Editors' preface

Summary

Thinking About Growth brings together Moses Abramovitz's principal essays on long-term economic change, and introduces them with a new and previously unpublished piece, the fruit of over forty years of purposeful thought on the subject. Professor Abramovitz, a former president of the American Economic Association, is one of the world's most distinguished students of the process of economic growth.

The book begins with two essays on the nature of growth and the efforts of economists to understand and explain the phenomenon. The two constitute respectively the most recent and the earliest of Abramovitz's statements on these subjects, allowing the reader to see how far his views have been modified by the extraordinary events of the post–World War II period and by alterations in the intellectual apparatus deployed by economists. The volume then turns to the analysis of the proximate causes of long-term economic change, a subject on which the author has done pioneering work. Chapter 3, the first in this section, reproduces one of the most heavily cited articles ever written on the historical sources of economic growth in the United States.

One of Abramovitz's central concerns is with the factors responsible for periods of divergence and convergence in the levels of economic performance of modernizing countries. He pursues this subject in his analysis of the rise of American productive superiority in the first half of the twentieth century, and of the post–World War II efforts by Japan and the countries of Western Europe to emulate American successes.