Rob Atkinson, President of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation:
One of our key challenges stems from the fact that while economists in many other nations, like Tawain and China, read Joseph Schumpeter, ours read neo-classical economists. As a result, while the former recognize that disequilibrium characterizes economies and that innovation and productivity are the keys to prosperity, most U.S. economists rely on models of equilibrium and focus on enhancing allocation efficiency.He was speaking at the ACT seminar on its recent paper, National Policies as Platforms for Innovation: Reconciling a Flat World with Creative Cities (Feb. 2007).