ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes the economics is now about where medicine was a century ago. It suggests that economics has probably reached the point where the random government official or business executive consulting the random economist is likely to benefit from the encounter. The chapter explores the rise of economic science, its increasing acceptance, and the consequent prospects for a vast worldwide economic expansion. It also suggests that economists and like-minded idea entrepreneurs seem substantially to have managed to get across four highly consequential and enormously controversial ideas. The ideas are the growth of economic well-being should be a dominant goal, wealth is best achieved through exchange rather than through conquest, international trade should be free, and economies do best when the government leaves them substantially free. The chapter also muses over the curious fact that advances in economic well-being do not necessarily cause people to profess that they have become happier.
