Progress Creates Interdependence

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At the core of innovation is usefulness. It provides us with new ways of operating and organizing or greater, more effective ways of doing the old. The impact on our lives is enabling us to do more work—to be more productive. Innovation makes the world more orderly and less random but infinitely more complex. Because of this, we become more specialized in what we produce and more diversified in what we consume. Self-sufficiency is traded for mutually beneficial collaboration. As a result, the world gets more output through the interdependence needed to support the knowledge of progress.

Innovation has created a cycle of self-sufficiency and interdependence. During an economic downturn, there’s a retreat towards self-reliance. In economic advances brought on by innovations, an increase in interdependent cooperation comes because we specialize more in services but buy everything else. This cycle creates a lasting theme across human history. The narrowing of work and broadening of everything else. Put another way, there’s a gradual increase in specialization and a diversification in consumption. Something that increases specialization or diversifies consumption lasts through these cycles. Self-sufficiency comes and goes.