Category: Economic Growth

Peter Boettke Offers Advance Praise for Openness to Creative Destruction

Prometheus didn’t ask permission for Zeus to bring fire to the humans. It cost him dearly, as Zeus punished him in a rather vicious manner. But human beings were made infinitely better off with fire. Art Diamond relays this story to us precisely because he wants us to understand the great benefits that entrepreneurial innovation deliver for mankind, and yet how the true innovator is often despised and disrespected by the prevailing orthodox establishment. If Prometheus had to get permission before giving fire to man, then man would have never gotten the benefits of fire. Similarly, if our entrepreneurial innovators had to get permission prior to introducing their innovation, we would still be walking around or perhaps at best riding on the backs of beasts but I doubt we would have seen the benefits of automobiles, let alone planes, and we would very well not have modern conveniences such as indoor plumbing, let alone air travel, cell phones, and the world wide web.

Peter Boettke, Professor of Economics & Philosophy, George Mason University; Director F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center.

Boettke’s advance praise is for:
Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming June 2019.

Innovative Entrepreneurs Bring Prosperity to the Poor

(p. A17) As the economist Joseph Schumpeter observed: “The capitalist process, not by coincidence but by virtue of its mechanism, progressively raises the standard of life of the masses.”
For Schumpeter, entrepreneurs and the companies they found are the engines of wealth creation. This is what distinguishes capitalism from all previous forms of economic society and turned Marxism on its head, the parasitic capitalist becoming the innovative and beneficent entrepreneur. Since the 2008 crash, Schumpeter’s lessons have been overshadowed by Keynesian macroeconomics, in which the entrepreneurial function is reduced to a ghostly presence. As Schumpeter commented on John Maynard Keynes’s “General Theory” (1936), change–the outstanding feature of capitalism–was, in Keynes’s analysis, “assumed away.”
Progressive, ameliorative change is what poor people in poor countries need most of all. In “The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty,” Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen and co-authors Efosa Ojomo and Karen Dillon return the entrepreneur and innovation to the center stage of economic development and prosperity. The authors overturn the current foreign-aid development paradigm of externally imposed, predominantly government funded capital- and institution-building programs and replace it with a model of entrepreneur-led innovation. “It may sound counterintuitive,” the authors write, but “enduring prosperity for many countries will not come from fixing poverty. It will come from investing in innovations that create new markets within these countries.” This is the paradox of the book’s title.
. . .
One example that the authors cite is Tolaram Group, a Singapore-based conglomerate that created the instant-noodle market in Nigeria, pushing out 4.5 billion packets annually and generating revenue of almost $1 billion a year. Sourcing, manufacturing, distributing and selling its Indomie-branded noodles required that Tolaram invest in a broad and deep logistics and distribution chain; create a retail network; develop specialized training; acquire its own electricity generation; build a water and sewage-treatment plant; and construct a deep-water port in the city of Lekki. Had Tolaram waited for the Nigerian government to address these infrastructure and institutional challenges before investing in the country, the company would still be waiting. Other examples include British businessman Mo Ibrahim’s pan-African Celtel, which built a cellphone network across 13 African countries and gained 5.2 million customers in six years, and India’s Narayana Health, which has brought the cost of open-heart surgery down to $1,000.
. . .
Instead of a book of glib answers, they present something much more powerful–a work of creative destruction for today’s failed development-policy paradigm.

For the full review, see:
Rupert Darwall. “BOOKSHELF; A Better Way to Fight Poverty; The current foreign-development paradigm of government-funded programs should be replaced by an entrepreneurial model.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, January 31, 2019): A17.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Jan. 30, 2019, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘The Prosperity Paradox’ Review: A Better Way to Fight Poverty; The current foreign-development paradigm of government-funded programs should be replaced by an entrepreneurial model.”)

The book under review, is:
Christensen, Clayton M., Efosa Ojomo, and Karen Dillon. The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty. New York: HarperBusiness Press, 2019.

Luis Locay Offers Advance Praise for Openness to Creative Destruction

Openness to Creative Destruction is first and foremost a great read. Much of the book is devoted to skillfully chosen accounts of usually successful, but occasionally unsuccessful, entrepreneurs to illustrate the author’s arguments. At times these accounts made me feel like I was reading a series of short adventure stories. This use of examples to make the argument for the central role of the creative entrepreneur in generating innovation, and the benefits that can accrue to society from creative destruction, makes the book very accessible to the intelligent layman or beginning student, while its serious ideas will be of interest to professional economists and sophisticated policymakers. The theoretician of entrepreneurship or innovation will find it a one-stop source of real-world examples. I plan to make it required reading in my growth and industrial organization classes.

