The Key Phenomena that Potentially Cause Growth

What are the causes of economic growth? One interdisciplinary approach to answering this question would involve investigating in turn which causes different disciplines think to be important. Such an approach runs the risk of missing causes that have escaped the attention of any discipline. This is a particular danger with respect to the study of economic growth: as noted in the introductory chapter, this topic has only been explicitly addressed by one or two disciplines. A much better strategy, then, involves surveying the entire list of human science phenomena, and asking in each case whether there seems to be a likely causal relationship to economic growth. This strategy not only insures against being ‘captured’ by existing disciplinary research programs but provides guidance on what causal links to investigate across disciplines. Is such a strategy viable? Most of this chapter will argue that it is, and show how the strategy can be pursued in this case. It is first desirable, however, to speak more generally to the advantages of the causal link approach pursued in this book.