This is nice. Where I disagree with him is about "creativity being embarrassing" -- this might be true for some, but not all. I, personally, thrive on having so

This is nice. Where I disagree with him is about "creativity being embarrassing" -- this might be true for some, but not all. I, personally, thrive on having someone else hear my idea, and at least say, "Huh," which gives me license to think further (rather than pause in despair, or remain stuck on that one, unarticulated thought). Something along these lines that I have been thinking about, yours for a nickel, is applying some principles of evolutionary biology to other domains with a selection process, specifically business and innovation. Species need to innovate in order to survive the vagaries of time. The process they use for doing this is selection, and the currency they spend is genetic diversity. The more standing genetic variation a population can hold onto, and the more freely it can move through the population, the more efficient selection will be, and the more easily that population will adapt and develop new features. These two quantities, the census population and overall population structure, are usually summarized in a single variable in many evolutionary models, the "effective population size" (which, for the curious, is usually measured as about 10,000 individuals for humans). We might apply the same principles to an economy in search of innovation. In this case, our selection process is a bit different, since instead of "survival and reproduction" we have something like "attracts capital and grows", but ideas can also spread and grow via conversation, etc. In this way, they are not atomic and indivisible like genetic variation, and their segregation is perhaps subject to more than just a selection process. The meat of the comparison, though, might hold true: we want both a large census population of innovators (to generate a large pool of diverse ideas) AND lack of "population structure", meaning things that prevent the flow of new ideas in the population (to allow those ideas to be excavated and exchanged efficiently rather than die on the vine unfulfilled). Monopoly is an obvious bad one; but so is orthodoxy of any kind. For example, if the sources of capital are highly constrained and are only willing or able to fund certain sectors, are risk-averse, etc., then innovation will be correspondingly constrained. This sort of thinking appeals to me because it demands: 1) widespread education in order to increase the pool of idea-generating individuals and 2) easier access to capital worldwide. Racism or classism is an obvious kind of 'population structure' that prevents capital from flowing evenly to all corners, and if our goal is an innovative (and therefore healthy) society, we should remove these hazards. Of course, this is only metaphorical and breaks down in many ways, but I find it a fun thought.