New Economic Windows – serie

This book offers a thorough introduction to the highly promising complex agent-based approach to economics, in which agent-based models (ABMs) are used to represent economic systems as complex and evolving systems composed of heterogeneous agents of limited rationality who interact with each other, generating the system’s emergent properties in the process. This approach represents a response to the limitations of the dominant theory in economics, which does not consider the possibility of a major crisis, and to the inability of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium theory to generate empirically falsifiable propositions. In the new perspective, the focus is on identifying the elements of instability rather than the triggering event. As the theory of complexity demonstrates, the interactions of heterogeneous agents produce non-linearity: this puts an end to the age of certainties. With ABMs, the methodology is “from the bottom up”. The individualparameters and their distribution are estimated, and then evaluated to verify whether aggregate regularities emerge on the whole. In short, not only micro, but also meso and macro empirical validation are employed. Moreover, it shows that the mantra of growth should be supplanted by the concept of a growth​. Given its depth of coverage, the book will enable students at the undergraduate and Master’s level to gain a firm grasp of this important emerging approach.   “This book is flower blossomed by one of the two greatest Italian economists.” Bruce Greenwald, Columbia University   “The author’s - the ABM prophet’s - thoughts on economics have been at the forefront of the world. Without a firm belief in and dedication to human society, it is impossible to write such a book. This is a work of high academic value, which can help readers quickly understand the history and current situation of complex economic theory. In particular,we can understand the basic viewpoints, academic status, advantages and shortcomings of various schools of economic theory.”Jie Wu, Guangzhou Milestone Software Co., China

This book presents the latest perspectives and challenges within the interrelated fields of econophysics and sociophysics, which have emerged from the application of statistical physics to economics and sociology. Economic and financial markets appear to be in a permanent state of flux. Billions of agents interact with each other, giving rise to complex dynamics of economic quantities at the micro and macro levels. With the availability of huge data sets, researchers can address questions at a much more granular level than was previously possible. Fundamental questions regarding the aggregation of actions and information and the coordination, complexity, and evolution of economic and financial networks are currently receiving much attention in the econophysics research agenda. In parallel, the sociophysics literature has focused on large-scale social data and their interrelations. In this book, leading researchers from different communities – economists, sociologists, financial analysts, mathematicians, physicists, statisticians, and others – report on their recent work and their analyses of economic and social behavior.

This book presents a probabilistic approach to studying the fundamental role of labor in capitalist economies and develops a non-deterministic theoretical framework for the foundations of political economy. By applying the framework to real-world data, the authors offer new insights into the dynamics of growth, wages, and accumulation in capitalist development around the globe. The book demonstrates that a probabilistic political economy based on labor inputs enables us to describe central organizing principles in modern capitalism. Starting from a few basic assumptions, it shows that the working time of employees is the main regulating variable for determining strict numerical limits on the rate of economic growth, the range of wages, and the pace of accumulation under the present global economic system. This book will appeal to anyone interested in how the capitalist mode of production works and its inherent limitations; in particular, it will be useful toscholars and students of Marxian economics.“Emmanuel Farjoun and Moshé Machover, follow up their pathbreaking work on the application of statistical physics methods to political economy in this book with David Zachariah, in which they develop methods for making educated and structured estimates of stylized facts applicable to capitalist economies. There’s a lot for economists and anyone interested in the political economy of capitalism to learn from their reasoning on these issues, including their novel and challenging suggestion of bounds on the rates of increase of use-value productivity of labor, and on the range of variation of the wage share.”Duncan K. Foley, Leo Model Professor of Economics, New School for Social Research

This book presents a probabilistic approach to studying the fundamental role of labor in capitalist economies and develops a non-deterministic theoretical framework for the foundations of political economy. By applying the framework to real-world data, the authors offer new insights into the dynamics of growth, wages, and accumulation in capitalist development around the globe. The book demonstrates that a probabilistic political economy based on labor inputs enables us to describe central organizing principles in modern capitalism. Starting from a few basic assumptions, it shows that the working time of employees is the main regulating variable for determining strict numerical limits on the rate of economic growth, the range of wages, and the pace of accumulation under the present global economic system. This book will appeal to anyone interested in how the capitalist mode of production works and its inherent limitations; in particular, it will be useful toscholars and students of Marxian economics.“Emmanuel Farjoun and Moshé Machover, follow up their pathbreaking work on the application of statistical physics methods to political economy in this book with David Zachariah, in which they develop methods for making educated and structured estimates of stylized facts applicable to capitalist economies. There’s a lot for economists and anyone interested in the political economy of capitalism to learn from their reasoning on these issues, including their novel and challenging suggestion of bounds on the rates of increase of use-value productivity of labor, and on the range of variation of the wage share.”Duncan K. Foley, Leo Model Professor of Economics, New School for Social Research

