The Neoclassical Growth Model and Twentieth-Century Economics

While growth has been a central element of economic thought at least since the physiocrats and Adam Smith, the modern analysis of growth using formal models began only in the middle of the twentieth century. Thanks largely to Robert Solow’s two articles, “A Contribution to the The-ory of Economic Growth ” (1956) and “Technical Change and the Aggre-gate Production Function ” (1957), growth economics developed into a major area of research in macroeconomics and economic theory, attract-ing the attention of a signifi cant part of the economics profession. The current volume collects most of the papers from the twentieth annual HOPE conference, held 25–27 April 2008 at Duke University. The conference addressed the history of modern growth economics, taking Solow’s key papers from the 1950s as its anchor. The conference was not about Solow’s work per se, but addressed the intellectual currents that formed the background to that work and the history of the growth eco-nomics that it subsequently informed. The conference considered the rise of growth economics as an active fi eld of research in the 1950s, its exten-sion to several branches of the discipline in the 1960s, its decline in the 1970s, and its return to the center stage of macroeconomics over the last twenty years. In addition to sixteen essays presented at the conference, we are fortunate to be able to include transcripts of two less formal talks. The fi rst is Professor Solow’s keynote lecture to the conference on the future of growth economics. This lecture was delivered as part of a celebration