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

PHELPS, Edmund.

$175.00

Item Number: 76844

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.

First edition of this work which won the 2014 Gold Medal in Economics. Octavo, original cloth. Signed by Edmund Phelps on the title page. Fine in a fine dust jacket. Jacket design by David Drumm0nd.

In this book, Nobel Prize-winning economist Edmund Phelps draws on a lifetime of thinking to make a sweeping new argument about what makes nations prosper--and why the sources of that prosperity are under threat today. Why did prosperity explode in some nations between the 1820s and 1960s, creating not just unprecedented material wealth but "flourishing"--meaningful work, self-expression, and personal growth for more people than ever before? Phelps makes the case that the wellspring of this flourishing was modern values such as the desire to create, explore, and meet challenges. These values fueled the grassroots dynamism that was necessary for widespread, indigenous innovation. Most innovation wasn't driven by a few isolated visionaries like Henry Ford and Steve Jobs; rather, it was driven by millions of people empowered to think of, develop, and market innumerable new products and processes, and improvements to existing ones. Mass flourishing--a combination of material well-being and the "good life" in a broader sense--was created by this mass innovation.