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From the Theory of Growth to the Theory of the Growing Economy

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Abstract

The sustained growth process that began after the end of the Second World War made it necessary to add to the static neoclassical theory a separate theory of growth. The latter was established by R. M. Solow (1956) in his essay “A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth.”

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The basis for this theory is formed by the essays written by Paul Romer (1986, 1990) and by Robert Lucas (1988). For an overview of the endogenous theories of growth cf. Lucas Bretschger (1996). A detailed analysis of the endogenous growth theory and corresponding statistical analyses may be found in Barro and Sala-i-Martin (1995).

  2. 2.

    Compared to similar observations made by Jürgen Löwe (1995, p. 91) about the “insatiable man”: “A process of orienting human endeavour towards material objects must have taken place through the development of the western culture. With this, man, torn from his originally natural, religious and social integration, has tended to fall back more and more upon himself so that he no longer regards himself as an agent within a whole, but judges everything according to whether it corresponds to his own interests. The elements of the outside world, degraded to mere objects of possession, have become what man desires for himself. The right of ownership, created by man, guarantees the continued subordination of the object to the almost unrestricted power of the subject. Man’s boundless desire for the acquisition of material goods as a result of cultural influences found … in the institution of money an appropriately increasable good thanks to which his boundless desire could be realised.”

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Correspondence to Hans Christoph Binswanger .

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Binswanger, H.C. (2013). From the Theory of Growth to the Theory of the Growing Economy. In: The Growth Spiral. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31881-8_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31881-8_8

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