"The question that I first asked was, why was progress . . . speeding up over time? It arises because of this special characteristic of an idea, which is if [a million people try] to discover something, if any one person finds it, everybody can use the idea."
-- Paul Romer, on receiving the Noble Prize in Economics in 2018
Economics is the study and practice of optimizing resources by allocating those resources in ways that maximize their use and increase that use in the future. In 1990 Paul Romer advanced the theory of endogenous growth. The value of ideas can explain growth. The 20th century’s was based on human capital, innovation, knowledge, investment capital, and ability to protect intellectual property--and businesses founded on these dynamics. Thinking in new ways, applied profitably, contains the power to transform human living conditions, and much more--our collective options to build on affluence for groups and the individual. Education, another idea source, has long been dedicated to this goal as its main outlook.
This theory rests on the assumption that
the flow of new and economically actionable ideas is unlimited, as a main product
of the human imagination and ingenuity.
Throughout human history, ideas are in constant production. Not all are actionable or successful. But everything we have as part of culture,
from art to tools to high concepts like language and mathematics, began as an
idea in the human mind. From fire to
space exploration, ideas, as well as a way to make them reality, have ruled how
we live, and our view of what kinds of futures are possible. The human purpose on earth is an active
agenda in the daydreaming of us all.
“To my mind, intellectual creativity is
one of a number of deep mysteries about human cognition, to which it may be
vain to seek answers,” writes linguist Geoffrey Sampson in The Linguistic
Delusion (2017). Sampson draws parallels between linguistics and economics
in their respective searches for the limits of human cognition—one is in
language. The other is in idea
generation leading to long-term economic growth based on productivity and
technological change generated from innovations within an industry or economy. Sampson points to Romer’s 1990 theory of innovation
as a major advance in economics because it opens the floodgates to further
thought--by considering human cognition as an engine of economic growth. The digital economy is a prime example, including
the Internet, along with entrepreneurship as a main form of (GDP) strength in
both creating efficiency and new job talents.
The entrepreneurial revolution parallels
the Experience Economy described by Pine and Gilmore in 1999 as a means to
widen the standard view of goods and services as the mainstay of economic
thinking, expanding this view to include retail, movie-going, travel, medicine,
and education. Focus on experience as
its own economic category has prompted professionalizing of many spheres of
consumer activity, including medicine, car-buying, vacationing (resorts and
theme parks), with many new applications of design, like architecture, to theme
experiences of many kinds—for working, shopping, learning, socializing,
worshipping, and wellness, including death and dying.
Idea Generation
Endogenous growth is a breakthrough
because it counts as an endlessly renewable resource the output of the human
brain. The 1990s was coincidentally the
Decade of the Brain underwritten by US government funding to discover much of
what we now know about our most important asset.
The human brain is the most advanced
processing machine in the known universe.
It contains 86 billion brain cells, generating up to 3000 thoughts per
hour, nearly 1 per second, for 70,000 every day. Brainstorming in groups is much slower: the
6-3-5 method, between 6 people, yields 3 written ideas every 5 minutes. Memory
capacity is a quadrillion, or 10 to the 15th bytes, enough to store
the entire Internet. Computing speed per
second is 10 to the 13th -- 16th, more than 1 million
times the number of people on earth, and more than any existing supercomputer.
Given that English has over 1 million
words (including scientific and technical vocabulary), it is not hard to
appreciate how many variations within any given idea statement could be
developed. The simple directive “Our
industry needs to develop new ways of thinking about what we offer consumers”
could be restated and expanded infinitely to inspire all sorts of new
thoughts. Taking this further, lateral
thinking seeks out less familiar patterns over familiar ones. Shifting a concept from one domain to inform
another is a common brainstarter in corporate settings: “What ideas can be
imported from an unlike source to produce new ways of operating and offering new product lines?” Of course
there is a vast difference between gross and net in setting ideas within
language. The multiple iterations
required for publishing ideas in formal style is one example.
Neuromorphic engineering follows brain
function in using what we know about processing speed to develop faster
computer function while keeping energy demands low. The mind in fact uses a double processing approach of
two modes: the conscious and subconscious.
The conscious mind is the rational “top of mind,” the logical one that
can be trained to think, but this thinking is limited to the rational mode. This mode is vertical, using straightline logic “in the box.”
Below the frontal lobes, operating in the horizontal sphere of
lateral thinking “out of the box,” the subconscious mind is 80 times more
powerful at processing, comparing, and elaboration – which is the reason 95% of
our decisions are actually made subconsciously.
When we have to justify this 95% to the 5%, we recruit the conscious
compartment to devise a rationale for our deeper-brain decisions.
But these originate from a place far less
open to metacognition, knowledge of how and why our thinking works. It is also the mysterious, hard-to-examine
seat of our most brilliant ideas.
