Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge and Change

Donald Boudreaux reviews Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge and Change by Edmund Phelps. While Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century tells of a one-dimensional, dreary, mechanical world in which wealth grows independently of human volition and where each person is fixated on the amount ofmoney in other people's paychecks and bank accounts. In a contrast that could not be more stark, Phelps - the 2006 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics - describes a world rich with varied motivations and bursting with the potential for creativity and the promise for all people of lives that are not only materially prosperous but mentally and emotionally satisfying.