This book is an outcome of the interdisciplinary conference held at OP Jindal Global University (Quantum Decision-making and Complexity modeling, and their possible applications in social sciences－ economics, finance and public policy). The volume builds upon the emerging fields of Econophysics, Complexity theory and Quantum like modelling in cognition and social sciences, and their plausible applications in economics and public policy. There can be deep linkages between the micro, meso and macro scales at which these paradigms operate. In this data-driven age, greater amounts of information, along with the facility to harvest, sort and process said information, have permitted an expansion of the capability to study a society’s various factors to a degree of detail and inclusiveness that has never before been available to researchers. As a result, an increasing number of throughlines is being discovered, revealing heretofore unknown connections between various disciplines and enhancing the study of such societal tropes as finance, language, shared behavior, and many others. As the reader will see, with clearer understanding of the interconnectedness of society’s assorted parts comes a clearer understanding of the society as a whole. We have received critical thoughts from noted experts in social and natural sciences to explore possible interconnections. The editors of this book earnestly hope that the critical reviews presented in this volume will stimulate further scholarly interest, but also interest among policy practitioners for the purpose of exploring possibilities for creating a new paradigm for comprehending pressing issues of deep uncertainty and emergence in social dynamics.

This book is an outcome of the interdisciplinary conference held at OP Jindal Global University (Quantum Decision-making and Complexity modeling, and their possible applications in social sciences－ economics, finance and public policy). The volume builds upon the emerging fields of Econophysics, Complexity theory and Quantum like modelling in cognition and social sciences, and their plausible applications in economics and public policy. There can be deep linkages between the micro, meso and macro scales at which these paradigms operate. In this data-driven age, greater amounts of information, along with the facility to harvest, sort and process said information, have permitted an expansion of the capability to study a society’s various factors to a degree of detail and inclusiveness that has never before been available to researchers. As a result, an increasing number of throughlines is being discovered, revealing heretofore unknown connections between various disciplines and enhancing the study of such societal tropes as finance, language, shared behavior, and many others. As the reader will see, with clearer understanding of the interconnectedness of society’s assorted parts comes a clearer understanding of the society as a whole. We have received critical thoughts from noted experts in social and natural sciences to explore possible interconnections. The editors of this book earnestly hope that the critical reviews presented in this volume will stimulate further scholarly interest, but also interest among policy practitioners for the purpose of exploring possibilities for creating a new paradigm for comprehending pressing issues of deep uncertainty and emergence in social dynamics.

This open access book is a groundbreaking exploration of systemic risk in modern financial systems. Through its theoretical and empirical investigations, it reveals the multidimensionality of systemic risk, the transmission channels of crises, and the interlinkages between physical, transition, and financial risks. It introduces cutting-edge methodologies, including prediction and optimization models based on complex networks, multilayer networks and eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) approaches, to forecast and measure systemic risk and financial crisis. It provides insight for academics, practitioners, policy and supervisory authorities, and bankers and financial market operators on understanding the links that determine the propagation of financial crises and the emergence of systemic risks. This book is essential for those wishing to better understand systemic risk and its implications.

This book delves into the intricacies of transformative processes, focusing particularly on radical and disruptive changes that shape markets, social systems, organizations, cities, and service ecosystems. In a world characterized by turbulence, unpredictability, and complex challenges, managers and marketers are tasked with navigating change and driving progress. Drawing on frameworks, typologies, and insights from diverse theories—including complexity theory, emergence theory, and service-dominant logic—this book equips academics and practitioners with the tools to analyze, understand, and facilitate the transformation of their systems. Rooted in research and discussions from international academic events such as the Naples Forum on Service and the Forum of Markets and Marketing, this book offers invaluable guidance for those seeking to design sustainable transformations in today's dynamic landscape.

