A significant mistake by Willy Hague
Apparently science and technology is where it’s all going to be at. Which is something we’ll partially agree with. It is indeed advancing technology - the flip side of advancing productivity - which will determine future living standards.
Being a leader in technology has always been woven into the modern British story. We led the Industrial Revolution, and we survived the Second World War largely because we had such things as radar, Bletchley Park and Spitfire engines. But the next decade is likely to contain as much scientific advance as those last two centuries put together.
OK. So, how did we do all that technology and science stuff in the past? Well, Jethro Tull got to keep the benefits of the seed drill, Crompton’s Mule fees went to Mr. Crompton and so on down the generations. We had small government which meant that the returns to having invented, to having done science and technology, went to those who’d done the doin’.
Incentives do matter after all. And it’s possible to mutter that takin’ the rewards of success off those successful to then pay out to those not so rather blunts said incentives.
But this is a far greater error:
And while the great ideas will come from the private sector and academia, governments will be decisive in many ways: using procurement to favour innovative companies, speeding up regulators to clear new products for use,
The innovation cycle - the invention one if you prefer - doesn’t work on what regulators will clear for use. It works on the happy happenstance of someone finding a way of doing something that people want to do. And we don’t, in fact, know what people want to do until they’re able to do it. Which means before any regulator gets to stick their nose in and demand evidence that people do want the thing done.
The correct way to foster technological advance is to shoot - in the metaphorical sense, of course - those who delay it, the regulators insisting on the power to grant permission or not for something to enter the market. Razing that system to the ground and ploughing the land with salt afterwards is to be taken literally, of course.
Tim Worstall