Luis Locay, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Miami.

Locay’s advance praise is for:
Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming June 2019.

Roger Koppl Offers Advance Praise for Openness to Creative Destruction

Diamond shows us that entrepreneurial innovation is not just the best way to make a better world. It is the only way. If we care about our fellow humans, then we had better do what we can to enable entrepreneurial innovation. Diamond shows with an unusual depth and breadth of scholarship that the most important thing we can do to promote innovation is to let entrepreneurs test their impossible ideas in the free market. Diamond’s book is a gem. Grab it, read it, learn from it.

Roger Koppl, Professor of Finance, Syracuse University. Author of Expert Failure and other works.

Koppl’s advance praise is for:
Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming June 2019.

Deirdre McCloskey Offers Advance Praise for Openness to Creative Destruction

Astoundingly rich in ideas and stories, Diamond’s sweet and beautiful book is more: an open-handed guide to what really matters in explaining, and sustaining, the Great Enrichment of 3,000 percent per person 1800 to the present. Diamond assuages the ancient fear of betterment, recently haunting us with spooks of AI and technological unemployment. He shows conclusively that an “innovative dynamism” enriches us all, materially and spiritually. The poor are bettered. The jobs are bettered. Read the book and be bettered, freed from specious and politically poisonous worries about economic change.

Deirdre McCloskey, UIC Distinguished Professor of Economics and of History Emerita. Author of Bourgeois Equality and many other works.

McCloskey’s advance praise is for:
Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming June 2019.

George Bittlingmayer Offers Advance Praise for Openness to Creative Destruction

For tens of thousands of years, before the Age of Innovation, human beings merely survived by hunting, gathering or tilling, and lived in caves or dirty, squalid huts. In marked contrast, the average person alive today enjoys a standard of living and access to entertainment, medical services, travel, and communications technology that our ancestors would have regarded as miraculous. Art Diamond skillfully shows how we got the many wonders we take for granted – everything from indoor plumbing to SUVs to iPhones – by telling the stories of the determined tinkerers, iconoclasts and visionaries who wouldn’t take “no” for an answer. They succeeded because they were willing to wage the good fight and because they could draw on flawed but ultimately supportive legal, cultural and economic institutions. Diamond also addresses the question of whether the Age of Innovation has run its course, and he provides a timely warning about the dangers that current political and intellectual forces pose to the many potential innovations yet to come. The Age Innovation may end, but whether it does is largely in our hands.

George Bittlingmayer, Economist, Angel Investor, and Professor Emeritus, University of Kansas.

Bittlingmayer’s advance praise is for:
Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming June 2019.

“Profit Feeds Impact at Scale”

(p. 1) Eric Reynolds will tell you that he is on the verge of freeing much of humanity from the deadly scourge of the cooking fire. He can halt the toxic smoke wafting through African homes, protect what is left of the continent’s forest cover and help rescue the planet from the wrath of climate change.
He is happy to explain, at considerable length, how he will systematically achieve all this while constructing a business that can amass billions in profit from an unlikely group of customers: the poorest people on earth.
He will confess that some people doubt his hold on reality.
“A lot of people think it’s too good to be true,” says Mr. Reynolds, a California-born entrepreneur living in Rwanda. “Most people think I am pretty out there.”
The company he is building across Rwanda, Inyenyeri, aims to replace Africa’s overwhelming dependence on charcoal and firewood with clean-burning stoves powered by wood pellets. The business has just a tad more than 5,000 customers and needs perhaps 100,000 to break even. Even its chief operating officer, Claude Mansell, a veteran of the global consulting company Capgemini, wonders how the story will end.
“Do we know that it’s going to work?” he asks. “I don’t know. It’s never been done before.”
Inyenyeri presents a real-world test of an idea gaining traction among those focused on economic development — that profit-making businesses may be best positioned to deliver critically needed services to the world’s poorest communities.
Governments in impoverished countries lack the finance to attack threats to public health, and many are riddled with corruption (though, by reputation, not Rwanda’s). Philanthropists and international aid organizations play key roles in areas such as immunizing children. But turning plans for basic services into mass-market realities may require the potent incentives of capitalism. It is a notion that has provoked the creation of many businesses, most of them failures.
“Profit feeds impact at scale,” says Mr. Reynolds, now in the midst of a global tour (p. 8) as he courts investment on top of the roughly $12 million he has already raised. “Unless somebody gets rich, it can’t grow.”
More than four decades have passed since Mr. Reynolds embarked on what he portrays as an accidental life as an entrepreneur, an outgrowth of his fascination with mountaineering. He dropped out of college to start Marmot, the outdoor gear company named for the burrowing rodent. There, he profited by protecting Volvo-driving, chardonnay-sipping weekend warriors against the menacing elements of Aspen. Now, he is trying to build a business centered on customers for whom turning on a light switch is a radical act of upward mobility.
. . .
To succeed, a stove had to be so convenient and clean burning that women preferred it over their existing cooking method.
Mr. Reynolds began testing stoves made in Italy, India, the United States and China. He tried making his own.
He came to realize that the magic was in the combination of stove and fuel. He experimented with making charcoal out of corncobs. (“A stupid idea,” he says.) He tried burning banana leaves. Then he discovered wood pellets, which involve compressing wood and eliminating water, the element that produces much of the smoke.
He settled on a Dutch-made stove that reduces wood down to clean-burning gases. Using pellets reduced the need for wood by 90 percent compared with charcoal. But those stoves cost more than $75.
Then came the epiphany: Inyenyeri could supply the stoves for free while collecting revenue from subscriptions for pellets. Rwanda was urbanizing rapidly, and city dwellers rely on charcoal. They would be eager to switch to pellets, which were 30 to 50 percent cheaper.
. . .
(p. 9) The business model would get more attractive as the cost of charcoal climbed, and as innovation inevitably made stoves more efficient. Inyenyeri would also stand to collect revenue from an arrangement it later entered into with the World Bank to sell credits for reducing emissions.
In 2010, Mr. Reynolds sold his house in Boulder and went all in on Inyenyeri. He unloaded his wine cellar, liquidated his retirement accounts and moved to Rwanda with no plan to leave.
. . .
“This business model will happen,” he says. “If it’s not Inyenyeri that’s the first mover, then it will be someone else who learns from our mistakes and does it better. It’s too big of an opportunity.”

