"The cumulative accretion of knowledge by specialists that allows us each to consume more and more different things by each producing fewer and fewer is, I submit, the central story of humanity. Innovation changes the world but only because it aids the elaboration of the division of labour and encourages the division of time. Forget wars, religions, famines and poems of the moment. This is history’s greatest theme: the metastasis of exchange, specialization and the invention it has called forth, the ‘creation’ of time."
— Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist
