ABSTRACT
A celebration of the remarkably fruitful career of David Landes is a good moment to pause and contemplate a striking paradox in the history of economic thought. Although Malthus and Ricardo are generally accounted the creators of the view that economics is the dismal science, their work after the great post-1812 decline in food prices. While focused on Britain's economic malaise from, say, 1815 to 1820 clearly reflected the enlarged role of machinery that had emerged during the generation of warfare with the French and was quite sanguine about the economy's long-run prospects. In terms of the 1870 fork in the road Alfred Marshall is a central figure. In his youthful The Theory of Economic Development, Joseph Schumpeter seized a nettle none of his predecessors and virtually none of his successors in mainstream economics were willing to grasp; namely that the processes of invention and innovation were often neither exogenous nor incremental; innovation was "spontaneous and discontinuous."
