Technical Change in an Evolutionary Model

The heart of this paper is an evolutionary model of the processes of technological advance and economic growth, a rough calibration of that model with data on U.S. economic growth, and a comparison with neoclassical models of the sort initiated by Solow in his classic 1957 paper.But before developing the particular model it is important to set a wider context.Traditional neoclassical microeconomic theory has been subjected over the years to a steady and sometimes heavy stream of criticism.By and large, it has withstood the challenges well.In part this is because many of the challenges were inept, and in part because of the robustness and flexibility of the neoclassical perspective.But a major reason is simply that no alternative theoretical structure of adequate scope has been put forward --as Thomas Kuhn has shCJVJn, the history of science offers abundant support for the generalization that 11 you can't beat something with nothing. 111 The more salient of the complaints against neoclassical theory remain unanswered, but ineffective, because they were not accompanied by a serious proposal for reconstruction.