It was not something that happened within a brain. It was some thing that happened between brains. It was a collective phenomenon.

As it is, a clutch of coal and nuclear power stations and a handful of oil refineries and gas pipelines supply the 300 million Americans with nearly all their energy from an almost laughably small footprint – even taking into account the land despoiled by strip mines. For example, in the Appalachian coal region where strip mining happens, roughly 7

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the capacity of a tiny pocket calculator in 2000 would have cost you a lifetime’s wages in 1975.

Empires, indeed governments generally, tend to be good things at first and bad things the longer they last. First they improve society’s ability to flourish by providing central services and removing impediments to trade and specialisation; thus, even Genghis Khan’s Pax Mongolica lubricated Asia’s overland trade by exterminating brigands along the

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As long as new ideas can breed in this way, then human economic progress can continue. It may be only a year or two till world growth resumes after the current crisis, or it may for some countries be a lost decade. It may even be that parts of the world will be convulsed by a descent into autarky, authoritarianism and violence, as happened in the

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Yet intellectual property is very different from real property, because it is useless if you keep it to yourself. The abstract concept can be infinitely shared. This creates an apparent dilemma for those who would encourage inventors. People get rich by selling each other things (and services), not ideas. Manufacture the best bicycles and you

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By exchanging, human beings discovered ‘the division of labour’, the specialisation of efforts and talents for mutual gain. It would at first have seemed an insignificant thing, missed by passing primatologists had they driven their time machines to the moment when it was just starting.

If economic growth does not produce happiness, said the new wisdom, then there was no point in striving for prosperity and the world economy should be brought to a soft landing at a reasonable level of income. Or, as one economist put it: ‘The hippies were right all along’.

The perpetual innovation machine that drives the modern economy owes its existence not mainly to science (which is its beneficiary more than its benefactor); nor to money (which is not always a limiting factor); nor to patents (which often get in the way); nor to government (which is bad at innovation). It is not a top-down process at all. Instead,

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