Phelps sobre inovação

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Review: ‘Mass Flourishing’

Review by Samuel Brittan

A defence of competitive markets is also a call to keep the faith

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A flight mechanic at work on a Boeing 747-8 freighter aircraft

Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge and Change, by Edmund Phelps, Princeton, RRP£19.95/$29.95, 392 pages

Edmund Phelps is known to economy watchers as the co-inventor, with the late Milton Friedman, of the doctrine that there is no long-term trade-off between inflation and unemployment; or, in more popular terms, you do not buy more jobs by tolerating high inflation, although a short-term stimulus is always possible. I will not risk my neck by pontificating on who got there first: probably some unheard-of pundit many generations back. One might have thought that Phelps would have achieved more publicity for this doctrine – which, with all due qualifications, happens to be correct. But, Nobel Prize in economics notwithstanding, he does not have Friedman’s genius for self-publicity.

In Mass Flourishing, drawing on a long academic career, Phelps paints on a much wider canvas. In old-fashioned terminology his book might have been called “A course in applied macroeconomics”, but that would hardly have appealed to publishers. The author ranges extremely widely and any student of any age will gain something from it, irrespective of political views.
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