Sublime

The confusion of inequality with poverty comes straight out of the lump fallacy—the mindset in which wealth is a finite resource, like an antelope carcass, which has to be divvied up in zero-sum fashion, so that if some people end up with more, others must have less. As we just saw, wealth is not like that: since the Industrial Revolution, it has e

Bizarrely, it’s precisely the jobs that shift money around–creating next to nothing of tangible value–that net the best salaries.

of larger society. So that’s a very old battle in human history between the self-serving stories of an elite and the stories that can actually help serve a broader society. Part of what we’ve seen in our economics is that elites previously used to appeal to gods, to how our ancestors did it, to the natural order, etc., to make credible their storie

Economically relevant information is discovered from experimentation, not deduced from a model.

"Conservatism," argued the journal, "is as much due to mental laziness as it is to fear of change.

The third innovation, after science and institutions, was a change in values: an endorsement of what the economic historian Deirdre McCloskey calls bourgeois virtue.12

The US Small Business Administration concluded in a 2003 study that “A small firm patent is more likely than a large firm patent to be among the top 1 percent” of innovations that make a commercial difference.

The economic growth of the wealthier countries benefits the very poor as well, though sometimes with considerable lags. The distribution of wealth changes over time, and not all growth trickles down, but as an overall historical average, the bottom quintile of an economy shares in growth.10 You can see this by comparing the bottom quintile in, say,