This book delves into the intricacies of transformative processes, focusing particularly on radical and disruptive changes that shape markets, social systems, organizations, cities, and service ecosystems. In a world characterized by turbulence, unpredictability, and complex challenges, managers and marketers are tasked with navigating change and driving progress. Drawing on frameworks, typologies, and insights from diverse theories—including complexity theory, emergence theory, and service-dominant logic—this book equips academics and practitioners with the tools to analyze, understand, and facilitate the transformation of their systems. Rooted in research and discussions from international academic events such as the Naples Forum on Service and the Forum of Markets and Marketing, this book offers invaluable guidance for those seeking to design sustainable transformations in today's dynamic landscape.

This book explores screen-based trading with an open order book, where traders' decisions influence others in real time via that open order book. Modelling traders’ actions using discrete choice, a method proven in other fields but new to finance, and the integration of discrete choice into a Markov Process, offers an innovative approach to understanding decision making under uncertainty. We call this combination "Doubly Stochastic Markov Process" (DSMP for short).The book is aimed at those interested in real market performance with traders’ modelling based on behavioural expertise.Monitoring orders instead of prices creates a competitive advantage because the adjustment of prices requires prior adjustment of orders. Only the matching of orders generates transactions and prices. Efficient order management turns risky volatility into profits.The presentation of DSMP is preceded by an introductory overview of trading venues and concludes with an outlook on the increasing suitability of stochastic processes to implement the interactions of agents and to facilitate modelling the self-organisation of markets.

The primary goal of this book is to present the research findings and conclusions of physicists, economists, mathematicians and financial engineers working in the field of "Econophysics" who have undertaken agent-based modelling, comparison with empirical studies and related investigations. Most standard economic models assume the existence of the representative agent, who is “perfectly rational” and applies the utility maximization principle when taking action. One reason for this is the desire to keep models mathematically tractable: no tools are available to economists for solving non-linear models of heterogeneous adaptive agents without explicit optimization. In contrast, multi-agent models, which originated from statistical physics considerations, allow us to go beyond the prototype theories of traditional economics involving the representative agent. This book is based on the Econophys-Kolkata VII Workshop, at which many such modelling efforts were presented. In the book, leading researchers in their fields report on their latest work, consider recent developments and review the contemporary literature.

In this book, leading experts discuss innovative components of complexity theory and chaos theory in economics.The underlying perspective is that investigations of economic phenomena should view these phenomena not as deterministic, predictable and mechanistic but rather as process dependent, organic and always evolving.The aim is to highlight the exciting potential of this approach in economics and its ability to overcome the limitations of past research and offer important new insights. The book offers a stimulating mix of theory, examples and policy.By casting light on a variety of topics in the field, it will provide an ideal platform for researchers wishing to deepen their understanding and identify areas for further investigation.

This book presents the works and research findings of physicists, economists, mathematicians, statisticians, and financial engineers who have undertaken data-driven modelling of market dynamics and other empirical studies in the field of Econophysics. During recent decades, the financial market landscape has changed dramatically with the deregulation of markets and the growing complexity of products. The ever-increasing speed and decreasing costs of computational power and networks have led to the emergence of huge databases. The availability of these data should permit the development of models that are better founded empirically, and econophysicists have accordingly been advocating that one should rely primarily on the empirical observations in order to construct models and validate them. The recent turmoil in financial markets and the 2008 crash appear to offer a strong rationale for new models and approaches. The Econophysics community accordingly has an important future role to play in market modelling. The Econophys-Kolkata VIII conference proceedings are devoted to the presentation of many such modelling efforts and address recent developments. A number of leading researchers from across the globe report on their recent work, comment on the latest issues, and review the contemporary literature.

This book presents a systematic overview of cutting-edge research in the field of parametric modeling of personal income and wealth distribution, which allows one to represent how income/wealth is distributed within a given population. The estimated parameters may be used to gain insights into the causes of the evolution of income/wealth distribution over time, or to interpret the differences between distributions across countries. Moreover, once a given parametric model has been fitted to a data set, one can straightforwardly compute inequality and poverty measures. Finally, estimated parameters may be used in empirical modeling of the impact of macroeconomic conditions on the evolution of personal income/wealth distribution. In reviewing the state of the art in the field, the authors provide a thorough discussion of parametric models belonging to the “κ-generalized” family, a new and fruitful set of statistical models for the size distribution of income and wealth that they have developed over several years of collaborative and multidisciplinary research. This book will be of interest to all who share the belief that problems of income and wealth distribution merit detailed conceptual and methodological attention.