For the full story, see:
Peter S. Goodman. “‘A Low-Cost Fix for Africa’s Silent Killer.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sunday, Dec. 6, 2018): 1 & 8-9.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Dec. 5, 2018, and has the title “Toxic Smoke Is Africa’s Quiet Killer. An Entrepreneur Says His Fix Can Make a Fortune.”)

Richest Man in World in 1836 Died of an Infection that Modern Antibiotics Cure

(p. A2) Rising incomes alone cannot capture how much better life has gotten. “Nathan Rothschild was surely the richest man in the world when he died in 1836,” economists Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina wrote in 2017. “But the cause of his death was an infection–a condition that can now be treated with antibiotics sold for less than a couple of cents. Today, only the very poorest people in the world would die in the way that the richest man of the 19th century died.”
Mr. Roser is the founder of Our World in Data, a website that tracks the evolution of human welfare over the last few centuries. Scroll through the charts, articles and data sets, and you will be stunned by how much better life has become in just the last few decades: Child mortality, illiteracy and deaths from violence have all plummeted, and life expectancy has gone up.

For the full commentary, see:
Greg Ip. “Stop Calling It ‘Vocational Training’; How we speak about education reflects class prejudice.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, January 3, 2019): A2.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Jan. 2, 2019, and has the title “CAPITAL ACCOUNT; The World Is Getting Quietly, Relentlessly Better.”)

The Roser and Oritz-Ospina piece mentioned above, is:
Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina (2018) – “Global Extreme Poverty”. Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: ‘https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty’ [Online Resource]

Bruce Yandle Offers Advance Praise for Openness to Creative Destruction

In writing Openness to Creative Destruction, Art Diamond has penned a timely and compelling discussion of innovative dynamism, words he chooses to describe the vital wealth-creating features of the US economy. As the book’s title suggests, Diamond, like Joseph Schumpeter before him, using lots of data and strong anecdotes, explains how innovation–the discovery and implementation of new products, services, and processes for providing them–drives prosperity. Dynamism, though not automatic but sometimes constrained by government regulation, relates to how growth, change and search for future equilibriums are features of US markets. A strongly written and deeply documented book, Openness deserves to be read by all who want a better understanding of how the US economy is performing now and how future performance can be improved.

Bruce Yandle, Dean Emeritus, Clemson University College of Business & Behavioral Science and Distinguished Adjunct Fellow, Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

Yandle’s advance praise is for:
Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming June 2019.

Michael C. Munger Offers Advance Praise for Openness to Creative Destruction

Creative destruction is the mainspring that animates growth and prosperity. Few people fully understand creative destruction; fewer still can explain it. In this remarkable book, Diamond uses compelling stories and plain English to construct the case for creative destruction, extending Schumpeter’s deep insights into the 21st century.

Michael C. Munger, Professor of Political Science, and Director, PPE Program, Duke University. Author of Tomorrow 3.0: Transaction Costs and the Sharing Economy, and other works.

Munger’s advance praise is for:
Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming June 2019.