"This book explains how changing technology and economizing behavior induce vast changes in productivity, resource allocation, labor utilization, and patterns of living. Economic growth is seen as a process by which businesses, regimes, countries, and the whole world pass through distinct epochs, each emerging from its predecessor and creating the conditions for its successor.

Viewed from a long-run perspective, growth must be characterized as an explosive process marked by turbulent transitions in social and political life as societies adapt to new opportunities, the demise of old ways of living, and the vast increase and redistribution of human populations.

The book is based on a new and unique synthesis of classical economics and contemporary concepts of adaptation and economic evolution. Although it is grounded in analytical methods, the text has been stripped of all equations and with few exceptions is devoid of technical jargon."--Jacket.