In this book, leading experts discuss innovative components of complexity theory and chaos theory in economics.The underlying perspective is that investigations of economic phenomena should view these phenomena not as deterministic, predictable and mechanistic but rather as process dependent, organic and always evolving.The aim is to highlight the exciting potential of this approach in economics and its ability to overcome the limitations of past research and offer important new insights. The book offers a stimulating mix of theory, examples and policy.By casting light on a variety of topics in the field, it will provide an ideal platform for researchers wishing to deepen their understanding and identify areas for further investigation.

The primary goal of this book is to present the research findings and conclusions of physicists, economists, mathematicians and financial engineers working in the field of "Econophysics" who have undertaken agent-based modelling, comparison with empirical studies and related investigations. Most standard economic models assume the existence of the representative agent, who is “perfectly rational” and applies the utility maximization principle when taking action. One reason for this is the desire to keep models mathematically tractable: no tools are available to economists for solving non-linear models of heterogeneous adaptive agents without explicit optimization. In contrast, multi-agent models, which originated from statistical physics considerations, allow us to go beyond the prototype theories of traditional economics involving the representative agent. This book is based on the Econophys-Kolkata VII Workshop, at which many such modelling efforts were presented. In the book, leading researchers in their fields report on their latest work, consider recent developments and review the contemporary literature.

This book presents the works and research findings of physicists, economists, mathematicians, statisticians, and financial engineers who have undertaken data-driven modelling of market dynamics and other empirical studies in the field of Econophysics. During recent decades, the financial market landscape has changed dramatically with the deregulation of markets and the growing complexity of products. The ever-increasing speed and decreasing costs of computational power and networks have led to the emergence of huge databases. The availability of these data should permit the development of models that are better founded empirically, and econophysicists have accordingly been advocating that one should rely primarily on the empirical observations in order to construct models and validate them. The recent turmoil in financial markets and the 2008 crash appear to offer a strong rationale for new models and approaches. The Econophysics community accordingly has an important future role to play in market modelling. The Econophys-Kolkata VIII conference proceedings are devoted to the presentation of many such modelling efforts and address recent developments. A number of leading researchers from across the globe report on their recent work, comment on the latest issues, and review the contemporary literature.

Do you know how banking and money will look like in the new digital age?This book collects the voices of leading scholars, entrepreneurs, policy makers and consultants who, through their expertise and keen analytical skills, are best positioned to picture from various angles the ongoing technological revolution in banking and finance.You will learn how lending and borrowing can exist without banks; how new forms of money can compete to better serve different society needs; how new technologies are banking the unbanked communities in the poorest parts of the world, and how ideas and small projects can be financed by the crowds without the need to rely upon banks. You will learn how, in the new digital age, we will interact with new self-organised and autonomous companies that operate without any human involvement, based on a set of programmed and incorruptible rules. You will learn that new business models will emerge thanks to technology-enabled platforms, upon which one can build new forms of non-hierarchical cooperation between strangers. And you will also learn that new forms of risks and threats are emerging that will destabilise our systems and jeopardise the stability of our financial order.

This book offers a practical guide to Agent Based economic modeling, adopting a “learning by doing” approach to help the reader master the fundamental tools needed to create and analyze Agent Based models. After providing them with a basic “toolkit” for Agent Based modeling, it present and discusses didactic models of real financial and economic systems in detail. While stressing the main features and advantages of the bottom-up perspective inherent to this approach, the book also highlights the logic and practical steps that characterize the model building procedure. A detailed description of the underlying codes, developed using R and C, is also provided. In addition, each didactic model is accompanied by exercises and applications designed to promote active learning on the part of the reader. Following the same approach, the book also presents several complementary tools required for the analysis and validation of the models, such as sensitivity experiments, calibration exercises, economic network and statistical distributions analysis.By the end of the book, the reader will have gained a deeper understanding of the Agent Based methodology and be prepared to use the fundamental techniques required to start developing their own economic models.Accordingly, “Economics with Heterogeneous Interacting Agents” will be of particular interest to graduate and postgraduate students, as well as to academic institutions and lecturers interested in including an overview of the AB approach to economic modeling in their courses.

