The Power of Creative Destruction
Economic Upheaval and the Wealth of Nations
Monday 28th June, 2021
09:00-10:00 EDT (Washington)
14:00-15:00 BST (London)
15:00-16:00 CEST (Paris)
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Crisis seems to follow crisis. Inequality is rising, growth is stagnant, the environment is suffering, and the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed every crack in the system. We hear more and more calls for radical change, even the overthrow of capitalism. But the answer to our problems is not revolution. The answer is to create a better capitalism by understanding and harnessing the power of creative destruction—innovation that disrupts, but that over the past two hundred years has also lifted societies to previously unimagined prosperity.
To explain, Philippe Aghion, Céline Antonin, and Simon Bunel draw on cutting-edge theory and evidence to examine today’s most fundamental economic questions, including the roots of growth and inequality, competition and globalization, the determinants of health and happiness, technological revolutions, secular stagnation, middle-income traps, climate change, and how to recover from economic shocks. They show that we owe our modern standard of living to innovations enabled by free-market capitalism. But we also need state intervention with the appropriate checks and balances to simultaneously foster ongoing economic creativity, manage the social disruption that innovation leaves in its wake, and ensure that yesterday’s superstar innovators don’t pull the ladder up after them to thwart tomorrow’s. A powerful and ambitious reappraisal of the foundations of economic success and a blueprint for change, The Power of Creative Destruction shows that a fair and prosperous future is ultimately ours to make.
Join the author Philippe Aghion and panellists Ufuk Akcigit, Sir Richard Blundell and Bronwyn Hall in a discussion on this newly published book.
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Philippe Aghion
Collège de France, LSE and CEPR
Philippe Aghion is a Professor at the College de France and at the London School of Economics, and a fellow of the Econometric Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His research focuses on the economics of growth. With Peter Howitt, he pioneered the so-called Schumpeterian Growth paradigm which was subsequently used to analyze the design of growth policies and the role of the state in the growth process. Much of this work is summarized in their joint book Endogenous Growth Theory (MIT Press, 1998) and The Economics of Growth (MIT Press, 2009), in his book with Rachel Griffith on Competition and Growth (MIT Press, 2006), and in his survey “What Do We Learn from Schumpeterian Growth Theory” (joint with U. Akcigit and P. Howitt.)
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Ufuk Akcigit
University of Chicago and CEPR
Ufuk Akcigit is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago. He is a nonresident senior fellow in the Global Economy and Development Program at Brookings and an elected research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Center for Economic Policy Research, and the Center for Economic Studies, and a distinguished research fellow at Koc University. Akcigit is an associate editor at the Journal of Economic Growth. He previously served as an associate editor at the Journal of the European Economic Association.
As a macroeconomist, Akcigit’s research centers on economic growth, technological creativity, innovation, entrepreneurship, productivity, and firm dynamics.
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Sir Richard Blundell
University College London and CEPR
Professor Sir Richard Blundell, CBE FBA holds the David Ricardo Chair of Political Economy at University College London where he was appointed Professor of Economics in 1984. He is Director of the ESRC Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) IFS where he was been Research Director 1986 - 2016. He holds Honorary Doctorates from the University of St.Gallen; Norwegian School of Economics NHH; University of Mannheim; Universita della Svizzera; University of Bristol; and University of Venice Ca’Foscari. He has held visiting professor positions at UBC, MIT, Chicago, Northwestern, TSE and Berkeley. He was Knighted in the 2014 New Years Honours list for services to Economics and Social Science; he was awarded the CBE in 2006. His published papers on microeconometrics, consumer behavior, savings, labour supply, taxation, public finance, innovation, and inequality have appeared in the top academic journals.
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Bronwyn H. Hall
University of California, Berkeley
Bronwyn is Professor Emerita at the University of California at Berkeley, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Research Fellow at MPI Munich, Associate Researcher at the Economics of Innovation Lab, College de France, a Visiting Fellow at NIESR, and an International Research Fellow of the IFS. Her current research area is the economics of innovation, R&D, and patents.
Professor Hall has published articles on the economics and econometrics of technical change and innovation in journals such as Econometrica, the American Economic Review, the Rand Journal of Economics, and Research Policy.
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Tim Phillips
VoxEU
Tim Phillips is a journalist who has been writing about business, technology, economics and innovation. He has written for the Wall Street Journal Europe, The International Herald Tribune, The Times and Sunday Times, The Observer, The Telegraph, The Independent and The Daily Express among others.
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