After decades in the wilderness, industrial policy is now being rediscovered as a tool for addressing climate change and navigating a fraught new geopolitical environment. This development is long overdue, and fully justified by economic history since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
CAMBRIDGE – “Make a better mousetrap,” Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, and “the world will make a beaten path” to your door. The economics of innovation is central to understanding the dynamics of economic growth. Its focus is on how entrepreneurs and those who finance them address two fundamental challenges. The first, which has commanded the most attention among academics and the popular press, is technological. As my old boss, Pike Sullivan, Chairman of F. Eberstadt & Co., used to ask: “If you plug it in, does it light up?”
CAMBRIDGE – “Make a better mousetrap,” Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, and “the world will make a beaten path” to your door. The economics of innovation is central to understanding the dynamics of economic growth. Its focus is on how entrepreneurs and those who finance them address two fundamental challenges. The first, which has commanded the most attention among academics and the popular press, is technological. As my old boss, Pike Sullivan, Chairman of F. Eberstadt & Co., used to ask: “If you plug it in, does it light up?”