Simon Kuznets's scholarly work spans over half a century and includes over twenty books and several hundred articles. In terms of sheer volume it is a prodigious individual record; by any quality-adjusted measure, it is awe-inspiring. The present collection of essays and research articles, done by Kuznets when he was in his seventies and now assembled and published posthumously, helps round out the record of this remarkable scholar and individual. The volume is not a “capstone”, for Kuznets's systematic search for new knowledge was never-ending. It represents, rather, the concerns at the top of his research agenda at a late phase of his career, plus several articles expounding on themes from earlier work.

The first four chapters fall in the category of expounding on earlier themes. They deal with the economic epoch that Kuznets, more than any other individual, has identified and analyzed, “modern economic growth”. It was for his empirically founded cross-national study of this epoch that Kuznets was awarded the 1971 Nobel prize in economics. In the first four chapters of this volume he returns to the subject, developing new insights and elaborating old. Chapters 1 and 4 deal in somewhat different fashion with what Kuznets calls the “driving forces” of economic growth. In these two chapters Kuznets departs from his usual insistence on measurement – the reader will note the absence of the usual statistical tables – to speculate on causation.