Sublime

Joel Mokyr notes that “aggregate statistics like GDP per capita and its derivatives such as factor productivity . . . were designed for a steel-and-wheat economy, not one in which information and data are the most dynamic sector. Many of the new goods and services are expensive to design, but once they work, they can be copied at very low or zero c

There are two complementary answers to this question: modern science and capitalism.

believe in the invisible hand of the data flow.

Intriguingly, when prosperity skyrocketed in recent centuries, it did so only in some parts of the world, triggering a second major transformation unique to our species: the emergence of immense inequality across societies.

The typical economist believes the world has not yet invented a problem that he cannot fix if given a free hand to design the proper incentive scheme.

The most important question in twenty-first-century economics may well be what to do with all the superfluous people.