Endogenous Growth or “Big Bang”: Two views of the First Industrial Revolution
探讨了增长理论回归主流经济学后，如何为历史学家重新审视长期经济发展提供新视角，并比较了内生增长理论与传统新古典范式对第一次工业革命的解释差异。
The return of growth theory to center stage in mainstream economics provides opportunities for historians to reconsider the forces shaping longer-term economic development. A key motivation for developing new growth modeling strategies lay in the desire to reestablish contact between theory and the empirics of economic growth. By postulating diminishing returns to capital, the traditional neoclassical paradigm precludes the sustaining of per capita growth in the absence of exogenous technological progress. Since historical records of economic development offer scant evidence for declining per capita growth, disenchantment grew with a theoretical perspective that leaves the crucial part of the empirical record unexplained, prompting a search for alternative modeling strategies.