ABSTRACT
The dramatic global gains in living standards are documented, and innovation, which is distinguished from scientific discovery and form, and the associated freedom to innovate and to test innovations in markets, are identified as the source of those gains. The Great Enrichment did not come about because of capital accumulation, or greater education, or colonialism, or any of the other usual suspects, but because of the freedom of ordinary people “to have a go,” made possible by the diffusion and embrace of the modern idea of “bourgeois dignity.”
