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The Pathway of Dynamic Efficiency: Economic Trajectory of a Technical Revolution

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The Long-Wave Debate
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Abstract

Technological progress is a highly uneven process in space and time, creating and absorbing a new efficiency potential. Among the underlying causes we find historical pushes to the organic composition of capital, realized by technical revolutions. The problem of technical revolutions has a long tradition in Marxist thinking, dating back to a letter from Engels to E. Bernstein in 1883 about the coming “electrotechnical revolution” (Marx/Engels, Vol. 35, p. 444). Substantial contributions to the problem were made by Soviet historians (Milonov, 1922), and in the 1950s the difference between the Great Industrial Revolution and technical revolutions was noticed. Quantitative estimates of long waves in the history of technology are also not recent inventions. One of the first attempts to draw a general historical curve of technological progress was made by Lilley (1952).

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© 1987 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Haustein, HD. (1987). The Pathway of Dynamic Efficiency: Economic Trajectory of a Technical Revolution. In: Vasko, T. (eds) The Long-Wave Debate. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-10351-7_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-10351-7_15

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-10353-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-10351-7

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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