Quotes from Eric D. Beinhocker

The evolutionary economist Richard Nelson of Columbia University has pointed out that there are in fact two types of technology that play a major role in economic growth. The first is Physical Technology; this is what we are accustomed to thinking of as technology, things such as bronze-making techniques, steam engines, and microchips. Social Technologies, on the other hand, are ways for organizing people to do things.

Hierarchies are critical in enabling networks to reach larger sizes before diseconomies of scale set in. This is why so many networks in the natural and computer worlds are structured as networks within networks.

Foster and Kaplan's somewhat paradoxical finding that as a group, the long-term survivors in the S&P 500 underperformed the average. It is the constant entry of newcomers that keeps the average up.

Intuitively, many people imagine that humankind's upward climb in economic sophistication was a slow, steady journey, a linear progression from stone tools to DVD players. The actual story, pieced together by archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, and economists, is not at all like that. It is far more dramatic.