Continental Values

This year's Bank of Sweden Nobel Prize winner in Economics, Edmund Phelps, has an interesting thesis about why Continental Europe's economies are lagging behind those of the Anglosphere. His prose, however, is exceeded in its bright ideas by its lousy prose, as Global Review previously noted.

Here's his idea, and this is as clear as it gets:

[T]he Continental economies' root problem is a dearth of economic dynamism--loosely, the rate of commercially successful innovation. A country's dynamism, being slow to change, is not measured by the growth rate over any short- or medium-length span. The level of dynamism is a matter of how fertile the country is in coming up with innovative ideas having prospects of profitability, how adept it is at identifying and nourishing the ideas with the best prospects, and how prepared it is in evaluating and trying out the new products and methods that are launched onto the market.

Read the rest at your own risk.