From Poverty to Prosperity: Intangible Assets, Hidden Liabilities and the Lasting Triumph over Scarcity

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The discipline of economics is not what it used to be. 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. What they left out of the story were the positive forces of creativity, innovation, and advanced technology that propel economies forward. They 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. From Poverty to Prosperity narrates and explains the revolutionary reorientation of economics in recent decades toward a new focus on understanding the huge differences in the standard of living across time and across borders. Mixing interviews with the world’s most important economists with their own clear and insightful analysis, Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz have produced an illuminating and thought‐​provoking guide to what they call “Economics 2.0.”