New Ideas are the Key to Economic Development

Arthur Diamond’s Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism joins a growing pile of books that seek to explain what the economic historian Deirdre McCloskey calls the Great Fact: the mind-boggling increases in per capita income in the last two and a half centuries that started in Northwestern Europe and spread around the world. Diamond joins very good company: McCloskey, for example, as well as Joel Mokyr (A Culture of Growth, 2016), Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now, 2018), Hans Rosling (Factfulness, 2018), Calestous Juma (Innovation and Its Enemies, 2016), David Rose (Why Culture Matters Most, 2019). And that’s just to name a few.

It’s a story we don’t really appreciate: Dennis, the constitutionally enlightened peasant from Arthurian Britain, would have found much with which he was familiar if he were transported to the ancient Roman Empire or anywhere else in medieval Europe. He would find our world bewildering, but perhaps more than anything, he would be surprised at how we just expect everything to get better. This year’s cars and cell phones are nice and all, but we just expect next year’s models to be even better. We embrace — or at least side-hug — creative destruction.

 
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