The Grip of History and the Scope for Novelty: Some Results and Open Questions on Path Dependence in Economic Processes

Abstract

The very notion of multiple paths of socio-economic change ultimately rests on the idea that history is an essential part of the interpretation of most socio-economic phenomena one observes at any time and place. The prop erty that history matters is also intimately related to that of time irreversibility . In the socio-economic domain and in many areas of natural sciences as well, one cannot reverse the arrow of time — even in principle, let alone in practice — and still recover invariant properties of the system under investigation. That is, in a caricature, you may get a lot of steaks out of a cow but you cannot get a cow out of a lot of steaks. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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