To clarify the evolution of modern economics, I will first discuss modern technology.
In the past, it was normal for industrial processes to improve a piece of technology to make it as efficient as possible, and then manage it for a longer period, since it took quite a long time to process a basic principle into a usable machine.
Modern technology, however, is likely to have moved much more quickly from basic science to usable technology. So-called nanotechnology is a good example of this. In other words, it now takes much more time to generate a new basic principle than a new engineering process. In general, basic science provides us with a huge number of possibilities, which can lead to potentially many more combinations of technologies. Therefore, detecting a feasible technology will be a much more difficult task. This may require better techniques underlying statistical physics/mechanics. It may also apply to Information and Communication Technology (ICT).ICT ensures that one of the core engines of society, particularly for services management, is also common to daily life for end-users as well as in production. Specifically, ICT can intermediate activities, and then provide ‘services’ bilaterally. The ways in which ICT is connected to societal activities and service processes must be nonlinear, dynamic, and hierarchical over time, i.e., complex and/or synergetic. ICT is therefore naturally an attractive research subject for complex sciences. At the same time, future society is likely to be built on ICT intermediation.
It is therefore obvious that ICT will be decisive in our future as both hardware and software. In future, ICT may be a key factor, not only crucial to each process of production at the various different stages of an economic system, but also in
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Y. Aruka, Evolutionary Foundations of Economic Science, Evolutionary Economics and Social Complexity Science 1, DOI 10.1007/978-4-431-54844-7__1 generating new technologies.
Looking at ICT, then, it is possible to generate a bird’s- eye view of the future profile of society. In this sense, designing ICT will serve as a policy measure to assess a social activity. In short, the new service-dominant economy will be realized if, and only if, ICT progresses as expected.During the final quarter of the last century, the economy shifted towards services and away from manufacturing. This transition is part of the ongoing evolution of the modern economy since the industrial revolution, and in particular, changes in production and consumption. More detailed observations on this will be found in Chaps. 2-3. Until the advent of the dominance of the service economy,[5] the basic principles of production and consumption, either in classic political economy or neoclassical economics, depended on the view that the consumption of citizens should be achieved outside the economic process. In the neoclassical view, the household will by definition never participate in any productive process except by providing its labor, because the household cannot be a resource for production (productive factor). Even the reproduction of the labor force should be outside the bounds of production, because its negation implies slavery: the household as a labor production factory.
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