Innovation is both a genuine development and a fad.
In a free society, with unrestricted flows of information, capital, labor, and goods, it’s nearly inevitable that people will improve products and services in powerful, clever ways.
Innovation – the word, the idea, etc. – is also a contemporary fad, the jargon of our time. It may be one of the greatest fads of our time, this ceaseless chattering over ‘innovation’ in our politics and economics. Read, watch, and listen and one finds that – from any direction – America must innovate, must be innovative, desperately needs Innovative Ideas, Innovation Centers, Innovation Programs, Innovation Projects, Innovation Cats & Dogs, Innovation Cereal, etc.
Over at the New Republic, there’s an essay entitled, Our Naive “Innovation” Fetish that describes how vacuous the term innovation has become. (The essay mostly criticizes the fad of innovation from the left, because that’s the orientation of the magazine. Still, author Evgeny Morozov rightly sees over-use of the term as an across-the-spectrum problem.)
I know that there’s a section in the local Gazette that focuses on innovation. The New Republic‘s essay pre-dates the section in the Gazette, but nicely illustrates the over-use of the word.
The term – repeated in communities incessantly as though it were a mental tic – is mostly empty when so repeated, borne of insecurity and the chicanery that feeds on insecurity.
‘Innovation’ has the nature, if not the illegality, of a confidence game to it: “It all begins with ‘you really, really need to do this,’ ‘I just know you can do it,’ and ‘let me be the one to help you.’
In so many cases, and certainly in Whitewater, projects for innovation are (1) schemes to take public money, (2) pretend it has a productive or civic purpose, (3) while actually using it to enrich undeserving, white-collar business people and their connected friends.
That’s not a crime, but it is repulsive corporate welfare.
It is the truly needy who have a claim to public support, not a collection of cunning, insatiable men.
Among those who flack innovation as a political solution, one will find, principally, the scared and the scheming. The first group is sadly desperate; the second is a white-collar group using others’ desperation for its own private profit at public expense.