an article by Adam Lent published in RSA Journal Issue 2 (2014)
Governments, business and our institutions need to make the most of the technologies and methods that are transforming our economy.
The economist Eric Beinhocker once wrote that for 130,000 years of human history not much happened economically before all hell broke loose 250 years ago. He was not wrong. There were explosions of inventiveness, such as during the Roman Empire, but these would come to an end with the fall of the political system that sustained them. Average incomes improved at glacial rates: in the first century, most people could expect an income of around $1.20 a day; by the 18th, it had risen to $1.70.
This all changed in the late 1700s. Britain became the birthplace of an extraordinary revolution that would come to transform the world. Modern capitalism was being built on the back of an enormous flowering of commercial innovation: new machines, new products, new production systems, new business structures and new markets came to life.
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