Lectures on Economic Growth

“Lucas provides a lucid introduction and nontechnical summaries of his main ideas… A reader may even come to feel the excitement of Lucas’s passionate quest for the solution to the mystery of growth… [This] book is an outstanding intellectual achievement… Lucas’s discussion raises the question of what kind of public policies are needed for countries to break out of poverty.”—Robert Skidelsky, The New York Review of Books

“Robert Lucas is the most outstanding economic theorist of the late 20th century… The great merit of Lucas’s models is that while they are mathematically rigorous, they are also very simple and transparent… As he takes up complications such as class, he still manages to derive elegant and lucid solutions… Lucas has now given a deeper meaning to new classical economics. This is a superb collection and will guide teaching as well as research for many years to come, as so much of Lucas’s work already has done.”—Meghnad Desai, The Times Higher Education Supplement

“Lucas writes beautifully and provocatively. He has thought hard about the forces of growth and the facts and episodes that must be explained by any growth theory. His discussion of history is interesting and insightful. It more than adequately motivates his theoretical modeling. And Lucas has few peers as a modeler; his models are parsimonious, his exposition is crisp, and he is very good at explaining what lessons should be drawn from the formal results.”—Gene M. Grossman, Jacob Viner Professor of International Economics, Princeton University