PLATFORM:THE PLAYROOM was a mess. Cheerfully painted plastic toys littered the floor and the storage boxes were overflowing. Time to bring in the black bin bags. Two were filled with rubbish and five with toys to give away.

The playthings that remained were the classics: wooden train sets, teddy bears, ancient handpainted dolls, the beloved Radio Flyer red wagon, Monopoly, chess and checkers, bouncy balls, blocks and card games. Even the toy soldier skittles – who had been camping in the radiator for the past year – were retrieved and put in a place of honour on the shelf.

Our cleaning frenzy was more than a clearout and a reorganisation of the room. According to the Financial Times recently, it is a trend. Faced with gloomy economic news, adults are yearning for their favourite childhood toys. A small story, “Traditional toys return as shoppers feel the squeeze”, reported on an interesting trend emerging for the upcoming “credit crunch Christmas”.

Retailers believe parents will embrace toys that are built to last. They are stocking up on spinning tops, wooden blocks, traditional teddy bears and Snoopy. Argos also reported that sales of Lego doubled year on year.

In Ireland, the trend is similar: pigsback.com is even running an eighth anniversary competition where you can win one of several retro toys: Mr Potato Head, the Rubik’s Cube, Operation, Etch-a-Sketch, Mr Frosty, Kitt from Knight Rider or a Slinky.

There are economic lessons to be learned from the contents of a nation’s toy box. In countries where there is little hope, children’s toys are minor miracles.

A few years back, in a remote village in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I bumped into a boy whose father had made him a small transport truck out of balsa wood. This is a place where people have little more than leaves and starchy mush to eat. Protein malnutrition is rife and clothes are dirty rags.

The truck was a work of art and I instantly wanted to bring it back to my children. It was obviously built with great skill, care and attention to detail.

My guide, an experienced humanitarian worker from Northern Ireland who spent his early years growing up on the banks of the Congo river, urged me not to ask the boy to sell it. Although puzzled, we smiled, admired the toy and moved on.

Later, when I asked him why, he said toys like these were one of the few pleasures children had in Congo. Of course the boy would have sold it to me and the money would have helped his family, but he’d probably never get another toy like it again.

A few days later, I saw another boy who had a fantastic ball made from hundreds of tightly bound leaves. Even in a place with a doubtful future, there was innovation.

Our instinct in an economic downturn is to seek comfort and return to what we know – the teddy bear, the reliable overcoat, mum’s stuffing. This trend is predictable but it’s also dangerous. It feels good but it won’t change anything. Innovation is the only way back to the days of milk and honey.

Joseph Schumpeter, an Austrian economist coming back into vogue, also believed that the only way out of a recession was innovation. He called capitalism’s cycle of innovation-recession- innovation “creative destruction”.

According to a well-respected professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, J Bradford DeLong, Schumpeter’s economics are appealing because “he tried to set long-term economic growth – entrepreneurship and enterprise – at the top of the discipline’s agenda”.

DeLong says: “Entrepreneurs innovate new ways of manipulating nature and new ways of assembling and co-ordinating people. It is important to stress that a Schumpeterian entrepreneur is not an inventor, but an innovator. The innovator shows that a product, a process or a mode of organisation can be efficient and profitable, and that elevates the entire economy.

“But it also destroys those organisations and people who suddenly find their technologies and routines outmoded and unprofitable. There is, Schumpeter was certain, no way of avoiding this: capitalism cannot progress without creating short-term losers alongside short- and long-term winners.”

The biggest box in our playroom is bursting with Lego. Maybe it’s time to pull it out and create something entirely new.

Margaret E Ward is a journalist and a director of Clear Ink, the Clear English Specialists. margaret@clearink.ie