My algorithms teacher states that algorithms are typically named after the last person to discover them, fitting with Steve Sailer’s statement and the idea that “It’s always in the last place you look, because after you find it you stop looking”.

Robin, the problem is a widespread perception that the last innovator in a chain deserves an overlarge share of the credit. People who share this bias don’t *think* that anyone is getting shortchanged on credit – that’s the *problem*. So long as innovators share the same faulty perception, they will think that the incentive structure is working properly, and invest their time accordingly.

But their motes are SO much bigger!

But it’s not like Henry Ford in your example was a wealthy monopolist who already owned a successful company and forced Nicolaus Otto to yield his inventions or anything. He was a automobile designer who produced technical innovations in his car *in addition* to process improvements in large-scale assembly line mass production, marketing, and other business organizations. Your statement gives the misleading impression that these are mainly people who had power who “stole” an invention.

Rather, the people listed are generally the *successful* people who took an invention, made improvements, and were able to successfully sell it to a mass audience and build a large company out of it. That adds value to life and affects people directly in a way that a discovery never marketed does not. Call it a bias towards engineers and away from scientists if you like, but there is a real reason behind the interest.

Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Willis Carrier and others were inventors who also founded successful companies to market their inventions. Yes, the incremental improvements to inventions are very important, but it’s understandable that attention focuses on the first person to make something widely commercially practical. Just as understandable (if a bit unfortunate) is the nationalistic bias that causes people to credit the “most significant” advance necessary for an invention to a citizen of their own country.

Yes, all true and I agree. However, my answer to the question of “how it could be worse” is that I fear that the popular press, rather than getting the story right, would merely replace the current type of heroic myth with a new kind of myth, the one about committees.

Of course it’s “wrong,” in some sense, to give all the credit to the one winner rather than the giants on whose shoulders he stood. But it’s no more particularly morally wrong than the first-mover or other winner-take-all advantages in a free-market system. I’m not sure how you can resolve those without taking away large amounts of incentive to improve things and invent. The historical story reflects the same “unfairness” as the economic results.

“But if what we really celebrate are people who grab credit for innovations, rather than the actual innovators, we may make things worse rather than better.”

Yes. But please don’t go too far in insulting those whose skills lie in business organization, marketing, implementation, or any of the other things that also help improve our lives. There is, I think, sometimes an urge to overpraise the “real inventors” (people who are absolutely very important) while ignoring that things like proper supply chain management and the ability to market, manufacture, distribute, and sell a product more efficiently have also brought dramatic gains in welfare.