MokEuropeyr&Voth. Understanding Growth in , 1700-1870 Theory and Evidence理解增长，1700-1870理论和证据.pdf

Understanding Growth in Europe, 1700-1870: Theory and Evidence Joel Mokyr Depts. of Economics and History Northwestern University Berglas School of Economics Tel Aviv University Hans-Joachim Voth Department of Economics Pompeu Fabra University Incomplete and preliminary version. Prepared for the Minerva Conference on Economic Growth, Jerusalem, June 2006. 1 Tentative outline 1. Introduction (incomplete and very preliminary). a. Can theory help the historians? In recent years, growth theory has turned to the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of modern economic growth as a topic of research. For economic historians, for whom these issues have been their bread and butter for over a century, this is a cause for jubilation. The issues are complex and difficult, and they need all the help they can get. What better than from the likes of Robert Lucas, Edward Prescott, Oded Galor and their colleagues, who had previouslydeveloped a set of novel and highly sophisticated and influential tools to analyze hugely complex phenomena such as the business cycles and th effects of monetary policy in elegant and powerful models? Theory has to simplify reality and to make assumptions. It tries to establish causal connections between exogenous and endogenous variables, to establish equilibria and the trajectories that a model of the economy will follow on its way there. What is being explained here is, at some level, rather straightforward. In the early nineteenth century, income per capita and a set of related variables, started to increase dramatically in a small number of economies in the northern Atlantic and European offshoots. In his long and detailed survey, Galor (2005, p. 177) raises the main questions that he feels need to be answered, such as why there was so little growth before the gre