THE ORIGIN OF WEALTH

Going solely on the basis of a write-up in the Sunday Times yesterday,The Origin of Wealth looks worth a read. Eric Beinhocker, a senior fellow at the McKinsey Global Institute, reckons that the economy is a “complex adaptive system”. (Apparently) he explores why we respond to incentives in some cases and not in others, and looks at the interaction of states, markets and communities in creating social outcomes. Sounds interesting, and provides an economic lense on some of the things that Demos has been talking about for a while: how social systems are more than the sum of their parts, what this means, and how governnment operate in the space between trying to control and ‘deliver’ everything on the one hand, and simply ignoring problems on the other.