Two world-renowned economists, Stiglitz and Piketty, have come out of the closet. They've admitted to the world that they are degrowthers. Writing in The Guardian, they argue that "economic growth is a doomed strategy." If the goal was to grab attention and shock people, they succeeded. If the goal was to help solve poverty and…
In recent years, Slovakia has been engaged in a debate about being "stuck in the middle-income trap," about having "exhausted our growth model," and about the need to move "from assembly line to brain gain." This debate matters. The trouble is that its vocabulary tempts us into a far too mechanical view of prosperity. Let…
Economists have been fascinated by the question of the origins of prosperity since the very beginning of their discipline. Today, we know much more about it than Adam Smith did 250 years ago when he wrote The Wealth of Nations. In the mid-20th century, economist Robert Solow developed a model explaining economic growth through capital…
