Princeton University Press, 2011
For most of the vast span of human history, economic growth was all but nonexistent. Then, about two centuries ago, some nations began to emerge from this epoch of economic stagnation, experiencing sustained economic growth that led to significant increases in standards of living and profoundly altered the level and distribution of wealth, population, education, and health across the globe. The question ever since has been--why?
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"Galor's project is breathtakingly ambitious. He proposes a fairly simple, intensely human-capital-oriented model that will accommodate the millennia of Malthusian near-stagnation, the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath of rapid growth, the accompanying demographic transition, and the emergence of modern human-capital-based growth. And the model is supposed to generate endogenously the transitions from one era to the next. The resulting book is a powerful mixture of fact, theory, and interpretation."--Robert Solow, Nobel Laureate in Economics
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"Unified Growth Theory is a work of unusual ambition. Full of original and daring ideas, this book will inspire, motivate, and challenge economists. Highly recommended."--Daron Acemoglu, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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"Unified Growth Theory is Big Science at its best. It grapples with some of the broadest questions in social science, integrating state-of-the-art economic theory with a rich exploration of a wide range of empirical evidence. Galor's erudition and creativity are remarkable, and the ideas embodied in this book will have a lasting effect on economics."--Steven N. Durlauf, University of Wisconsin-Madison