Transaction Costs and Doomed Creditors

It is hardly an exaggeration to suggest that we live in a regime of innovation, a regime whose political, economic, technological, and cultural arms inextricably link innovation with progress, ingenuity, prosperity, and the greatness of nations, whereby innovation regulates our imagination and ambition in business, education, and just about any other field one can name. Under this regime, any question other than "how do we accelerate innovation" seems inconvenient, if not illegitimate. However, inconvenient questions do get asked from time to time by unorthodox thinkers, from whom we learn that even allegedly successful innovations bring with them not only winners but also losers [1], that hasty innovations might cause irreversible damage to nature and society [2], and that the enchantment of "thinking outside the box" might suppress ? rather than liberate ? original and creative thinking [3]. To these daring acts of questioning innovation I would add the following: the process of pursuing innovation might impose undue burden on innocent people. This happens, as this article explains, when innovators fail to properly account for the transaction costs of innovation.