The central theme of this challenging and provocative study involves two interrelated ideas. The first is that the divorce between deductive theory and empirical reality in economics, together with the inability of theory to address, let alone resolve, the big issues facing human society, poses critical problems for a discipline that claims to possess social relevance. The second idea, which has considerable quantitative support, is that over the last millennium human society in Europe has been driven through time by great waves of economic change of some 150 to 300 years in duration. Just as the forces underlying these great waves have been important in the past, they will be important in the future. The author demonstrates convincingly that without the dimension of time in economics these longterm forces would remain unknown.