules about bicycle racing. Human history is driven by a co-evolution of rules and tools. The increasing specialisation of the human species, and the enlarging habit of exchange, are the root cause of innovation in both.
Chapter Four
The feeding of the nine billion: farming after 10,000 years ago
Whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.
JONATHAN SWIFT
Gulliver’s Travels
Oetzi, the mummified ‘iceman’ found high in the Alps in 1991, was carrying as much equipment on him as the hikers who found him. He had tools made of copper, flint, bone and six kinds of wood: ash, viburnum, lime, dogwood, yew and birch. He wore clothes made of woven grass, tree bark, sinew and four kinds of leather: bearskin, deer hide, goat hide and calf skin. He carried two species of fungus, one as medicine, another as part of a tinder kit that included a dozen plants and pyrite for making sparks. He was a walking encyclopedia of accumulated knowledge – knowledge of how to fashion tools and clothes and from what materials to make them. He carried the inventions of scores, perhaps thousands, of people upon him, their insights manifest in his kit. If he had had to invent from scratch all his equipment he would have had to be a genius. But even knowing what to make and how to make it, if Oetzi had spent his days collecting all the raw materials he needed for just his food and his clothing (let alone his shelter or his tools), he would have been stretched to breaking point, let alone if he then had to smelt, tan, weave, sew, shape and sharpen everything. He was undoubtedly consuming the labour of many other people, and giving his own in exchange.
He was also consuming the specialised labour of other species. Oetzi lived about 5,300 years ago in an Alpine valley. This was 2,000 years after agriculture reached southern Europe. Compared with his hunter-gatherer ancestors, Oetzi had cattle and goats that spent all day working for him gathering grass and turning it into leather and meat; wheat plants that gathered sunlight and turned it into grain. Under human genetic tutelage these species had grown specialised in doing so at the expense of their other biological imperatives. That is the point of agriculture: it diverts the labour of other species to providing services for human beings. The biologist Lee Silver was once watching chickens coming ‘home to roost’ in a village in south-east Asia and it struck him that they were like the farmer’s tools: they had been gathering food for him in the forest all day. Farming is the extension of specialisation and exchange to include other species.
Oetzi was also the beneficiary of capital investment. He lived right at the beginning of the metal age, when copper was first being smelted. His pristine copper axe, 99.7 per cent pure, had been smelted in a furnace that had consumed a lot of somebody’s capital to build. The chaff in his clothing came from a grain crop grown with invested capital in the form of stored seeds and stored labour. For Adam Smith capital is ‘as it were, a certain quantity of labour stocked and stored up to be employed, if necessary, upon some other occasion’.
If you can store the labour of others for future use, then you can spare yourself the time and the energy of working for your own immediate needs, which means you can invest in something new that will bring even greater reward. Once capital had arrived on the scene, innovation