DARWINIAN VERSUS NEWTONIAN VIEWS OF THE ECONOMY: Empirical tests of Schumpeterian and New Classical Theories

The modern Schumpeterian vision in which history matters is of a non-stationary, evolving economy driven by bursts of technological change initiated by agents facing uncertainty and producing long term, path dependent growth and shorter term non-random investment cycles. The New Classical vision in which history does not matter is of a stationary, ergodic process driven by rational agents facing risk and producing stable trend growth and shorter term cycles caused by random disturbances. We use Carlaw and Lipsey’s forthcoming simulation model of non-stationary, sustained growth driven by endogenous path dependent technological change under uncertainty, to generate artificial national accounts data. We first use an HP-filter to match these data to the RBC stylized growth facts. We then show that the raw simulation data pass standard tests for trend and difference stationarity, appearing to exhibit unit roots and cointegrating processes of order one. Thus, contrary to current belief, these tests do not establish that the real data are generated by a stationary process. Real data from six OECD countries are then used first to show that the hypothesis of a non-varying NAIRU is rejected for all six countries and then to estimate time varying NAIRU’s for each. The estimates are highly sensitive to the time period over which they are made. They also fail to show any relation between the difference between actual unemployment and the estimated NAIRU for each year and the acceleration in the inflation rate. Thus there is no tendency for the inflation rate to behave as required by the New Classical theory.