Tackling Keynes' question: a look back on 15 years of Learning To Consume
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Author(s)
Chai, Andreas
Griffith University Author(s)
Year published
2017
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Two centuries of continuous economic growth since the industrial revolution have fundamentally transformed consumer lifestyles. Here Keynes raised an important question: will consumption always continue to expand in the same manner as it has in the previous two centuries? If so, how? This paper critically reviews a body of work that has adopted the Learning To Consume (LTC) approach to study the long run growth of consumption (Witt 2001). By borrowing certain established insights from psychology and biology about how consumers learn and what motivates them to consume, it highlights how rising income, new technologies and ...
View more >Two centuries of continuous economic growth since the industrial revolution have fundamentally transformed consumer lifestyles. Here Keynes raised an important question: will consumption always continue to expand in the same manner as it has in the previous two centuries? If so, how? This paper critically reviews a body of work that has adopted the Learning To Consume (LTC) approach to study the long run growth of consumption (Witt 2001). By borrowing certain established insights from psychology and biology about how consumers learn and what motivates them to consume, it highlights how rising income, new technologies and market competition have combined to trigger important changes in both the underlying set of needs possessed by consumers and how they learn to satisfy these needs. Methodological issues and open questions are discussed.
View less >
View more >Two centuries of continuous economic growth since the industrial revolution have fundamentally transformed consumer lifestyles. Here Keynes raised an important question: will consumption always continue to expand in the same manner as it has in the previous two centuries? If so, how? This paper critically reviews a body of work that has adopted the Learning To Consume (LTC) approach to study the long run growth of consumption (Witt 2001). By borrowing certain established insights from psychology and biology about how consumers learn and what motivates them to consume, it highlights how rising income, new technologies and market competition have combined to trigger important changes in both the underlying set of needs possessed by consumers and how they learn to satisfy these needs. Methodological issues and open questions are discussed.
View less >
Journal Title
Journal of Evolutionary Economics
Copyright Statement
© 2017 Springer Berlin Heidelberg. This is an electronic version of an article published in Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Volume 27, Issue 2, pp 251–271, 2017. Journal of Evolutionary Economics is available online at: http://link.springer.com/ with the open URL of your article.
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This publication has been entered into Griffith Research Online as an Advanced Online Version.
Subject
Economic theory
Microeconomic theory
Applied economics
Heterodox economics