This book presents the proceedings from ECONOPHYS-2015,an international workshop held in New Delhi, India, on the interrelated fieldsof “econophysics” and “sociophysics”, which have emerged from the applicationof statistical physics to economics and sociology. Leading researchers fromvaried communities, including economists, sociologists, financial analysts,mathematicians, physicists, statisticians, and others, report on their recentwork, discuss topical issues, and review the relevant contemporary literature.A society can be described as a group of peoplewho inhabit the same geographical or social territory and are mutually involvedthrough their shared participation in different aspects of life. It is possibleto observe and characterize average behaviors of members of a society, an examplebeing voting behavior. Moreover, the dynamic nature of interaction within anyeconomic sector comprising numerous cooperatively interacting agents has manyfeatures in common with the interacting systems of statistical physics. It ison these bases that interest has grown in the application within sociology andeconomics of the tools of statistical mechanics. This book will be of value forall with an interest in this flourishing field.

This book provides the first comprehensive introduction to multi-agent, multi-choice repetitive games, such as the Kolkata Restaurant Problem and the Minority Game. It explains how the tangible formulations of these games, using stochastic strategies developed by statistical physicists employing both classical and quantum physics, have led to very efficient solutions to the problems posed. Further, it includes sufficient introductory notes on information-processing strategies employing both classical statistical physics and quantum mechanics. Games of this nature, in which agents are presented with choices, from among which their goal is to make the minority choice, offer effective means of modeling herd behavior and market dynamics and are highly relevant to assessing systemic risk. Accordingly, this book will be of interest to economists, physicists, and computer scientists alike.

This book targets the critical issue of decision making in uncertain conditions and situations. The aim is to increase readers’ understanding of complexity and of socio-economic interactions through the application of systems thinking perspectives. Among the various areas and topics addressed are complexity and sustainable management, markets as complex adaptive systems, the impacts of psychological and emotional factors upon value co-creation exchanges, and ICT enablers of service network performance and service exchange fulfillment. Thanks to the chosen perspectives, all of which are based on different systems research streams, the book will support more consistent and robust decisions, leading to sustainable, wise, and viable systems dynamics. It will aid managers, practitioners, and consultants in their decision-making processes and will also be of interest for academics and scholars in management, systems, computer science, engineering, and marketing.

This book, now in its third edition, explores how human populations grow, based on their creative abilities.  To reconsider the theory of economic growth from a physicist's perspective, the book analyses the concepts of value and utility and their relationship to thermodynamic concepts. This approach allows the author to include characteristics of technology in descriptions of development and to formulate a phenomenological (macroeconomic, no-price fluctuations are discussed) theory of production as a set of evolutionary equations in one-sector and multi-sector approximations. The theory is proved to be useful for describing both national economies and global production in ancient times.This monograph presents the topics in a compact and consistent manner and can be used by students with a background in physics and other natural sciences who wish to specialize in economics. It explains how the growth of production is connected with advances in technology, consumption of labour and energy and makes it possible to analyse past and present social production systems and to build scripts of future progress. The book is of interest to energy specialists engaged in planning and analyzing the production and consumption of energy carriers, and to economists wanting to know how energy and technology affect economic growth. This third edition has been substantially revised and three brand new chapters have been added. Chapter 8 illustrates the robustness of the theory with the aid of statistical historical data from the Russian economy, while Chapter 12 is devoted to a reconstruction of the global production activity in ancient times. Chapter 13 discusses the principles of the organization of social production.

This book presents a systematic overview of cutting-edge research in the field of parametric modeling of personal income and wealth distribution, which allows one to represent how income/wealth is distributed within a given population. The estimated parameters may be used to gain insights into the causes of the evolution of income/wealth distribution over time, or to interpret the differences between distributions across countries. Moreover, once a given parametric model has been fitted to a data set, one can straightforwardly compute inequality and poverty measures. Finally, estimated parameters may be used in empirical modeling of the impact of macroeconomic conditions on the evolution of personal income/wealth distribution. In reviewing the state of the art in the field, the authors provide a thorough discussion of parametric models belonging to the “κ-generalized” family, a new and fruitful set of statistical models for the size distribution of income and wealth that they have developed over several years of collaborative and multidisciplinary research. This book will be of interest to all who share the belief that problems of income and wealth distribution merit detailed conceptual and methodological attention.

Do you know how banking and money will look like in the new digital age?This book collects the voices of leading scholars, entrepreneurs, policy makers and consultants who, through their expertise and keen analytical skills, are best positioned to picture from various angles the ongoing technological revolution in banking and finance.You will learn how lending and borrowing can exist without banks; how new forms of money can compete to better serve different society needs; how new technologies are banking the unbanked communities in the poorest parts of the world, and how ideas and small projects can be financed by the crowds without the need to rely upon banks. You will learn how, in the new digital age, we will interact with new self-organised and autonomous companies that operate without any human involvement, based on a set of programmed and incorruptible rules. You will learn that new business models will emerge thanks to technology-enabled platforms, upon which one can build new forms of non-hierarchical cooperation between strangers. And you will also learn that new forms of risks and threats are emerging that will destabilise our systems and jeopardise the stability of our financial order.

This book offers a practical guide to Agent Based economic modeling, adopting a “learning by doing” approach to help the reader master the fundamental tools needed to create and analyze Agent Based models. After providing them with a basic “toolkit” for Agent Based modeling, it present and discusses didactic models of real financial and economic systems in detail. While stressing the main features and advantages of the bottom-up perspective inherent to this approach, the book also highlights the logic and practical steps that characterize the model building procedure. A detailed description of the underlying codes, developed using R and C, is also provided. In addition, each didactic model is accompanied by exercises and applications designed to promote active learning on the part of the reader. Following the same approach, the book also presents several complementary tools required for the analysis and validation of the models, such as sensitivity experiments, calibration exercises, economic network and statistical distributions analysis.By the end of the book, the reader will have gained a deeper understanding of the Agent Based methodology and be prepared to use the fundamental techniques required to start developing their own economic models.Accordingly, “Economics with Heterogeneous Interacting Agents” will be of particular interest to graduate and postgraduate students, as well as to academic institutions and lecturers interested in including an overview of the AB approach to economic modeling in their courses.

This book presents the proceedings from ECONOPHYS-2015,an international workshop held in New Delhi, India, on the interrelated fieldsof “econophysics” and “sociophysics”, which have emerged from the applicationof statistical physics to economics and sociology. Leading researchers fromvaried communities, including economists, sociologists, financial analysts,mathematicians, physicists, statisticians, and others, report on their recentwork, discuss topical issues, and review the relevant contemporary literature.A society can be described as a group of peoplewho inhabit the same geographical or social territory and are mutually involvedthrough their shared participation in different aspects of life. It is possibleto observe and characterize average behaviors of members of a society, an examplebeing voting behavior. Moreover, the dynamic nature of interaction within anyeconomic sector comprising numerous cooperatively interacting agents has manyfeatures in common with the interacting systems of statistical physics. It ison these bases that interest has grown in the application within sociology andeconomics of the tools of statistical mechanics. This book will be of value forall with an interest in this flourishing field.

This book targets the critical issue of decision making in uncertain conditions and situations. The aim is to increase readers’ understanding of complexity and of socio-economic interactions through the application of systems thinking perspectives. Among the various areas and topics addressed are complexity and sustainable management, markets as complex adaptive systems, the impacts of psychological and emotional factors upon value co-creation exchanges, and ICT enablers of service network performance and service exchange fulfillment. Thanks to the chosen perspectives, all of which are based on different systems research streams, the book will support more consistent and robust decisions, leading to sustainable, wise, and viable systems dynamics. It will aid managers, practitioners, and consultants in their decision-making processes and will also be of interest for academics and scholars in management, systems, computer science, engineering, and marketing.

This book, now in its third edition, explores how human populations grow, based on their creative abilities.  To reconsider the theory of economic growth from a physicist's perspective, the book analyses the concepts of value and utility and their relationship to thermodynamic concepts. This approach allows the author to include characteristics of technology in descriptions of development and to formulate a phenomenological (macroeconomic, no-price fluctuations are discussed) theory of production as a set of evolutionary equations in one-sector and multi-sector approximations. The theory is proved to be useful for describing both national economies and global production in ancient times.This monograph presents the topics in a compact and consistent manner and can be used by students with a background in physics and other natural sciences who wish to specialize in economics. It explains how the growth of production is connected with advances in technology, consumption of labour and energy and makes it possible to analyse past and present social production systems and to build scripts of future progress. The book is of interest to energy specialists engaged in planning and analyzing the production and consumption of energy carriers, and to economists wanting to know how energy and technology affect economic growth. This third edition has been substantially revised and three brand new chapters have been added. Chapter 8 illustrates the robustness of the theory with the aid of statistical historical data from the Russian economy, while Chapter 12 is devoted to a reconstruction of the global production activity in ancient times. Chapter 13 discusses the principles of the organization of social production.