"In nineteenth-century Britain and America, and later Germany and France, a culture of exploration, experimentation, and ultimately innovation grew out of the individualism of the Renaissance, the vitalism of the Baroque era, and the expressionism of the Romantic period. In view of the explosion in poetry, music, and art in the “creative” sector of the economy, it should not surprise us that imagination exploded in the rest of the economy too.
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What made innovating so powerful in these economies was that it was not limited to elites. It permeated society from the less advantaged parts of the population on up. People of ordinary background might be involved in innovations, large and small.
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[Moi ici: Agora uma bicada na tríade e nos Galambas deste mundo] In the classical models I have been describing, no one is trying to think up something new (except perhaps new profitable investments) and no one is attempting to create it. There is no conception of human agency, only responses to wages, interest rates, and wealth. The economy is mechanical, robotic.
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Such classical models are basic to today’s standard economics. This economics, despite its sophistication in some respects, makes no room for economies in which people are imagining new products and using their creativity to build them. What is most fundamentally “wrong with economics” is that it takes such an economy to be the norm—to be “as good as it gets.” The cost is that elements of the Western economies are becoming products of this basically classical economics, which has little place for creativity and imagination.
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In most of Western Europe, economic dynamism is now at lows not seen, I would judge, since the advent of dynamism in the nineteenth century. Imagining and creating new products has almost disappeared from the continent—a continent that had been a major wellspring of new industries and new ways of living. Growth there has stopped, and econometric estimates of the rate of homegrown innovation are generally small. The near disappearance of imaginative and creative activity has reduced indigenous innovation, contracted investment activity, and depressed the demand for labor.
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How might Western nations gain—or regain—widespread prospering and flourishing? Taking concrete actions will not help much without fresh thinking: people must first grasp that standard economics is not a guide to flourishing—it is a tool only for efficiency. Widespread flourishing in a nation requires an economy energized by its own homegrown innovation from the grassroots on up. For such innovation a nation must possess the dynamism to imagine and create the new—economic freedoms are not sufficient. And dynamism needs to be nourished with strong human values.
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Of the concrete steps that would help to widen flourishing, a reform of education stands out. The problem here is not a perceived mismatch between skills taught and skills in demand. (Experts have urged greater education in STEM subjects—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—but when Europe created specialized universities in these subjects, no innovation was observed.) The problem is that young people are not taught to see the economy as a place where participants may imagine new things, where entrepreneurs may want to build them and investors may venture to back some of them. It is essential to educate young people to this image of the economy."
Trechos retirados de "What Is Wrong with the West’s Economies?"
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