Free Republic

This year rewards theorists of creative destruction. The 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics honors three economists whose work embodies an idea first coined by Joseph Schumpeter: creative destruction. Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt have each advanced our understanding of how technological progress drives human prosperity. As Schumpeter described, every technological advance has two faces. It destroys by rendering old methods obsolete, yet it creates by flooding the market with new goods and more efficient ways of meeting human needs.The Nobel Committee’s focus on creative destruction feels particularly relevant today, in an era dominated by fears over artificial intelligence....

We owe our modern prosperity to Enlightenment ideas. ___ Was the Enlightenment a Good Thing? At first blush, the question sounds almost sacrilegious. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment, after all, taught us to be democratic and to believe in human rights, tolerance, freedom of expression, and many other values that are still revered, if not always practiced, in modern societies. On the other hand, historians question whether the Enlightenment actually led to brotherhood and equality (it did not, of course), and even freedom, its third objective, was achieved only partially and late. Some have even suggested that its ideas of human “improvement”...

The question: In the coming days and weeks, the Hamptons, the Vineyard and all the other August escapes from workaday life will likely see a bull market in pessimism as financiers and powerbrokers reach into their summer book bags to relive the recession or look ahead to even greater disaster. "Lofty geo- globaloney tomes on the future of the world" is how the economist Nouriel Roubini has described his summer reading list. Alan Greenspan has said that he will delve into "Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World," which sounds more like a penance than poolside pleasure. Which...