Traditional Visions of the Future

A powerful dynamic theory should provide a clear and realistic vision of the future. Any model with pretensions to explain the past and the present must be able to offer profound insights about the path ahead for human society. This will be important as a basis for framing wider policies concerning infrastructure and environment. If, however, a model has nothing worth while to say about the future, then it will be equally impotent in relation to the present and the past. In this chapter we need to ask: What can the traditional theory of growth and development tell us about the future? To answer this question I will briefly review traditional visions of the future from the classical economists of the late eighteenth century to the neoclassical economists of the late twentieth century.