The Idea of Growth: How Economists Explained Prosperity, Stagnation, and Change is an ongoing project that ChatGPT and I began in the summer of 2026. It grew out of a long-standing intellectual interest. As a macroeconomist whose research and teaching focus on economic growth, I had long wanted a broad and systematic account of how economists have explained growth across different historical periods. I could find excellent books on particular thinkers, periods, and models, but not one that combined the scope, analytical depth, and structure I had in mind. I therefore began to explore whether ChatGPT and I could build such a book together. This evolving manuscript is the result.

The book centers on the evolution of theories of economic growth: how economists have explained prosperity, stagnation, structural change, technological progress, and the uneven development of nations. Its planned historical arc begins with the intellectual world surrounding Adam Smith and classical political economy, proceeds through the major transformations of growth thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and extends to selected frontiers of contemporary growth theory. The organizing thread is theoretical development rather than a simple chronological survey. The book asks how successive economists reformulated the central objects of analysis, identified new constraints and mechanisms, and changed the relationship among theory, evidence, and the economic problems of their own time.

Alongside this analytical history, the book introduces the lives and intellectual settings of major economists and traces the relevant literature through primary works, debates, reinterpretations, and later formalizations. Equations and economic models are used where they clarify the development of an idea. Historical data, reproducible figures and tables, portraits, and contextual illustrations are included when they help readers see the scale, setting, or mechanism of an argument. The aim is to connect economic theory with the people, institutions, controversies, and historical circumstances through which it developed.

ChatGPT has undertaken most of the source gathering and synthesis, drafting, preparation of figures and tables, and typesetting. My role has been to develop the chapter plan with ChatGPT, shape the book’s overall architecture, substantive balance, and visual design, and review successive drafts by providing feedback, correcting errors, and deciding what should be revised, expanded, or removed. The book is therefore both a history of ideas about economic growth and an experiment in sustained human–AI authorship.

I am making the manuscript freely available online for two reasons. First, I hope it will be useful to anyone who shares my interest in the subject, whether a professional economist, a student, or a curious general reader. Second, because the project is still evolving, I hope readers will help identify errors, question interpretations, and suggest improvements. Each publicly released version records a stage in the development of the book, and comments and corrections will help shape subsequent revisions.