It’s always a difficult choice, selecting the winner of the annual Enlightened Economist prize. After pondering it for a few days, I’m going for Innovation in Real Places by Dan Breznitz: not everywhere can be like Silicon Valley, but that’s ok. There are other routes places can take, depending on where they are starting from.
An additional read is a recent article Prof Breznitz co-authored with Jane Gingrich in the Annual Review of Political Science, with some nice insights about the political economy of industrial policy.
I don’t know Prof Breznitz but if he comes across this and would like to take me up on the prize lunch at some point, it would be a pleasure to meet him.
What is the NET Domestic Product in comparison to the Gross Domestic Product?
What has happened to the depreciation of all of the Automobiles purchased by American consumers since Sputnik?
This is a comment from Jonathan Davies, who wasn’t able to post it himself: Given your recommendation I read this book. I don´t like being negative – having co-authored two books myself I know how hard and what an effort writing can be. But this is not a good book. The 7 sides of acknowledgements are a red flag! Some sections are almost unreadable, a potpourri of anecdotes, statistics, and hopping from one example to another. There is a lot of loose thinking about “communities”, and – for my taste – too many throwaway remarks (“Humanity has never had it so good”). And then there is the evangelical ending: “innovation is hope … and hope that, more often than not, human-brought change will lead us all toward a better world.” Fingers crossed then with the current AI innovations.
By happenchance I have also been reading “Thinking Like an Economist” by Elizabeth Popp Berman (which you reviewed). It has a clear, concise argument, and is well-written, with a minimum of adjectives and adverbs (plus only 2 sides of acknowledgements). More importantly, it describes one strand of how we got into the current Trumpian mess, and how we might recover.