Innovation and diffusion of knowledge

Growth stagnant, inequality rising , Crisis seems to follow crisis, the environment is suffering  and Covid-19 pandemic has exposed every crack in the system.

The answer is to create a better capitalism by understanding and harnessing the power of creative destruction innovation that disrupts, but that over the past two hundred years has also lifted societies to previously unimagined wealth.

Philippe Aghion of the College  de France and  the London School of Economics, and two collaborators Celine Antonin and Simon Bunel investigates the evidence including the most fundamental economic questions, roots of growth and inequality, competition and globalisation, the determinants of health and happiness, technological revolutions, secular stagnation, middle income traps, climate change and how to recover from economic shocks.

They reveal that we our modern standard of living to innovations enabled by free-market capitalism.

We need state intervention with the appropriate checks and balances to simultaneously foster ongoing economic creativity, mange the social disruption that innovation leaves in its wake and ensure that yesterday’s superstar innovators don’t pull the ladder up after them to thwart tomorrow’s. The book is a blueprint for change and an ambitious reappraisal of the foundations of economic success.

Innovation and diffusion of knowledge are at the heart of the growth process, Innovators are motivated by the possibility of lucrative monopoly, Innovation threatens incumbents who will fight to thwart it.

The Power of Creative Destruction: Economic Upheaval  and the Wealth of Nations by Philippe Again, Celine Antonin and Simon Brunel, Translated by Jodie Cohen -Tanugi, Belknap Press $35/£28.95/Euro31.50,