The discipline of economics is not what it used to be. Over the last few
decades, economists have begun a revolutionary reorientation in how we
look at the world, and this has major implications for politics, policy,
and our everyday lives. For years, conventional economists told us an
incomplete story that leaned on the comfortable precision of
mathematical abstraction and ignored the complexity of the real world
with all of its uncertainties, unknowns, and ongoing evolution.
What economists left out of the story were the positive forces of
creativity, innovation, and advancing technology that propel economies
forward. Economists did not describe the dynamic process that leads to
new pharmaceuticals, cell phones, Web-based information services--forces
that fundamentally alter how we live our daily lives.
Economists also left out the negative forces that can hold economies
back: bad governance, counterproductive social practices, and patterns
of taking wealth instead of creating it. They took for granted secure
property rights, honest public servants, and the willingness of
individuals to experiment and adapt to novelty.
From Poverty to Prosperity is not Tipping Point or Freakonomics. Those
books offer a smorgasbord of fascinating findings in economics and
sociology, but the findings are only loosely related. From Poverty to
Prosperity on the other hand, tells a big picture story about the huge
differences in the standard of living across time and across borders. It
is a story that draws on research from the world's most important
economists and eschews the conventional wisdom for a new, more
inclusive, vision of the world and how it works.
