This book shows how revolutionary ideas from economics and science are providing answers to these age-old questions. Around the world, researchers are upending a hundred years of economic theory and recasting the economy as a teeming evolutionary stew, a ' complex adaptive system' more akin to the brain, the Internet, or an ecosystem than to the static picture presented by traditional theory. Beinhocker describes how this new theory of the economy will fundamentally change our thinking on topics ranging from technological innovation, to the workings of the stock market, to political debates about right versus left.