Creative Destruction: Placing Innovation at the Heart of Progressive Economics

Article

This pamphlet, the first output of IPPR's New Era Economics programme, argues that in light of new economic thinking and the mistakes of the past, contemporary economic policy needs to be centred on three core principles: it must be innovation-centred, pragmatic and aware.

The uniqueness of capitalism resides in its ability to turn the vast capacity of humans to innovate into massive wealth. Progressives are in a good position to recognise that capitalist innovation is a double-edged sword that offers the opportunity to address inequality and poverty by raising productivity and living standards but will also bring about obsolescence and so incur great human costs. The challenge facing progressives is to reduce the human impact of the 'creative destruction' process, without losing its benefits.

'This is a very stimulating and provocative contribution to the debate on economic policy. There are so many ideas in it, everyone is bound to disagree with something, but it is a coherent and wide-ranging attempt to completely rethink the economic position of the centre-left and to bring it into the 21st century. It deserves a wide readership.'

Paul Ormerod

Author of Butterfly Economics and Why Most Things Fail

'The global economic crisis dramatically showed the limitations of current economic thinking. But there are ideas emerging from the field of complexity economics with the potential to give us a much more realistic view of the economy - a view that takes into account real-world human behaviour and institutions. This pamphlet is an important step in developing those ideas and beginning to think how they might be applied to improving policy, with the promise of a more robust, resilient, and innovative economy. With its New Era Economics programme, ippr is helping to reframe economic debates and turn crisis into opportunity.'

Eric D Beinhocker

Author of The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics

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