The New Kaldor Facts: Ideas, Institutions, Population, and Human Capital

If you live from paper to paper, seminar to seminar, and conference to conference, it is easy to lose faith in scientific progress. The risk is perhaps most pronounced at job talks in areas outside our field of interest. “Isn’t this what they were arguing about last year?’’ Or, “last decade?’’ In any assessment of progress, as in any analysis of macroeconomic variables, a long-run perspective helps us look past the short-run fluctuations and see the underlying trend. In 1961, Nicholas Kaldor stated six now famous “stylized’’ facts. He used them to summarize what economists had learned from their analysis of twentieth-century growth, and also to frame the research agenda going forward (Kaldor 1961):