Saturday , April 26 2025
Home / Video / The Role of Energy in Production. Explaining “Solow Residual” as energy’s contribution to output

The Role of Energy in Production. Explaining “Solow Residual” as energy’s contribution to output

Summary:
Economic theory has failed to incorporate the role of energy in production for two centuries since the Physiocrats. In this video I derive a production function that includes energy in an essential manner. It implies that economic growth has been driven by the increase in the energy throughput capabilities of machinery. NOTE: As a viewer ...

Topics:
Steve Keen considers the following as important:

This could be interesting, too:

Robert Vienneau writes Austrian Capital Theory And Triple-Switching In The Corn-Tractor Model

Mike Norman writes The Accursed Tariffs — NeilW

Mike Norman writes IRS has agreed to share migrants’ tax information with ICE

Mike Norman writes Trump’s “Liberation Day”: Another PR Gag, or Global Reorientation Turning Point? — Simplicius











Economic theory has failed to incorporate the role of energy in production for two centuries since the Physiocrats. In this video I derive a production function that includes energy in an essential manner. It implies that economic growth has been driven by the increase in the energy throughput capabilities of machinery.



NOTE: As a viewer pointed out, I should set alpha to 0.3 rather than 0.7 here. I swapped usual treatment of which input was raised to alpha but forgot to swap the values as well. I’ll fix that for the presentation and whenever I do this on a video again.



Steve Keen
Steve Keen (born 28 March 1953) is an Australian-born, British-based economist and author. He considers himself a post-Keynesian, criticising neoclassical economics as inconsistent, unscientific and empirically unsupported. The major influences on Keen's thinking about economics include John Maynard Keynes, Karl Marx, Hyman Minsky, Piero Sraffa, Augusto Graziani, Joseph Alois Schumpeter, Thorstein Veblen, and François Quesnay.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *