As Time Goes By

From the Industrial Revolutions to the Information Revolution

Chris Freeman author Francisco Louçã author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press

Published:15th Feb '01

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As Time Goes By cover

How can we best understand the impact of revolutionary technologies on the business cycle, the economy, and society? Why is economics meaningless without history and without an understanding of institutional and technical change? Does the 'new economy' mean the 'end of history'?an we best understand the impact of revolutionary technologies on business organization and the business cycle? These are some of the questions addressed in this authoritative analysis of modern economic growth from the Industrial Revolution to the 'New Economy' of today. Chris Freeman has been one of the foremost researchers on innovation for a long time and his colleague Francisco Louçã is an outstanding historian of economic theory and an analyst of econometric models and methods. Together they chart the history of five technological revolutions: water-powered mechanization, steam-powered mechanization, electrification, motorization, and computerization. They demonstrate the necessity to take account of politics, culture, organizational change, and entrepreneurship, as well as science and technology in the analysis of economic growth. This is an well-informed, highly topical, and persuasive study of interest across all the social sciences.

This is a very good and important book that is must reading for anyone interested in evolutionary economics and/or the relationship between history and economics. In addition, you get a very well documented and argued interpretation of long run capitalist development from the industrial revolution to the present that will be a standard reference ... a first rate contribution to the discussion of how evolutionary economics should (may) develop. * Journal of Evolutionary Economics *
The book offers numerous insights into particular aspects of technological change ... Social theorists and policy advisors today need to be able to understand technological change in relation to cultural, political and economic life, and to situate contemporary developments in a longer term perspective. The authors provide a framework to do exactly that. Their book is a welcome demonstration of the usefulness of historical context for contemporary debates regarding science and technology policy. * Business History *
A thought-provoking work that is valuable for more than its detailed account of the technological revolutions that shape our economy today. By directing our attention to a perspective outside the current wave, it shapes our thinking about events inside the current wave. * Academy of Management Review *
This major contribution to economic history is the most impressive and convincing attempt I know to apply the concept of the 'long waves', a basic rhythm of historical development in the era of capitalism, to the entire stretch from eighteenth-century Lancashire to twenty-first-century Silicon Valley. It is also a call for economic history to escape from the handcuffs of narrow retrospective econometrics to the freedom of its vocation: understanding and explaining secular historical transformations. * Eric Hobsbawm FBA, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Emeritus Professor of Social and Economic History, Birkbeck College; Author of The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991 *

ISBN: 9780199241071

Dimensions: 242mm x 163mm x 28mm

Weight: 1g

424 pages