The grip of history and the scope for novelty: Some results and open questions on path dependence in economic processes

The very notion of multiple paths of socio-economic change ultimately rests on the idea that history is an essential part of the interpretation of most socio-economic phenomena one observes at any time and place. The prop erty that history matters is also intimately related to that of time irreversibility. In the socio-economic domain and in many areas of natural sciences as well, one cannot reverse the arrow of time - even in principle, let alone in practice - and still recover invariant properties of the system under investigation. That is, in a caricature, you may get a lot of steaks out of a cow but you cannot get a cow out of a lot of steaks.