How bad could it get? America’s ugly election

Hard work and black swans

To explain wealth and poverty, the ideas of the earliest economists are being

revisited and improved

A social turn

Economics brief

Culture

1 Competition and concentration

2  Setting minimum wages

3  Explaining inflation's absence

4  The dollar's role in trade

5 

The importance of culture

6  Embracing government debt

In this series

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60

Economics brief

The Economist

September 5th 2020

2

of scale and which can drive the adoption

of new technologies. This suggests that it is

no coincidence that the average business

in Lombardy, a rich northern region in Ita-

ly, has 13 employees, compared with five in

Calabria, a poor southern one. 

Others look beyond Italy. In “A Culture

of Growth”, published in 2016, Joel Mokyr

of Northwestern University puts the “prin-

ciple of contestability” as the reason why

some countries industrialised but others

did not. Organisations such as the Royal

Society, founded in London in 1660, were

forums for the exchange of ideas, where

people put forward their discoveries and

fiercely interrogated the theories of others.

Crucially, too, over time the goal of western

European science shifted from one con-

cerned with the “mindless piling up of em-

pirical facts”, as Mr Mokyr puts it, towards

discoveries which could be put to use in the

real world. Scientific inquiry laid the

groundwork for European economic ex-

ceptionalism. Nothing quite comparable

happened in other parts of the world.