Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations: A Story of Economic Discovery

Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations: A Story of Economic Discovery PDF Author: David Warsh
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393066363
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
"What The Double Helix did for biology, David Warsh's Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations does for economics." —Boston Globe A stimulating and inviting tour of modern economics centered on the story of one of its most important breakthroughs. In 1980, the twenty-four-year-old graduate student Paul Romer tackled one of the oldest puzzles in economics. Eight years later he solved it. This book tells the story of what has come to be called the new growth theory: the paradox identified by Adam Smith more than two hundred years earlier, its disappearance and occasional resurfacing in the nineteenth century, the development of new technical tools in the twentieth century, and finally the student who could see further than his teachers. Fascinating in its own right, new growth theory helps to explain dominant first-mover firms like IBM or Microsoft, underscores the value of intellectual property, and provides essential advice to those concerned with the expansion of the economy. Like James Gleick's Chaos or Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe, this revealing book takes us to the frontlines of scientific research; not since Robert Heilbroner's classic work The Worldly Philosophers have we had as attractive a glimpse of the essential science of economics.

Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations: A Story of Economic Discovery

Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations: A Story of Economic Discovery PDF Author: David Warsh
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393066363
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 448

Get Book Here

Book Description
"What The Double Helix did for biology, David Warsh's Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations does for economics." —Boston Globe A stimulating and inviting tour of modern economics centered on the story of one of its most important breakthroughs. In 1980, the twenty-four-year-old graduate student Paul Romer tackled one of the oldest puzzles in economics. Eight years later he solved it. This book tells the story of what has come to be called the new growth theory: the paradox identified by Adam Smith more than two hundred years earlier, its disappearance and occasional resurfacing in the nineteenth century, the development of new technical tools in the twentieth century, and finally the student who could see further than his teachers. Fascinating in its own right, new growth theory helps to explain dominant first-mover firms like IBM or Microsoft, underscores the value of intellectual property, and provides essential advice to those concerned with the expansion of the economy. Like James Gleick's Chaos or Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe, this revealing book takes us to the frontlines of scientific research; not since Robert Heilbroner's classic work The Worldly Philosophers have we had as attractive a glimpse of the essential science of economics.

Endogenous Growth in Historical Perspective

Endogenous Growth in Historical Perspective PDF Author: Ramesh Chandra
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030837610
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
In recent decades, new endogenous growth theory has become popular but the ideas are not new. They go back at least as far as Adam Smith, and the subsequent contributions made notably by Alfred Marshall and Allyn Young. This book critically discusses and provides an historical perspective to the entire spectrum of endogenous growth theories starting with Adam Smith and ending with Paul Romer. It fills an important gap in the literature. While contributions of individual authors are readily available, there is no comprehensive study on the subject covering such a vast ground, critically discussing these authors in a comprehensive framework. It collates all the arguments and economic viewpoints in one collection, providing both the seasoned economist and a graduate economist with a critical comparison of origin, mechanisms, conclusions, and policy implications of these models.

The Return to Increasing Returns

The Return to Increasing Returns PDF Author: James M. Buchanan
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472104321
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
Makes available important articles on increasing returns as related to the size of the economy

Evolutionary Spatial Economics

Evolutionary Spatial Economics PDF Author: Miroslav N. Jovanović
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1785368990
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 831

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Book Description
A crucial question in contemporary economics concerns where economic activities will locate and relocate themselves in the future. This comprehensive, innovative book applies an evolutionary framework to spatial economics, arguing against the prevailing neoclassical equilibrium model, providing important concrete and theoretical insights, and illuminating areas of future enquiry.

