Lots of people inside and outside China have heard Premier Li Keqiang promote mass entrepreneurship and innovation in speeches. Far fewer know where he got the idea. It comes at least in part from the Upper West Side of Manhattan—specifically from the mind of Edmund Phelps, a Nobel prize-winning economist and Columbia University professor who wrote a 2013 book called Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change. The book has sold 100,000 copies in China, about 10 times as many as in the U.S., Phelps says.
Image: Nobel prize-winning economist Edmund Phelps Photographer: Kerem Uzel/Bloomberg
