Innovation and its Discontentents

One thing that I tell people is if you're going be, if you're going to do anything new or innovative, you have to be willing to be misunderstood. If you cannot afford to be misunderstood, then for goodness' sake, don't do anything new or innovative.
Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos reveals what it's like to build an empire and become the richest man in the world — and why he's willing to spend $1 billion a year to fund the most important mission of his life

There are, of course, people who genuinely cannot afford to be misunderstood. But the number is likely smaller than we suspect. More often, it's a matter of the price of misunderstanding being higher than seems reasonable under the circumstances. If we define "innovation" as "doing things differently than has commonly come to be expected," then there are a lot of people who spend their time innovating, in an attempt to improve their condition in life. But many Black people in the United States have become wary of innovating themselves because they perceive both the likelihood and the costs of misunderstanding to be high. (Of course, many people perceive the likelihood and costs of being misunderstood to be high even when they are acting well within the status quo.)

In a culture that values doing new things and innovation as much as modern America does, it can be easy to forget that innovating has costs beyond that of the labor and materials that go into it. And so Mr. Bezos' quote can be a helpful reminder of the fact that social innovation also has costs. And those costs can be high. The lack of generalized, directed innovation results in the status quo remaining in effect, and so the period of invention and experimentation is prolonged. And while piecemeal innovation has lower collective social costs than a coordinated group shift, those costs must still be paid, and so the fall on the innovative individuals.

Innovations create opportunities, and opportunities tend to come at a cost. And, as Mr. Bezos points out, incumbents who are currently benefiting from the status quo are quick to understand their potential to need to bear those costs, and will mobilize criticism in attempt to head them off by derailing the new innovation. But criticism of innovation can also be a means of justifying a reaction to an innovation that would otherwise be seen as unwarranted. As these factors that raise the cost of innovation, the impulse to outsource the task to people better able to bear the costs (or for whom there are lower costs) is understandable. But people who innovate on behalf of others do so commonly out of a profit motive, rather than solely the betterment of their clients. And so it's worth asking if the final cost is even higher.