Claims that innovation is always good rely on cherry picking data – policy should be designed to focus on the direction of innovation instead

For writers such as Steven Pinker (for example, in his book ‘Enlightenment Now’), the  human condition is steadily improving, and this improvement can be picked up across a  range of indicators: fewer homicides, fewer infant deaths, longer life expectancies,  improving human rights, increasing literacy, increasing average education, increases in  mean (and also median) wealth, fewer people in extreme poverty (less than 1 USD/  day), etc.  

However, while not denying significant progress in some areas, particularly the  reduction in violence, cherry-picking data to support a comforting Whiggish conclusion  is unlikely to generate robust evidence.  

To show that the picture is more nuanced, it is worth compiling an alternative,  complementary list of dimensions where public health and environmental wellbeing  are deteriorating, and highlighting that many of these are probably due to innovation:  for example, the appearance and rise of lung cancer (it was relatively unheard of, even  among doctors, by 1900: Proctor 2012); the problematic increase of allergies such as  asthma (which are somehow conspicuously absent in Amish communities, Holbreich et  al. 2012); the rapid increase of anaphylactic shock (Lee et al. 2017); the prolonged  decrease in human sperm counts (Levine et al. 2017); the positive relation between  new cancer cases and per capita income (which cannot be explained by improved  detection potential or longer lives: Luzzati, Parenti, and Rughi 2018); the rise of childhood   obesity (Ebbeling, Pawlak, and Ludwig 2002); the global burdens posed by air   pollution (Akimoto 2003), the collapse of insect populations (Kunin 2019); pervasiveness  of fluorinated chemicals in the environment (Lim 2019), plastic waste accumulating in  the oceans (Cressey 2016); the ‘annihilation’ of vertebrate populations in the context of  the current human-induced mass extinction event (Ceballos, Ehrlich, and Dirzo 2017);  the increasing share of Earth’s surface made desolate and uninhabitable by human  activity (e.g. Chernobyl, Fukushima, polluted battlefields such as Verdun in France  (Bausinger, Bonnaire, and Preuß 2007; Cooper 2018), the Union Carbide disaster area  in Bhopal with continuing groundwater contamination, perhaps also including landfill  sites, nuclear waste disposal areas, former mining sites, landmine fields); and so on.  

Rather than cherry picking data to support a preconceived view that innovation is  either always good or always bad, we should seek to better understand the nature of  innovation (in order to better design innovation policy), and hence there is a need for a  more nuanced discussion that rearticulates an old point: innovation has a direction as  well as a rate of change (Nelson 1962). Innovation can have good and bad effects, and  those positive and negative outcomes are typically unevenly distributed. Choices about  innovation are therefore complex and often contested, and the selection environment  that weeds out the ‘bad’ innovations is not something that can be taken for granted. Nor  can it be assumed in a pluralistic society, let alone world, that definitions of what counts  as good or bad are universally or even widely shared. It would be concerning if people  who occupy important positions in society overlook the fact that the definitions of good  and bad are reflected in the selection environment for innovation, and think that  innovation produces good outcomes naturally.  

In recent years, policymakers have seemingly neglected that innovation has a direction, and usually take it for granted that ‘innovation is good’ and hence, ‘more innovation  is better’. For example, when they directly compare the performance of countries using  indicators such as R&D spending or patenting, more is assumed to be better.  Understanding the downsides of innovation, and how those downsides are distributed,  might therefore help inform better policy. This editorial, and the special issue, seeks to  provide a bit more balance by giving space to suggestions that innovation is not always a  force for good.