The paradox of innovation

Abstract

Applying Humean empiricism to policy reform implies a “paradox of innovation.” All radical changes to human conventions, whether we eventually judge them beneficial or harmful, will be ex ante irrational: they initially lacked good evidence in their favor. Having set forth the paradox, this article treats some consequences. First, it argues that sound policy advice will be “supra-rational,” i.e. able to suggest one plausible convention without ruling out others, and relative to the state of both physical and political technology. Second, it analyzes “projectors” (disruptive policy entrepreneurs) as “zealots of means,” who seek not to achieve specified outcomes but to establish their preferred conventions. The article calls for making use of such zealots’ advice, as capable of yielding qualitative improvements in human welfare, while limiting their independent power and discretion. It glosses interest groups as zealots of means whose demands are less likely to be salutary. Third, after sharply criticizing the ethics of performing ( ex ante ) dangerous social experiments on the powerless, the paper nevertheless argues how we might usefully employ data from past instances of others' having performed them. Making a virtue of uncertainty, it advocates that each society's members learn from other democratic societies' apparently reckless innovations, since what seems reckless to one society's public may seem plausible and exciting to another's. The paper closes by stressing our rationality's necessary incompleteness.