Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change by Edmund Phelps (review)

The potent mix of crises of our times, including irreversible global warming, resource scarcity, and financial woes, are urging nations to innovate at a brisk clip. The race to innovate for achieving better standards of living at lower costs while leaving the earth in good shape for posterity is impacting every sphere of human activity. Therefore, the contents of Mass Flourishing, written by Nobel Laureate and Professor of Economics, Edmund Phelps, Columbia University, USA, are pertinent to the deployment of innovation machinery in countries the world over. Professor Edmund Phelps nicely takes the reader through the advent and evolution of this machinery mainly in North American and Europe, and its role in the making of a modern economy during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It details the advent and progression of concepts, such as democracy, that are critical to the innovation process. It provides a nice read on the evolution and eventual success of economic models involving capitalism, socialism, and corporatism to bring out their impact on job satisfaction and also their efficacy for unfettered innovating by the masses.

This book rightfully emphasizes the importance of dynamism—talent among a wide swathe of society to create new products and services and successful reception of innovations by that society—to an economy striving to achieve sustained growth through widespread entrepreneurship. An economy marked by such dynamism with diversity in both the number of entrepreneurs and the number of end users has been termed as modern by the author. Such a hypothesis runs counter to the Schumpeterian thought of scientists being the wellspring of innovations, which is adopted later by society at large. In fact, the book points to the similarities between scientists and business practitioners in fostering innovations. Moreover, the author’s observation of the positive impact of urbanization on creativity, with its positive influence on employment, in a modern economy has serious ramifications in the fight against global warming.

The author also delves into the multifaceted benefits resulting from the advent of these economies including the well-being of people living in that era by focusing on both economic inclusion and alleviation of poverty. The modern economy also challenged the creativity of its individual workers by offering them everchanging work assignments that obliterated the tedium of routine chores. The productivity wrought about by the advent of modern economies had a major hand in improving the material well-being of the populace of the United States and Europe. Besides material benefits, the modern economy has played a huge role in stressing gender equality, improving the healthcare and hence longevity of its citizenry and engender freedom, to name a few. Various sources have been combed for hints about these widespread changes including art, music, and literary works. It is noteworthy that even Charles Dickens was impressed with the wider influence, for the better, of modern economies on society. This exhaustive book ends with chapters examining the negative impacts of banking, subsidies, speculative finance, regulations, and patent and copyrights on innovation and also correlates declines in both productivity and employment to decline in innovations. One of the excellent ideas of this book is the complete revamping of the financial sector to think long term and, banks in particular to a relational model, for funding innovators and their enterprises. Such a model for finance would go a long way in averting crises stemming from greed and speculation. These conclusions also stress on reviving the institutions and culture relevant to bringing back dynamism into the current stagnant economies of the west.

A future edition of this book should address the recent grassroots movement, frugal-innovations, whose development owes much to the dynamism of masses comprising the bottom of the pyramid. Frugal-innovations, which originated mainly in India with its traditional- as opposed to modern-values, is all the rage in many western economies where it has been used for creating low- and hi-tech...