5 Posts found for Author: Ryan Avent

Ten years after the first stirrings of the global financial crisis of 2007–09, economic historians are trying desperately to understand what has gone wrong. With remarkable frequency, writers and thinkers orient themselves and their stories around World War II, which seems entirely appropriate: What’s happening in the global economy and in politics certainly may feel like an unraveling of the postwar institutions and order. But … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Ryan Avent | Source: “strategy+business” | Subjects: Economics, History

[Adam] Smith saw things differently. Trade is not zero-sum, he wrote. Rather, trade increases the size of the market, which allows for greater labour specialization. Specialized labour is more productive than non-specialized labour, so that a world of trade and specialization, in which many people focus on one task and exchange their produce with others in mutually beneficial trades, is one in which everyone is … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Ryan Avent | Source: “Evonomics” | Subjects: Economics, Trade

People, essentially, do not create their own fortunes. They inherit them, come to them through the occupation of some state-protected niche, or, if they are very brilliant and very lucky, through infusing a particular group of men and women with the germ of an idea, which, in time and with just the right environment, allows that group to evolve into an organism suited to the … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Ryan Avent | Source: “Evonomics” | Subjects: Economics, Entrepreneurship

The wealth of humans is societal. But the distribution of that wealth doesn’t rest on markets or on social perceptions of who deserves what but on the ability of the powerful to use their power to retain whatever of the value society generates that they can.

That is not a radical statement. People take what they can take, and it is only the interplay of countervailing … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Ryan Avent | Source: “Evonomics” | Subject: Economics

The wealth of humanity is limited by our ability to produce goods and services of value. The production of goods and services of value increasingly rests on the collection, processing and management of information. There is no value without the knowledge of what can be produced, what ought to be produced, and how it can be produced most effectively. It is the information-processing structures of … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Ryan Avent | Source: “Evonomics” | Subjects: Economics, Information