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Why getting complicated increases the wealth of nations

One of the defining characteristics of the modern economy is that it's awfully complicated. Even a fairly humble product such as a shirt might incorporate cotton from west Africa, oil from Indonesia to make the polyester in the button (manufactured in China), and designs sketched out by an Italian using American computer software. Then there is the sheer number of products: Eric Beinhocker, author of The Origin of Wealth, reckons there are probably 10 billion distinct products and services available in a modern economic environment such as London, Tokyo or New York. It's a guess, but a fairly educated one. Beinhocker also estimates that for a traditional hunter-gatherer society, the number is closer to 300.

This would probably not have surprised Adam Smith, who emphasised the importance of specialisation as a source of the wealth of nations. Specialisation and complexity are closely linked: an economy with more specialists is one that requires more teamwork and more distinct interactions between individual activities.

Leaving aside a few complexity theorists such as Beinhocker, this is not the way that most economists think about what makes countries rich. It is not that they disagree, simply that they tend to focus on more easily measurable aggregates, such as the total stock of capital and labour.

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臥底經濟學家

蒂姆•哈福德(Tim Harford)是英國《金融時報》的經濟學專欄作家,他撰寫兩個欄目:《親愛的經濟學家》和 《臥底經濟學家》。他寫過一本暢銷書也叫做《臥底經濟學家》,這本書已經被翻譯爲16種語言,他現在正在寫這本書的續集。哈福德也是BBC的一檔節目《相信我,我是經濟學家》(Trust Me, I’m an Economist)的主持人。他同妻子及兩個孩子一起住在倫敦。

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