Theory of Cost and Production Functions

Theory of Cost and Production Functions PDF Author: Ronald William Shephard
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400871085
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
A sequel to his frequently cited Cost and Production Functions (1953), this book offers a unified, comprehensive treatment of these functions which underlie the economic theory of production. The approach is axiomatic for a definition of technology, by mappings of input vectors into subsets of output vectors that represent the unconstrained technical possibilities of production. To provide a completely general means of characterizing a technology, an alternative to the production function, called the Distance Function, is introduced. The duality between cost function and production function is developed by introducing a cost correspondence, showing that these two functions are given in terms of each other by dual minimum problems. The special class of production structures called Homothetic is given more general definition and extended to technologies with multiple outputs. Originally published in 1971. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

A Model of Growth Through Creative Destruction

A Model of Growth Through Creative Destruction PDF Author: Philippe Aghion
Publisher: London : Department of Economics, University of Western Ontario
ISBN: 9780771411168
Category : Economic development
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This paper develops a model based on Schumpeter's process of creative destruction. It departs from existing models of endogenous growth in emphasizing obsolescence of old technologies induced by the accumulation of knowledge and the resulting process or industrial innovations. This has both positive and normative implications for growth. In positive terms, the prospect of a high level of research in the future can deter research today by threatening the fruits of that research with rapid obsolescence. In normative terms, obsolescence creates a negative externality from innovations, and hence a tendency for laissez-faire economies to generate too many innovations, i.e too much growth. This "business-stealing" effect is partly compensated by the fact that innovations tend to be too small under laissez-faire. The model possesses a unique balanced growth equilibrium in which the log of GNP follows a random walk with drift. The size of the drift is the average growth rate of the economy and it is endogenous to the model ; in particular it depends on the size and likelihood of innovations resulting from research and also on the degree of market power available to an innovator.

The Invention of Capitalism

The Invention of Capitalism PDF Author: Michael Perelman
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822324911
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
DIVRethinks the history of classical political economy by assessing the Marxian idea of “primitive accumulation,” the process by which a propertyless working class is created./div

Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Capital in the Twenty-First Century PDF Author: Thomas Piketty
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674979850
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 817

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Book Description
What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In this work the author analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality. He shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality--the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth--today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values if political action is not taken. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, the author says, and may do so again. This original work reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.

The Knowledge Economy

The Knowledge Economy PDF Author: Roberto Mangabeira Unger
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 178873498X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Revolutionary account of the transformative potential of the knowledge economy Adam Smith and Karl Marx recognized that the best way to understand the economy is to study the most advanced practice of production. Today that practice is no longer conventional manufacturing: it is the radically innovative vanguard known as the knowledge economy. In every part of the production system it remains a fringe excluding the vast majority of workers and businesses. This book explores the hidden nature of the knowledge economy and its possible futures. The confinement of the knowledge economy to these insular vanguards has become a driver of economic stagnation and inequality throughout the world. Traditional mass production has stopped working as a shortcut to economic growth. But the alternative—a deepened and socially inclusive form of the knowledge economy—continues to lie beyond reach in even the richest countries. The shape of contemporary politics on both the left and the right reflects a failure to come to terms with this dilemma and to overcome it. Unger explains the knowledge economy in the truncated and confined form that it has today and proposes the way to a knowledge economy for the many: changes not just in economic institutions but also in education, culture, and politics. Just as Smith and Marx did in their time, he uses an understanding of the most advanced practice of production to rethink both economics and the economy as a whole.

The Great Stagnation

The Great Stagnation PDF Author: Tyler Cowen
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101502258
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 98

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Book Description
Tyler Cowen’s controversial New York Times bestseller—the book heard round the world that ignited a firestorm of debate and redefined the nature of America’s economic malaise. America has been through the biggest financial crisis since the great Depression, unemployment numbers are frightening, media wages have been flat since the 1970s, and it is common to expect that things will get worse before they get better. Certainly, the multidecade stagnation is not yet over. How will we get out of this mess? One political party tries to increase government spending even when we have no good plan for paying for ballooning programs like Medicare and Social Security. The other party seems to think tax cuts will raise revenue and has a record of creating bigger fiscal disasters that the first. Where does this madness come from? As Cowen argues, our economy has enjoyed low-hanging fruit since the seventeenth century: free land, immigrant labor, and powerful new technologies. But during the last forty years, the low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau. The fruit trees are barer than we want to believe. That's it. That is what has gone wrong and that is why our politics is crazy. In The Great Stagnation, Cowen reveals the underlying causes of our past prosperity and how we will generate it again. This is a passionate call for a new respect of scientific innovations that benefit not only the powerful elites, but humanity as a whole.