Phelps Edmund S. Mass Flourishing. How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change

Princeton University Press, 2013. — 514 p. — ISBN 978-0-691-15898-3Eventually I began to sense another kind of problem: a resistance to modern values and modern life. The values that supported high prosperity ran up against other values that impeded and devalued flourishing. Prosperity has paid a heavy toll. Questions are being asked about the sort of life it would be best to have and thus the sort of society and economy to have. There are calls in America for traditionalist goals long familiar in Europe, like greater social protection, social harmony, and public initiatives in the national interest. These were the values that have led much of Europe to viewing the state in traditional, medieval terms—through the “lens of corporatism.” There are calls too for more attention to community and family values. There is little awareness of how valuable modern life, with its flourishing, was. There is no longer in America or in Europe a sense of what mass flourishing was like. Nations with brilliant societies a century back, say, France in the Roaring Twenties, or even a half-century ago, say, America in the early sixties, have no living memory of wide flourishing. Increasingly, the processes of anation’s innovation—the topsy-turvy of creation, the frenzy of development, and painful closings when the new things fail to take hold—are seen as a pain that upstart materialist societies were willing to endure to increase their national income and national power, but that we are unwilling to endure any longer. The processes are not seen as the stuff of flourishing—the change, challenge, and lifelong quest for originality, discovery, and making a difference.
This book is my response to these developments: It is an appreciation of the flourishing that was the humanistic treasure of the modern era. It is also a plea to restore what has been lost and not to reject out of hand the modern values that inspired the broad prosperity of modern societies.