Long-term economics.

Summary "What can economic analysis teach us about the long term, about those times whose duration is such that nothing (or almost nothing) can be treated as a constant - neither the population, nor knowledge, nor economic and political institutions? Is it possible to construct an economic theory of the very long term, without betraying the specificity of the societies that have succeeded one another, and of the relationships that characterize them? This manual provides an introduction to the Unified Growth Theory. Developed over the last 20 years, this theory studies, with the help of refined dynamic models, the existence, over the centuries, of various economic regimes - each regime being characterized by its own "economic laws" - and the transition from one economic regime to another. Three main lessons emerge from this book. The first lies in the definition of the economic regime: what may look like an economic "law" over a period of several centuries may well disappear once the time horizon is broadened. A second lesson is that the same variable can, at one moment in history, constitute an obstacle to the process of economic development, and then, at another moment, become the driving force of this process. Finally, slow and quantitatively minor changes in a variable can, if repeated over a long period of time, become the latent dynamic that will govern, at a given moment, the transition to a new economic regime."