Technology and Long Term Economic Growth

Bill St. Arnaud, on his "CAnet - news" (highly recommended!) today recommends the book ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATIONS: General Purpose Technologies and Long Term Economic Growth by Richard G. Lipsey, Kenneth I. Carlaw, and Clifford T. Bekar. 

After browsing information and extracts on Richard Lipsey's web site, I've ordered the book.  I find the question of how we've gone from hunting and gathering to the modern world fascinating.  I've already read (and recommend) popular works like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel and I've absorbed various scholarly works like Joel Mokyr's The Lever of Riches and The Gifts of Athena.

One concern in reading Lipsey's website was typified by this:

...focus on these massive technical shocks...  ...perhaps twenty such shocks in all of human experience since we abandoned hunting gathering...  All of these shocks fall into five categories:  Power, Materials, Information and Communications Technology (ICT), Transportation and Organization.

While separately categorizing ICT and organization, the authors don't appear to discuss or even recognize the multiplier effect of technologies such as writing, printing and the Internet.  And, while there is discussion on the website about medieval universities as an organizational structure that helped foster science and the industrial revolution, the authors again don't appear to evaluate the potential multiplier effects of this organizational structure.

Oh well,  I should wait for the book before I get too critical...  :-)

Comments

[Kenneth Carlaw]

I chanced across this comment on our book while doing some related research on the net. I would like to point out that your "multiplier effect" is what we describe as our structural-evolutionary transforation, which in the cases of most of our GPTs is a profound social transformation that proliferates beyond the usual economic variables of interest. My co-authors and I are economist and for us the term multiplier has a limited a specific meaning. So we opted for a different jargon in the book.

Thanks for the positive and critical feedback.

KC