Most economists, like the rest of us, would be hard pressed to envisage a thriving global economy of such extraordinary proportions, especially given the stress that human activity already puts on the planet, and so they may prefer to wave the implications off to the horizon. No one epitomised this approach so literally and influentially as the American economist Walt W. Rostow who, in 1960, published his seminal book, The Stages of Economic Growth, renowned for its dynamic theory of economic development. Every country, he claimed, must pass through five stages of growth so that it can come to
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