Summary |
In provocative and entertaining fashion, The Origin of Wealth surveys the cutting-edge ideas of leading economists and scientists who are reshaping economics and brings their work alive for a broad audience. Beinhocker argues that the economy is a “complex adaptive system,” more akin to the brain, the Internet, or an ecosystem than to the static picture presented by traditional theory.
Building on these new ideas, Beinhocker shows how wealth is created through an evolutionary process. Modern science views evolution not just as a biological phenomenon, but as a general-purpose formula for innovation. It is this evolutionary formula, acting on technologies, social institutions, and businesses, that has taken us from the Stone Age to the enormously complex $36.5 trillion global economy of today. If Adam Smith provided the inspiration for economics in the twentieth century, Charles Darwin is providing it in twenty-first.
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