What's wrong with the West's economies?

Essay about some of the apparent failings of economies in the west and exploring the role education has to play (NYBooks):

In the classical models I have been describing, no one is trying to think up something new (except perhaps new profitable investments) and no one is attempting to create it. There is no conception of human agency, only responses to wages, interest rates, and wealth. The economy is mechanical, robotic. The crops may be growing, but there is no personal growth. In the classical canon, Bentham, with his “sum of utilities,” portrays individuals like machines working to contribute their share to the general welfare. Joseph Schumpeter portrays “innovation” as produced by hard-driving entrepreneurs who make “obvious” applications of discoveries occurring outside the nation’s economy—as if the economy’s central participants possessed no imagination whatever.

Such classical models are basic to today’s standard economics. This economics, despite its sophistication in some respects, makes no room for economies in which people are imagining new products and using their creativity to build them. What is most fundamentally “wrong with economics” is that it takes such an economy to be the norm—to be “as good as it gets.” The cost is that elements of the Western economies are becoming products of this basically classical economics, which has little place for creativity and imagination.