Innovators love to innovate

Grant McCracken has an excellent post on innovation, focusing in on the crucial point that slipped by the usually-sharp Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution and Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek: innovators like to innovate. Man is a creative animal. Innovation & discovery are among the best experiences that life has to offer.

Like the stereotypical economists who Cowen argues elsewhere are not representative of the complex set of members of the economics profession, Cowen and Boudreaux fill their theories with people who are motivated by instrumental rationality, with perhaps a few deviations from perfect rationality (like excessive optimism) and maybe even something non-monetary (fame) to seek in the end. (For Cowen's full defense of economists, click through to the PDF that he has written elsewhere.)