The happiness literature has established that, in the developed countries, increasing affluence has not increased well-being in recent decades. We seek an explanation for this in terms of conspicuous consumption, a phenomenon originally identified by Veblen. We develop some simple general...

Seven years after Helpman's (1998) book on general purpose technologies (GPTs), there is a dearth of subsequent models. Early models employed technically complex dynamic optimising techniques which limited further development. We present a model in which sustained growth is driven by a...