The Digital Era, Viewed From a Perspective of Millennia of Economic Growth

Jakub Growiec

No 2018-034, KAE Working Papers from Warsaw School of Economics, Collegium of Economic Analysis

Abstract: I propose a synthetic theory of economic growth and technological progress over the entire human history. Based on this theory as well as on the analogies with three previous eras (the hunter-gatherer era, the agricultural era and the industrial era) and the technological revolutions which initiated them, I draw conclusions for the contemporary digital era. I argue that each opening of a new era adds a new, previously inactive dimension of economic development, and redefines the key inputs and output of the production process. Economic growth accelerates across the consecutive eras, but there are also big shifts in factor shares and inequality. The two key inputs to the digital-era production process are hardware and software. Human skilled labor is complementary to hardware and substitutable with software, which increasingly includes sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. I also argue that economists have not yet designed sufficient measurement tools, economic policies and institutions appropriate for the digital-era economy

Keywords: economic growth; technological progress; unified growth theory; digital economy; artificial intelligence. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O10 O30 O40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 52 pages
Date: 2018-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-gro, nep-hpe and nep-ict
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12182/1164 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sgh:kaewps:2018034

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in KAE Working Papers from Warsaw School of Economics, Collegium of Economic Analysis Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dariusz Nojszewski ().