Matt Ridley argues that it is the ever-increasing exchange of ideas that causes the ever-increasing rate of innovation in the modern world — but there’s something to be said, as any Silicon Valley venture capitalist will tell you, for bringing capital and talent together:
For most of history, people have been adept at keeping them apart.
In imperial Rome, scores of unknown slaves no doubt knew how to make better olive presses, better watermills, and better wool looms, while scores of plutocrats knew how to save, invest, and consume. But the two lived miles apart, separated by venal middlemen who had no desire to bring them together.
An anecdote repeated by several Roman authors drives home the point. A man demonstrates to Emperor Tiberius his invention of an unbreakable, malleable form of glass, hoping for a reward. Tiberius asks if anybody else knows his secret and is assured nobody does. So Tiberius beheads the man to prevent the new material from reducing the relative value of gold to that of mud.
The moral of the tale — whether it is true or not — is not just that Roman inventors received negative reward for their pains but that venture capital was so scarce that the only way to get a new idea funded was to go to the emperor.