Socio-technical evolution

Are we evolving into a new Post-Industrial epoch driven by the emerging living and intelligent technologies, spearheaded by the digital revolution? Or are we just entering a new period in the Industrial epoch, where we don’t need to radically update our institutions, the market and our cultural narratives? Using an evolutionary perspective and time series analysis we seek to investigate these questions. We report a study of the long term dynamics of the economy across 28 countries and across different socio-technical epochs, some dating back to 1270, while others starting at the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Using standard time series analysis methods we report overall growth dynamics as well as rhythmic phenomena in the growth patterns after the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Our main data sources include the Maddison Project [4], Edvinson [1], Our Wold in Data [7] and updated data references in the cited literature. Assuming these evolutionary changes of our societies are driven by fundamental inventions that are capitalized through innovation when the socio-economic climate is appropriate (Mensch) [5], we can use a simple mathematical model (Mosekilde et al.) [6] to interpret and to better understand the underlying dynamics for the empirical data as well as provide informed, tentative forcasts for the future (Rosenlyst et al.) [9].