Innovation is messy, unpredictable and difficult. It’s not a straight-line processes. That’s why you simply cannot use current technology to predict future innovation. No one knew, for example, that 4G wireless technology, because it was faster and smoother than 3G, would enable applications like Uber and Lyft that transformed an entire industry and provided new forms of consumer convenience and worker flexibility.
What we do know is that certain policy environments create greater opportunity for innovation than others. As an example, just compare Europe to the United States when it comes to the technology industry. Europe, despite being even larger than the U.S., does not hold a candle to the innovation force of this country. There are many factors and differences between the U.S. and Europe, but what is clear is that the U.S. has figured out something that the rest of the world has not: Heavy-handed tax and regulatory policies do not lead to greater invention.
This then is why populism, with its calls for more (European style) regulation on tech companies, is so troubling. And populism is on a tear both on the left and right. In pandering to popular sentiments, frustrations and dissatisfactions, populism provides bread and circuses rather than sound public policy that serves the country now as well as tomorrow.
Tech populism, in its current iteration, wants to tear down and refashion everything from broadband to social media to software through government power. Remaking whole industries in the fashion that politicians, not the marketplace nor the people, decide. Even worse, in most cases it is not the majority demanding change but rather the political class whipping their base up into a frenzy so that politicians and consultants can extract their respective winnings.
That politicians so quickly surrender principle to grievance politics is a betrayal. But it gets worse. Such populist thinking is also tearing away at supposed principled thought leadership, as IPI wrote last week.
Some argue that innovation will still happen regardless of the policy environment. They fail to grasp innovation’s nature and appreciate the innovation ecosystem. As with most ecosystems it is interconnected and, in many ways, delicate. Poor government choices can destroy it as easily as poor government choices have led to disastrous fires out west or led to poor levee management and flooding.
The time is now to choose sides, either for continued American leadership in innovation and creativity or to becoming just one more innovation also-ran.