In Adam Gopnik’s excellent piece about Gillette razors and innovation in the New Yorker, he discusses the fact that each new generation of razors—Gillette’s latest, the Fusion, now has five blades and a “triple-A battery inside, which makes it vibrate delicately to no particular purpose, like an old electric football game” (probably the best simile I’ve read all year)—doesn’t seem to work any better than the previous one.

Am I just five times more likely to cut myself?

This Gopnik explains with what he calls the “Devil’s Theory of Innovation”: briefly, that “cutthroat…competition produces stasis,” and that “we are born to be inherently frivolous aesthetes, who like change for change’s sake.”

I am deeply sympathetic to this point of view. In fact, Gopnik’s piece reminded me of a long law-and-economics argument that I had seven or eight years ago with Yale Law professor (and erstwhile Microsoft consultant) George Priest on the same topic: Gillette’s farcical march of purported technological progress toward ever more blades. The argument happened over a lovely dinner (more…)