Arnold Kling on Prosperity, Poverty, and Economics 2.0

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 14 December 2009

⏱️ 58 minutes

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Summary

Arnold Kling of EconLog and the author (with Nick Schulz) of From Poverty to Prosperity: Intangible Assets, Hidden Liabilities and the Lasting Triumph over Scarcity talks about the book with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Kling discusses how modern economists think about growth in both developed and undeveloped countries and contrasts those ideas with earlier views in economics. The focus of the modern understanding is on ideas and the ability of ideas to improve technology, leading to prosperity. Unlike physical capital, ideas can be enjoyed by many people at once, explaining why past models that ignored ideas and focused on physical capital failed to account for the observed magnitude of economic development. Kling also discusses the success of China and India.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts
0:13.9	of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org
0:21.2	where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to
0:26.5	another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd
0:33.6	love to hear from you.
0:38.5	Today is December 9, 2009, and my guest is Arnold Kling, who blogs at Econ Log on the Econ
0:44.0	Live website, and is the author of two new books Unchecked and Unbalanced, and from poverty
0:50.0	to prosperity and tangible assets, hidden liabilities, and the lasting triumph over scarcity,
0:56.5	authored with Nick Schultz. Arnold, welcome back to Econ Talk.
0:59.5	Thanks, Russ.
1:00.5	Arnold, our topic for today is prosperity, and unfortunately we'll probably talk about some
1:04.7	poverty as well. You call your approach to growth issues and the issues of economic development
1:11.5	and the economy writ large, economics 2.0. What do you mean by that?
1:16.5	Well, this is the economics that you don't hear about, first of all, on the mainstream media,
1:23.5	and also oddly enough, you don't typically hear much about it if you take an undergraduate
1:29.1	macroeconomics curriculum, and maybe even a graduate economics curriculum as well. The
1:37.1	traditional economics is all about allocating a given amount of resources, and you'll even
1:42.9	see in textbooks the idea that you're supposed to, you know, people have unlimited wants,
1:51.4	limited resources, and the economic problem is to allocate scarce resources among competing
1:58.3	ends.
1:59.3	Guns vs. Butter.
2:00.3	Yeah, this is a horrible textbook version of that.
	...

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