Innovate or die, clearly true of all things in Nature as well as in the socio-economy.

But there seem to be rising concerns about the relative size of the second group, how one can enter it, and the overall implications.

Two lines of argument. One from Robert Gordon – http://www.c-span.org/video/?406230-1/qa-robert-gordon – about whether the kind of economic innovation we consider ‘normal’ is possible or likely any more.

Second, whether innovation is actually ‘costless’, alternatively put, where does new economic value come from. The debates about the ‘costs’ of new energy are raging. Subtler may be the debates about the intellectual and emotional ‘costs’ of the digitization of everyday life, and how the Internet of Everything will extend that. There are many other dimensions – healthcare, agriculture, transportation, surveillance, and so on – wherein innovations seem to have costs that eventually come home to roost, even as we ignore them in the early days.

Perhaps we have to get used to a way of thinking about innovation that does not ignore the many dimensioned ‘costs’ of the new goods and services we applaud?