Secular seasons: Long-run trends in spatial-temporal socioeconomic behavior

This paper proposes an explanation of unbalanced regional growth and regional inequalities based on the view that human behavior is motivated either to reduce the physiological state of arousal or to increase it. While arousal reduction is the basis of conventional economic analysis, arousal augmentation is seldom considered. This paper argues that arousal augmentation motivates society to seek technological and socioeconomic innovations that trigger economic progress. The mechanism for this progress is seen as a synthesis of spatial growth poles and temporal long waves.