In this paper I pose an old fashioned question, "Why do capitalist economies evolve in the way that they do?" The answer will lie, on the one hand, in the nature of human curiosity and the corresponding growth of knowledge and, on the other hand, in the particular instituted rules of the game...

Because different people can develop different skills, a knowledge rich society must be an ecology of specialists; knowledge is distributed within each human brain, within each organisation and within the economic and social system; and being distributed it can grow, provided that it is...