Menu
How Innovation Works: Serendipity, Energy and the Saving of Time
Next in the queue
59
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
62/100Critics
17/100Scholars
98/100Author:
Matt Ridley
Publisher:
Harper
Date:
May 19, 2020
Best-selling author Matt Ridley explores the process of innovationâwhich he differentiates from inventionâand makes the case that free markets are crucial to that process.
What The Reviewers Say
Matt Ridley is one the best non-fiction writers of his generation.
For dedicated science readers, Ridley’s lessons may have a glancing and derivative feel. He knits together stories many of us have probably heard before...but somehow misses the opportunity to enliven these sketches with a sense of wonder and surprise. More seriously, he skirts the opportunity to footnote his summarizations, leaving only a skeletal guide to sources in his back pages. What becomes clear, though, is that Ridley is focused less on exploring the pageant of history than on fashioning a new belief system. I don’t necessarily mean this as a critique; in fact, the second half of his book—where he looks closely, chapter by chapter, at the factors that shaped the innovations he’s spent his first 200 pages describing—is more polemical in its approach but often more engaging, even as one might disagree with a narrative direction that arises from what I would characterize as the libertarian right.
An enthusiastic history.
