Be the next tech hotshot – by staying the hell away from regulators

And this is rather good news for the IT industry

Which brings us to the vital point of what's going on here. We can look around ourselves and see that the tech business itself is vibrantly creative (the UK's Silicon Roundabout less so than the PR hype, perhaps, but still more so than most other sectors of the economy) in a manner that, say, food distribution or energy generation is not, nor banking.

And why is that? The answer perhaps being that the tech sector is doing something new: something where there isn't either an incumbent industry that needs to be attacked nor a regulatory thicket that must be overcome.

Tech is more like that Smithian, or ultra micro economic, economy than much of the rest of the business landscape.

There are the basic rules – the rule of law, property ownership, a tolerable administration of justice, and so on – and really not much more to prevent people getting on with whatever it is that they want to do. We can even see this in starker contrast when some part of that tech industry meets the old immovability.

Consider Uber, Lyft, Le Cab and the rest: their problems come not from the tech part of what they're doing, but from the regulatory interface with the extant taxi and limo industry. Or the way in which Amazon is not allowed to offer discounts on books in France in order to protect physical bookstores. The hassles that Bitcoin and online payment processors have with money-laundering regulations.

Perhaps all of these restrictions are necessary, perhaps they're not: that's more of a political question than an economic one. But it is undoubtedly true that their existence does retard the growth of the new in a manner that both Smith and the new new economics would and do condemn.

All of which leads to two points: the one I've already mentioned, which is quite how closely this new economics seems to be tracking what we've assumed to be true for the past couple of hundred years since it was first pointed out.

In other words, leave people to get on with things and they'll tend to get them sorted out.

The second is that if you're a tech type looking for an adventure of a new and different kind, try to aim your project at an area which is truly new, not just a better way of doing old things. By doing that, you're likely to find that there isn't some regulatory thicket that you must fight through before you can start enjoying the fruits of your labours.

It might be that a new method of curing cancer will produce a great deal more human happiness than the next Flappy Birds. But the next mobile smash-hit game could be on the market next week, and any medical treatment requires a decade of examination by the bureaucracy before it can be used by paying customers. ®