Product Description
What is wealth? How is it created? And how can we create more of it for the benefit of individuals, businesses, and societies? In The Origin of Wealth, Eric Beinhocker provides provocative new answers to these fundamental questions.

Beinhocker surveys the cutting-edge ideas of economists and scientists and brings their work alive for a broad audience. These researchers, he explains, are revolutionizing economics by showing how the economy is an evolutionary system, much like a biological system. It is economic evolution that creates wealth and has taken us from the Stone Age to the $36.5 trillion global economy of today.

By better understanding economic evolution, Beinhocker writes, we can better understand how to create more wealth. The author shows how complexity economics is turning conventional wisdom on its head in areas ranging from business strategy and organizational design to investment strategy and public policy. As sweeping in scope as its title, The Origin of Wealth will rewire our thinking about the workings of the global economy and where it is going.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 49 reviews)

Radical but lost in translation

The provocative theory of this book, that economic theory is all wet and that economies evolve according to social and technological intervention, is presented well early in the book but then suffers from the presentation of too much information much of which does not appear relevant to the theory itself. Still, necessary reading for those interested in how and why the world works the way it does.
November 20, 2008

Spot on

A must read for anyone trying to figure out the future of finance, economics and risk management.
November 19, 2008

Astonishing and brilliant

Don't be put off by the lengthy critiques found here. You may get the feeling that these reviewers should be writing their own books. If they actually did so, I'd bet they would find that one can't cite every sentence, can't reference every economist who ever contributed to the field, can't explain every generalization at every opportunity. Ignore them and don't miss this great synthesis that pulls from many disciplines to form a wonderful construct that shows how economics is part and parcel of the main drivers of organic life - evolutionary processes.

Btw, Publisher's Weekly also blows their summary. Beinhocker does not use this synthesis as a "panacea." For we humans, his ideas are potentially a more accurate worldview, not a global cure for disease. Beinhocker writes with the aim that we might construct better approximations of reality using this line of thought. Worldviews are big, but that is not the same as a panacea that will cure all that ails you. This is a brilliant work that all thinking members of homo economicus should read.
August 22, 2008

This book is about more than economics

I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in human society and social evolution. The book discusses a lot of interesting aspects from an analytic viewpoint.

Despite the title which portrays the book as an economics text, this book isn't about making money - it's more about analysing how our economic society works (or doesn't as the case may be).
August 05, 2008

A unified field theory of economics

The author does a noble job of trying to integrate nearly everything including Darwinian evolution into economic theory. The penultimate section on stock prices seems to be the finale - what could be next? It is a description of left vs. right, and the end of this political distinction. It was not a good close.
June 03, 2008

SIMILAR PRODUCTS

Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations: A Story of Economic Discovery
by David Warsh

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life (Princeton Studies in Complexity)
by John H. Miller, Scott E. Page

The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World
by Alan Greenspan

A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
by Gregory Clark