innovation

The pattern of “competition” is an excellent case in point. Every economics textbook will tell you that competition between rival firms leads to innovation in their products and services. But when you look at innovation from the long-zoom perspective, competition turns out to be less central to the history of good ideas than we generally […]

Working out of the legendary Santa Fe Institute, where he served as president until 2009, West assembled an international team of researchers and advisers to collect data on dozens of cities around the world, measuring everything from crime to house-hold electrical consumption, from new patents to gasoline sales. When they finally crunched the numbers, West