Focusing on the interplay between economic growth and human capital, this book presents a new framework that integrates dynamic economics with the analysis of business cycles and long-term development. It posits that economic growth is fundamentally linked to the advancement of human capital and scientific knowledge, advocating for quality education in hard sciences as a key policy objective. Additionally, it introduces a novel causal structure in economics and offers insights into nonlinear causality, while proposing enhancements to national accounting and input-output dynamics to incorporate human capital metrics.
The author shows that the enormous gap between theory and facts in modern macroeconomics can only be eliminated by nonlinear macroeconomic dynamics with the following special characteristics: First of all, only certain group-theoretical invariants generate the correct growth cycles with irregularly varying lengths, not any stochastic process as usually applied for this purpose. Furthermore, a special extended value function and generalized human capital are needed for a correct representation of scientific and technological innovation. Finally, the correct nonlinear macroeconomic dynamics are not reducible to microeconomics, for both of the above mentioned reasons.
This book deals with factors affecting economic growth in knowledge-based societies. It is shown that the interaction between material and nonmaterial values is the ultimate source of all economic growth including business cycles. The model developed predicts the quantitative facts concerning the business cycles better than the conventional real-cycle models. It also produces, besides the balanced-growth path, another growth path whose existence is verified by empirical facts. The results give strong evidence of the economic relevance of nonmaterial values. They also prompt a new vision of the stochastic elements in the business cycles. Nonmaterial values are analysed, and their interaction with economic growth is also illustrated in terms of an entropy formalism of historical analysis.
1. Facts: A leisure term with an unbounded value function, when added to utility in the Lucas (1988) 'mechanics of economic development', expands enormously the range of data covered by the theory. To explain this we have to ask two questions. First: why leisure would be so much desired? Perhaps because leisure is one's own time and such a leisure term means an unbounded value of individual freedom. But why leisure is economically productive, as implied by the results obtained in this study? Perhaps because cognitive innovations often occur during the time which in economics is registered as leisure? Then an unbounded leisure term would also make room for an unbounded creation of knowledge, as distinguished from the mere transmission of knowledge in education and training. In any case the leisure term seems to act as if it where the'hole' through which strong nonmaterial values affect economics. The ensuing 'extended mechanics' is derived in Chapters 4-6 and proves to involve an extension of growth theory as well as a theory of the causal part of business cycles. Their empirical verification is given by showing (i) that the existence of the two Basic Growth Paths derived from this theory, defining its Growth Type 1 and Growth Type 2, respectively, is verified already by the statistics collected by Solow (1957) but ignored so far (see Chapter 5 of the present study); one of them, viz.
