Technological innovation, including the three major forces of commercial design, physical technology, and social technology, is the absolute force that promotes the growth of social wealth.
Specially set up a reading section for reading, screening some books worth reading, and providing some summaries. I hope that you have a book on your hand to let the movement of reading continue.
This article is a book review of The Origins of Wealth, author Chen Jin, a professor at the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University, and a well-known innovation manager.
What is wealth? For the Maasai, wealth is measured by the number of cows. For our readers, it is measured in RMB, USD, GBP, EUR, JPY or other currencies. More than 200 years ago, the great economist Adam Smith pointed out that throughout the historical process, the standards people use to measure wealth are diverse: “In early society, animals were used as a universal medium for business; In some coastal areas of India, the common medium used by people is a certain type of shell; Newfoundland is a dried squid; Virginia is a tobacco; some West Indian colonies in the United States are sugar…”
As Adam Smith described in his book The Wealth of Nations, wealth is not a fixed concept. The value of things depends on the willingness of others to pay at a particular point in time. For people who measure wealth in money, wealth is a metaphorical concept. Most people in developed countries have never seen or touched most of their wealth, and the money they have worked hard to survive is only in the electronic signals of bank computers. However, these spooky signals can be converted into touchable items, such as cows, squids, nails, or anything they wish to acquire or have the ability to purchase, by swiping a credit card or clicking a mouse.
Where is the original origin of wealth? How do people’s sweat and knowledge in their heads create wealth? Why is the world becoming more and more affluent as time goes by? How did people change from trading in cattle to trading on microchips? This series of questions will eventually lead us to one of the most important unsolved mysteries about wealth: how can people create more wealth?
We can ask this question based on narrow self-interest, but we can also ask a more grand question, how can we increase social wealth? How should managers develop their businesses to provide more jobs and opportunities for people? How should the government develop the economy to address poverty and inequality?
The “The Origin of Wealth” by Eric Bahnhof, the head of the Institute for New Economic Thoughts at Oxford University, recently explored: What is wealth? How is wealth generated? How to create more wealth for individuals, businesses and society?
These issues are the most important and oldest issues in the field of economics. Looking at history, economics seems difficult to answerthese questions. Eric Byinhoek’s The Origins of Wealth provides new answers that are not only derived from the work of economists, but also from biologists, physicists, evolutionary theorists, and computer scientists. The work of anthropologists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists. Modern science, especially the theory of evolution and complex adaptive systems, provides us with a new perspective on these long-standing economic problems.
Economy is the embodiment of human evolution success
Bein Hawke argues in The Origins of Wealth that the traditional theory of economics is replaced by the theory of economic evolution of complex theory when interpreting wealth. He pointed out that evolution and economics are not just analogous relationships, they are actually a more ambitious phenomenon – two forms of complex adaptive systems, in which independent elements and parts interact, and then information processing To adapt their behavior to changing conditions. The immune system, ecosystem, language, economy, law and the Internet are all examples of complex system applications.
Economic evolution and biological evolution are different: human planning and adaptability make economic evolution faster and more purposeful than biological evolution. But it is still an evolution.
The innovative research I am doing now, mainly on the study of economic growth and wealth growth, is actually a study of evolution. Our early innovation research is first to study the law of economic development. In recent years, innovative management is relatively mature, and the economics of innovation are not very advanced. I also hope that young economists will be more involved in innovative economic research, how to consider the elements of innovation from the perspective of economics, and put forward a new theory of China’s economic development. This is very promising and space.
How is the economy and wealth growing today?
The economy is a miracle in complex things. However, no one designs it or nobody manages it. How can such a system be created? Why does complexity increase over time? According to Beinhok, the answers to these questions can be found. The economy is “a complex system with adaptability” that operates in the same logic as biological evolution—dynamics, subjectivity, interaction, emergence, evolution.
The market is a very powerful evolutionary mechanism, it is an innovative machine. Technological innovation, including the three major forces of commercial design, physical technology, and social technology, is the absolute force that promotes the growth of social wealth.
I. Commercial Design
The first is the power of commercial design. The market is a dynamic system that is constantly evolving and adapting. As Darwin’s theory of evolution says, the fittest survives, experiencing exponential growth in economic complexity—the Internet of Things, the digital economy, the information society, and the smart future, whether it’s the state. , or the enterprise, in order to succeed in the cruel business competition, we must first form an evolving commercial design.
Traditional economics is static, but in reality