The Power of Creative Destruction

Hayek Book Prize FinalistAn Economist Best Book of the YearA Foreign Affairs Best Book of the YearA Financial Times Summer Reading Favorite “Sweeping, authoritative and—for the times—strikingly upbeat…The overall argument is compelling and…it carries a trace of Schumpeterian subversion.” —The Economist “[An] important book…Lucid, empirically grounded, wide-ranging, and well-argued.” —Martin Wolf, Financial Times “Offers…much needed insight into the sources of economic growth and the kinds of policies that will promote it…All in Washington would do well to read this volume carefully.” —Milton Ezrati, Forbes Inequality is on the rise, growth stagnant, the environment in crisis. Covid seems to have exposed every crack in the system. We hear calls for radical change, but the answer is not to junk our economic system but to create a better form of capitalism. An ambitious reappraisal of the foundations of economic success that shows a fair and prosperous future is ours to make, The Power of Creative Destruction draws on cutting-edge theory and hard evidence to examine today’s most fundamental economic questions: what powers growth, competition, globalization, and middle-income traps; the roots of inequality and climate change; the impact of technology; and how to recover from economic shocks. We owe our modern standard of living to innovations enabled by free-market capitalism, it argues, but we also need state intervention—with checks and balances—to foster economic creativity, manage social disruption, and ensure that yesterday’s superstar innovators don’t pull the ladder up after them.