interdependence effect

A powerful idea I came across when I was going through famous journalist and scientist Matt Ridely’s book ‘The Rationalist Optimist’ (which is a historical analysis how human prosperity has evolved) is the power of interdependence. Progress is fueled by the vast interconnection of diverse pre-existing ideas and resources which effectually breeds new ideas and inventions. The process of invention and innovation is beautifully infinite which thrives best on a larger and diverse pool of ingredients which are free to mingle and exchange. The ability to exchange is naturally catalyzed by the phenomena of specialization and trust which are important features of a progressive economy where innovation in different fields is possible due to deep specialization of large organizations of people in specific capabilities to produce specific resources and the possibility of having trust on external parties to provide for the deficit resources which are outside their specific capabilities via trade ultimately creating an efficient system where all needs are satiated along with the possibility of innovation. Inter-dependence is thereby extremely crucial for progress where free exchange, merging and hybridization of existing ideas are possible in a friction-less manner in order to breed new ideas which effectually drive the human race forward. The idea of self-sufficiency is thereby a highly malignant idea which detracts progress as you are contracting the pool of ingredients from which from which new ideas and inventions can breed. New ideas and inventions which are presently outside our comprehension or reach is at best possible only when there is a free conduit to exchange and inter-connect all the prevalent ideas and resources from all over the world. Each generation has the optionality and power to create new and previously undiscovered recipes of ideas and inventions by experimenting and interconnecting old recipes of the previous generation which were in turn built upon older recipes of their previous generation and so on which effectively amounts to a beautiful evolutionary process of incremental growth that magically leverages all knowledge condensed and organized across a vast band of time. The process continues forward where the future generations will constantly build on the recipes of their previous generations triggering branched-out unpredictable chain reaction breeding radically newer ideas and inventions catalyzed heavily by the necessary phenomenon of free-flowing interdependence among a growing pool of diverse elements. Hence, the ability of economies and individuals to thrive and progress is strongly attributed to its interdependence power. The importance of interdependence can be easily overlooked at times but the insights from ‘The Rationalist Optimist’ make a very strong case that interdependence is an extremely powerful ideological invention of history that has arguably played the strongest role in facilitating all the other inventions of the world.