As the late Harvard historian Arthur Cole wrote: “To study the entrepreneur is to study the central figure in economic history.” The Industrial Revolution was powered by entrepreneurial energy. In the nineteenth century, as political and economic freedoms advanced, millions of human beings were at last free to make of themselves whatever their passions and energies allowed.

The second crucial point of convergence was far more recent, and arguably far more transformative. It began some 12,000 years ago when some of our ancestors began to routinely store food and experiment with cultivation, transforming their relationships with their environments, with each other, with scarcity, and with work. Exploring this point of convergence also reveals how much of the formal economic architecture around which we organize our working lives today had its origins in farming and how intimately our ideas about equality and status are bound into our attitudes to work.

The principal purpose, however, has been to loosen the claw-like grasp that scarcity economics has held over our working lives, and to diminish our corresponding and unsustainable preoccupation with economic growth. For by recognizing that many of the core assumptions that underwrite our economic institutions are an artifact of the agricultural revolution, amplified by our migration into cities, frees us to imagine a whole range of new, more sustainable possible futures for ourselves, and rise to the challenge of harnessing our restless energy, purposefulness, and creativity to shaping our destiny.

It is common, and natural, to tell the history of innovation through the exploits of men of genius, such as Edison and Tesla, and pioneers such as Berners-Lee and the Wright brothers. But if the Wright brothers had not flown in 1903, someone else would have done something very similar in some other location. Collective intelligence develops when the accumulation of collective knowledge reaches a point at which talented people identify problems that this shared knowledge can be employed to solve. And it is also common, and natural, to describe the history of innovation through the introduction of new gadgets, from aeroplanes to iPhones. I have taken running and apples as examples to emphasise that the

growth of collective intelligence has a range and applicability that extends well beyond technology.

The economies and societies that emerged from the scientific revolution advanced through

disciplined pluralism. Pluralism is the freedom to try new ideas or new ways of doing old things or promoting new products. A society with freedom of speech and a vibrant research community enjoys a surfeit of claims to new knowledge. Likewise, a competitive business environment stimulates the adoption of new business processes and the offer of new goods and services. An economy characterised by disciplined pluralism will applaud these novelties but weed out those not worth pursuing from those that are. In these ways humans navigate radical uncertainty – and prosper from it. Economic advance through disciplined pluralism is an evolutionary process, resembling natural selection.