The Coming Prosperity: How Entrepreneurs Are Transforming the Global Economy

Once the system didn’t function normally, it came very close to not functioning at all.

Production recipes are the how of economic life—the repeatable steps that allow individuals or, far more often, groups of people, to turn raw materials into useful products. Most production recipes, like most culinary recipes, are unwritten. Most managers, like most cooks, are not hugely inventive. The creation of new forms of economic activity, li

Only when enhanced by the power of recombination does the increased efficiency achievable by specialization—heralded by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations—yield TiVos, Mini Coopers, camera phones, and all the other complex outputs of twenty-first-century global supply chains.

Seriously. In part that’s because the economics of the twentieth century was overwhelmingly about how best to share existing “pies” of human well-being, rather than how

everyday practice of providing lower-level personnel both the discretion and the information they need to improvise in response to particular situations.

That was understandable because, for the bulk of the twentieth century, basic research and big business were the primary vehicles of economic growth and prosperity.

Urban sprawl and the traffic it engenders is an example of a paradox of prosperity—a

For individuals, companies, and nations alike, it’s time to be what matters.

When it comes to technologies that have made it all the way to the village level on a truly global scale, the previous success was the radio. And before that? Fire.