Mises Wire

Has Innovation Reached Its Breaking Point?

Writing for Entrepreneur, Per Bylund offers three arguments for why innovation skeptics are wrong.

With the Tesla 3 hitting the markets, innovation is on everybody’s minds. However, an electric car is hardly revolutionary: It’s at best an evolution of what already exists. While Elon Musk’s venture is touted as innovative, it can be seen as a symptom of the very condition that many have observed lately: innovation inactivity.

In Tyler Cowen’s “The Great Stagnation,” he argues that we’ve already picked all the low-hanging fruit available as far as innovation goes. PayPal co-founder and Facebook investor Peter Thiel has a similar outlook, famously stating, “We wanted flying cars; instead, we got 140 characters.”

Thiel is right: We certainly don’t have flying cars. We don’t even have self-driving cars, even though it looks like we’ll soon get there. And we have flying drones, though they are still used more for our personal entertainment than transportation.

While things haven’t turned out as we had hoped, it doesn’t mean we have run out of innovation. “Stagnation” is probably a poor word choice for what we’ll see in the near future. 

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