Alvin Hansen on Economic Progress and Declining Population Growth

摘要

The driving forces of economic growth, according to the mainstream of classical economic thinking, are threefold: technological innovations, the opening up of new territories and discovery of new resources, and increase in population. In interaction,in an entrepreneurial market economy, these forces generate growth not only in the aggregate but also per capita. Evidence of their power was seen in the long stretch of rising living standards in the West over the nineteenth century, despite the ups anddowns of the business cycle. However, the economic experience of the interwar years, and in particular the Great Depression of the 1930s, suggested that the forces were largely spent and hence that future economic prospects were gravely imperiled. The Keynesian revolution in economics was a response to the evident malfunctioning of the capitalist economic system, although the policy recipes it offered (for increasing demand and investment to levels capable of generating an equilibrium consistent with full employment of productive resources, especially labor) by no means commanded unanimity.