All of Jason Scharf's Comments + Replies
AMA: Jason Crawford, The Roots of Progress
What is the role of geography and place in the future of progress?
There was the recent paper on "Why Britain? The Right Place (in the Technology Space) at the Right Time" looking at why Britain gained economic leadership during the Industrial Revolution. We have seen the agglomeration effects on innovation regions with Detroit in the 40's and 50's and Silicon Valley in the 1990s-2010s.
On the other hand we are seeing remote work and considerably high demand for it. Recent data on LinkedIn had 14% of jobs being listed as remote, but garnering 52% of the applications. IP commercialization is not limited to where it was developed.
11yThere are some analysis about why democracy, modernity appeared in Europe,
earlier in Greece, and there are two related analysis.
One is by David Cosandey, "Le secret de l’Occident. Vers une théorie générale du
progrès
scientifique, "
You can translate this related presentation to have a quick vision:
https://gerflint.fr/Base/MondeMed4/Demorgon_Secret.pdf
[https://gerflint.fr/Base/MondeMed4/Demorgon_Secret.pdf]
He proposes 2 concepts, one is "articulated thalassography", a measurement I've
seen in fractal theory, comparing the length of the coast with surface of the
country that can be reasonably defended...
Another is "Mereuporia", the capacity in a zone to have stable "realms" that
compete strongly but can never win totally on the whole zone...
Both ideas push countries to stay stable, exchange much, innovate much, and
prevent the creation of a sterile centralized empire.
The second author, cited David Cosande (and Isaac Asimov, and many others,
including a post-Roman historian) : Philippe Fabry
https://www.amazon.com/s?i=digital-text&rh=p_27%3APhilippe+Fabry&s=relevancerank&text=Philippe+Fabry
In English there is only: "history of next century", and "Rome from
libertarianism to socialism: Ancient lessons for our time"
He has a more comprehensive theory of history (Historionomy), proposing that
there have been 3 ages, with Mycenian empire, Roman Empire, and US Empire,
evolving in spiraling cycles...
What he calls Civilization A was Greece, and now is Europe (before it was Cretan
"palaces"), with dynamic states that from medieval period, move to a
Renaissance, with each country making a national transition from medieval to
monarchy then parliamentary democracy.
However, this transition is frozen during wars when the country is troubled...
Britain with 100 years war, delayed French Revolution by 100 years, while it's
own process was not... it became the "thalassocracy" , having control over the
commerce... WW1&WW2 (German national transition, which trigge
11yThe more transportation and communication technology advance, the more we
conquer time and space, and the less they matter. However, they still matter a
lot, and will for the foreseeable future. We would need something faster than
supersonic airplanes, or some kind of very high-fidelity VR/telepresence, for
the effect of distance to be negligible.
Emphasis on “foreseeable”—maybe something will happen that makes distance
obsolete.
On the other hand, it can only do so as long as we stay on one planet. Once we
go beyond Earth, the speed of light makes distances matter again. Even between
here and the Moon, a ~2.5-second round trip delay makes real-time conversations
awkward. Between here and Mars, the delay is measured in minutes, making even
basic web browsing basically impossible. Once we become interstellar, we're
basically forking human civilization. So probably “place” will always matter.
One of the consequences of the pandemic is a dispersion of talent and capital away from of the traditional regional economic engines. Steve Case documented that change in his Rise of the Rest book and you spoke on Joe Londsdale's American Optimist podcast on how Austin maybe one of big beneficiaries of this change.
To see if this is leading to a change in regional innovation we have to be able to measure it, but as I see it the traditional measures have some large flaws.
The primary challenge is that innovation is created locally and distur... (read more)