Demand, Complexity, and Long-Run Economic Evolution

Andreas Chai is an Associate Professor at Griffith University specialising in the study of consumption behaviour from an evolutionary economic perspective and its implications for economic development, measuring poverty, structural change in the economy and climate change adaptation. His work has been published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Cambridge Journal of Economics as well as the Journal of Evolutionary Economics.Chad M. Baum is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Food and Resource Economics at the University of Bonn. His main research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection between consumption theory, evolutionary economics, and public understanding of technological innovation in the food sector. Motivated by the broad pursuit of a sustainable Bioeconomy, his work has appeared in the Journal of Bioeconomics and he has collaborated on a number of interdisciplinary projects exploring the development and acceptanceof emerging technologies.

• Introduction: Demand, Complexity, and Long-Run Economic Evolution.- Part I Re-thinking the Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren.- Work and Consumption in an Era of Unbalanced Technological Advance.- Institutions Hold Consumption on a Leash: An Evolutionary Economic Approach to the Future of Consumption.- The Mortgage Treadmill Versus Discretionary Spending and Enforced Leisure.- Ars Ultima Spes? Some Notes on the Unsustainability of Today’s Capitalism and Culture as a Possible Remedy.- Part II New Perspectives on the Long-Run Evolution of Demand.- Tackling Keynes’ Question: A Look Back on 15 years of Learning to Consume.- The Evolution of Consumption and Its Welfare Effects.- How Where I Shop Influences What I Buy: The Importance of the Retail Format in Sustainable Tomato Consumption.- Innovation, Structural Change and Multisectoral Economic Growth.