Innovism

 

                                                   Innovism       

The advances of the last two hundred years are multifactorial, a function of many interlacing and interdependent factors.

From a post on Reddit:

Innovism is a term coined by Deirdre McCloskey to better embody what she sees as the actual driver of historical progress.

While Capitalism is an often misconstrued word, on both sides of the debate, it tends to create the mental image of economic progress coming primarily from the act of increasing per capita capital in an economy. The "stacking of brick on brick & bachelor degree on bachelor degree" as McCloskey puts it is a necessary but insufficient part of the massive material betterment seen in the last ~250 years.

To avoid this confusion McCloskey coined the term "Innovism" as a replacement for the term Capitalism. Thus freeing us from the historical baggage & confusion of the term while also helping to put more of the intellectual spotlight on the true driver of material betterment in Society.

If one wanted to summarize & simplify what "Innovism" is we could say something like:

Human creativity unleashed from cultural & political restraints and the resulting ideas put through the refining fire of trade.

Or even more simply; cultural respect for "shopkeepers" + innovative ideas + trade tested betterment = the Great Enrichment

In Innovism it is innovation that is the fundamental driver of material betterment. It is innovation that allows for the growth of per capita capital, for the increasing resources that unions bargain for, & for the rising incomes than governments can tax.

But here innovation is not a synonym for technological invention but encompasses also social/cultural innovations, business innovations (especially entrepreneurship), as well as technological and other physical inventions.

Most economists, on both sides of the Capitalist/Socialist divide, are primarily fixated on the material aspects of wealth creation. This leaves a blind spot on how culture, philosophy, and so on impact the economic output, the creation of material betterment, of a nation.

Innovism seeks to help fill this gap, to help move economics towards being more of a 'humanomics' than the idea of inert resources being moved around on a spreadsheet.

While, under the broad definitions used on this sub, Innovism is a clear form of Capitalism the insights it has should also be considered by Socialists. Grappling with a better version of what actually happened to drive our average standard of living to dizzying heights help shape any economic theory into a better version of itself.