Unlimited Growth and Climate Change Economists Win Nobel Prize - Hit & Run : Reason.com

Unlimited Growth and Climate Change Economists Win Nobel Prize - Hit & Run : Reason.com:
"New York University economist Paul Romer and Yale economist William Nordhaus have been jointly awarded this year's Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
Of the two, Romer's contributions are much more fundamental and far-reaching.
Romer won based on his conceptual overthrow of old-fashioned limits-to-growth economics. 
As the Nobel Committee notes, Romer "showed that growth driven by the accumulation of ideas, unlike growth driven by the accumulation of physical capital, does not have to experience decreasing returns.
In other words, ideas-driven growth can be sustained over time."
Economic growth and wealth creation is limited only if one believes that human ingenuity is limited.
In my 2001 Reason article "Post-Scarcity Prophet," I explained that Romer's "New Growth Theory shows that economic growth doesn't arise just from adding more labor to more capital, but from new and better ideas expressed as technological progress. 
Along the way, it transforms economics from a 'dismal science' that describes a world of scarcity and diminishing returns into a discipline that reveals a path toward constant improvement and unlimited potential.
Ideas, in Romer's formulation, really do have consequences.
Big ones."...
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