Breezing through some of The Square and the Tower, I just want to make a few random remarks here about the concept of innovation.
It is usually, including in this work, treated, blindly, as an inherently beneficial, positive, characteristic of certain social and political structures, and not of others.
If you go back through history and look at innovations, they seldom, on closer inspection, failed to also contain losses of various kinds relative to what had gone before.
These losses often accrued to the non innovating consumers of these innovations, sometimes in unforeseen and sometimes long delayed ways, while the gains accrued mostly to their makers, and immediately.
I am not going to give examples right now, but just put it out there.
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