What a helpful and comprehensive guide to the economic study of human capital and productivity. Thank you for writing this! I like the idea of a model as a good way of testing various hypotheses. Models are undefeated for inferring causality. As a matter of prediction or even for generating hypotheses, I’m less optimistic about models.
Pulling on the institutional thread does seem like the right move, as opposed to ideas. They do at least roughly map to the slow pre-enlightenment, fast modernity and slowing post-modern pattern of progress. Still, privileging institutions over individuals as the most important factor doesn’t make much intuitive sense to me, since each new idea only happens once. It’s possible that institutions are getting in the way of idea execution (regulation, etc.), but missing key ingredient seems to be coordination more than anything.
The “one-time-boom” version of the ideas are getting harder to find argument is one you hear often that does seem to map to the general pattern of progress and is Cowen’s favored variant. I’m partial to the idea that in the wartime hurry to push innovation we reordered our institutions to achieve great short-run gains at the expense of a kludgy emergent system that was working fairly well. Over-optimization of talent sorting and centrally directed R&D may extract progress from promising individuals at the same time that it destroys the system for creating promising individuals. Somewhere between a “Seeing Like a State” argument and a more individual and metaphysical explanation.
What a helpful and comprehensive guide to the economic study of human capital and productivity. Thank you for writing this! I like the idea of a model as a good way of testing various hypotheses. Models are undefeated for inferring causality. As a matter of prediction or even for generating hypotheses, I’m less optimistic about models.
Pulling on the institutional thread does seem like the right move, as opposed to ideas. They do at least roughly map to the slow pre-enlightenment, fast modernity and slowing post-modern pattern of progress. Still, privileging institutions over individuals as the most important factor doesn’t make much intuitive sense to me, since each new idea only happens once. It’s possible that institutions are getting in the way of idea execution (regulation, etc.), but missing key ingredient seems to be coordination more than anything.
The “one-time-boom” version of the ideas are getting harder to find argument is one you hear often that does seem to map to the general pattern of progress and is Cowen’s favored variant. I’m partial to the idea that in the wartime hurry to push innovation we reordered our institutions to achieve great short-run gains at the expense of a kludgy emergent system that was working fairly well. Over-optimization of talent sorting and centrally directed R&D may extract progress from promising individuals at the same time that it destroys the system for creating promising individuals. Somewhere between a “Seeing Like a State” argument and a more individual and metaphysical explanation.