DYNAMIC ECONOMICS with increasing returns is extended to cope with economic growth, the business cycles and the irregular swings in the long-term development as different aspects of the same dynamical system, the economic system "as a whole." HUMAN CAPITAL emerges as the seminal concept: economic growth is in this dynamics causally reduced to the growth of human capital and thus to the growth of exact scientific knowledge. An analysis of this knowledge shows that quality education in hard sciences must be a prime target of future economic policies. A CAUSAL STRUCTURE, new in economics, underlies the extended dynamics. To enable students to study and to improve it, a detailled introduction to nonlinear causality is given, emphasizing the points relevant to this causal structure. NATIONAL ACCOUNTING and input-output dynamics are suggested to be extended to include also the production prices and production of human capital and of human time, by using a method of calculation indicated in detail in the book.

Dealing with factors affecting economic growth in knowledge-based societies, the author shows that the interaction between material and nonmaterial values is the ultimate source of all economic growth. The model thus developed predicts the quantitative facts concerning business cycles better than the conventional real-cycle models, while also producing a new growth path whose existence is verified by empirical facts. The results provide strong evidence of the economic relevance of nonmaterial values, and also prompt a new view of the stochastic elements in the business cycles.

The author shows that the enormous gap between theory and facts in modern macroeconomics can only be eliminated by nonlinear macroeconomic dynamics with the following special characteristics: First of all, only certain group-theoretical invariants generate the correct growth cycles with irregularly varying lengths, not any stochastic process as usually applied for this purpose. Furthermore, a special extended value function and generalized human capital are needed for a correct representation of scientific and technological innovation. Finally, the correct nonlinear macroeconomic dynamics are not reducible to microeconomics, for both of the above mentioned reasons.

A critical examination of The prevailing orthodoxy according to which all macroeconomic theory should be reducible to microeconomics. The book provides a mathematical extension of the Lucas theory to allow for the effects of creation of knowledge upon economic development so as to improve the prediction of business cycle data.