This book studies the ongoing transition from an industrial to a creative (or post-industrial) society and how the creative society depends on a ‘soft infrastructure’ of individualist values and institutions.

Chapter 1: Introduction: The Emergence of the Creative Society.- Chapter 2: The Creative Individual.- Chapter 3: The Entrepreneurial Individual.- Chapter 4: Cultural Individualism.- Chapter 5: Political Individualism.- Chapter 6: The Future of the Creative Society.

This book studies the ongoing transition from an industrial to a creative (or post-industrial) society and how the creative society depends on a ‘soft infrastructure’ of individualist values and institutions. It explains this by looking first at the key actors in the creative society: creative individuals and entrepreneurial individuals, using insights from social and cognitive psychology and the economic theory of entrepreneurship. It shows how individual creativity and entrepreneurship are supported by both cultural individualism, based on the work of political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, as well as political individualism, the principles of a democratic market economy guided by classical liberalism.The book offers a number of policy implications that result from the connection of this multidisciplinary reconceptualization of individualism to economic creativity. It discusses a system of property rights that accommodates the creation of new property, rangingfrom the result of what we normally think of as product innovation to larger-scale innovations embodied in the formation of new lifestyle communities. It also considers examples such as universities that are more open to experimentation and more autonomous from government regulation, and a more liberal immigration policy that may result from the positive association between population diversity and creativity. This book is intended to support further interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research on the creative society (also known as post-industrialism, the postmodern society or the knowledge-based society). It will be of interest to academics and postgraduate students working in political economy, entrepreneurship, institutional economics, Austrian economics, and public policy.David Emanuel Andersson is Professor of Management at National Sun Yat-sen University (NSYSU), Taiwan.

“The best economics incorporates allusions to the relevant history and culture. Smith, Hayek, and McCloskey showed the way. That is David Andersson's mode too. Our modern prosperity surely rests on the widespread creativity we are now seeing in many fields. In The Future of the Post-industrial Society, Andersson writes about our creative society in a compelling narrative that is well grounded in data, economics, history, and culture. He does all this in a compact book that is a pleasure to read.” (Peter Gordon, Emeritus Professor, Sol Price School of Public Policy, University of Southern California, USA)“In The Future of the Post-industrial Society, David Andersson provides a new exploration of the origins of Western individualism, better represented as personalism based on the inviolable dignity of the person (with a solid faith capstone) and its relationship to cultural and political development.           The endeavour traces several salient institutional features of medieval Europe, including family patterns, the development of legal systems, and inter-jurisdictional competition. These features combined to produce a society centred on the person as the basic unit of society.  This personalism facilitated economic development predicated on the rule of law, from early mercantile networks via industrialization to the emergence of the post-industrial society in the late 20th century. A key feature was the emergence of domestic and international orders of contractarian interaction. While many latecomers seek to catch up through technology-driven educational initiatives and by benchmarking formal institutions, a key contention in this book is that the combination of cultural personalism and classical liberal institutions supports creative and innovative power.” (Lawrence Wai-Chung Lai, Professor of Planning, Law and Economics, University of Hong Kong, HK)

Contributes to multidisciplinary research on the post-industrial society Explores how classical liberal principles support the creative society Discusses individual creativity and entrepreneurship in the context of cultural and political individualism