ABSTRACT
There is a fairly general understanding that the slowdown of the 1970s was more than a cyclical phenomenon, in fact a break in the pattern of growth of the postwar period. In his analysis of the boom and the bubble, Brenner (2002) takes the mid-70s as a reference point for the beginning of a new phase. Much literature, more or less explicitly, suggests that underlying the slowdown was the crisis of mass production and the system of social and economic relations associated with it. There are therefore a set of fundamental changes that characterizes the pattern of growth of industrial economies in the years, by and large, before and after 1973. One example is the essay by Cornwall and Setterfield (2002), already discussed in Chapter 1. Building on Kaldor’s ideas, the two authors combine cumulative causation and institutional change to interpret discrete episodes of growth, the golden age (1945-73) and the Age of Decline (post-73), indicating how demand-led growth affords an interpretation of the pattern of growth emerging from the mid-70s. Indeed, their stated purpose is to explain the growth slowdown since 1973, with some conjectures concerning the expansion of the 1990s. The many dimensions of the break in the pattern of growth are held together by an extended notion of structural dynamics, which includes organizational and institutional change. The two growth episodes are associated with historically specific macroeconomic regimes. Regimes
comprise a process of income generation embedded within a historically specific institutional framework, which together give rise to the conditional steady-state output and productivity growth outcomes characteristic of a growth episode. . . . Any equilibrium is thus conditional on the reproduction over time of a specific institutional framework.
