Column: Mass Flourishing-How It Was Won, and Then Lost
This essay is adapted from Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change, published this month by Princeton University Press.
The epic story of the West is the development in the 19th century of a mass prosperity the world had never seen and its near-disappearance in one nation after another in the 20th. Mass Flourishing is a history linking this story to the rise and fall of homegrown innovation. It is also a text on the nature and sources of prosperity. It has two components. The material part is growth of productivity and wages. The non-material part is flourishing - successful exercise of creativity and talents. To flourish, people have to engage a world of challenges and opportunities. The economy's dynamism and the resulting experience of business life are central to our well-being.
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2013/08/16/us/16reuters-column-massflourishing.html?hp