During these tough moments our community might provide insight to get new great jobs

Keep up the good work

From my study of many texts on the subject of economics, the only serious attempts in trying to see what makes our social system operate are either a) oversimplified or b) based on statistical data which replaces the “how” with the “what the response was”. Neither of these two kinds of answers are satisfactory and in fact the abilities of modern macro-economic theories to forecast the future are very poor.

In response to this unsatisfactory situation I have developed a new theory and associated model which has the advantages of being sufficiently (but not too) simple so as to express the whole system in terms that are understandable. I would be glad to share this original work with somebody from your readers or research workers whose interest is academic (like my own) and can appreciate the difference between the present-day econometrics and what should be possible by use of methods taken from a more distant perspective that encompass the whole shebang.

Many thanks for your comment – of course you’re absolutely correct.

It’s important to remember two things about this blog. The first is that Matthew and I do it in our spare time and so we can’t address everything immediately. The second is that innovation is at the heart of the matter on which we’re trying to stimulate debate. Either in our spare time or in our day jobs, we’d love to do some reviews and analysis of different experiences of innovation and what they can teach us.

I know you’re generally supportive of Matthew’s blog, but to defend it against the criticism you make – which as I say is fair – it was designed more as a follow up to the growth limits ding-dong we had earlier in the week in which we felt the role of technological innovation was being overlooked. Hence the emphasis on this occasion on technology. However, as we both work for a public policy research institute, you can probably guess where we think the emphasis should be placed.

My experience of the climate debate is on the international side. In the UNFCCC negotiations the word innovation is bandied around without any proper understanding of what it is; most negotiators assume it’s just R&D. As you suggest, it’s a process with many, complex stages and, currently, many different metaphors are being used and it’s hard to say whether these are accurate or errant.

It’s great that you’ve found us. We’re working on blogs all the time, but often have to run the gauntlet of our families and write these in the evening and at weekends. However, we’re at a critical crossroads in the climate debate and so now is the time for these debates to be had.

Keep reading and commenting and thanks for the link, which we’ll follow up.

Andrew.

I agree with your emphasis on innovation here, but this post is poorly titled. You have listed a number of interesting and promising developments, but in the end you have said very little about innovation itself. How does innovation actually work?

You raise some important general innovation challenges in your last paragraph, these are tip of the iceberg. It’s not just about raising the capital (whether public or private), it’s figuring out how to invest it. People use all sorts of analogies for this: a new Manhattan Project, a DARPA for energy (ARPA-E), an Apollo moonshot effort… the list goes on. But are people actually thinking about how these models of innovation differ from one another, and which of them might actually be appropriate to the task? I suspect that in general they have not. They use these analogies because of a vague idea that those other cases were successful in some way, but that’s as far as it goes.

I recommend you check out this report recently released jointly by a few DC-based organizations, which tries to inject some clarity with respect to innovation and the energy/emissions challenge:
http://www.cspo.org/projects/eisbu/

For the purposes of disclosure, I did not work on this project personally, but I am affiliated with one of the participating organizations (CSPO).

Hope it proves interesting.
Thanks!

Ryan