Technological progress

We now reach a key stage in the development of the term and the study of technological change. Economic progress now has the central place in the language and discourse of technological change. This is the end result of several decades of thinking on machines. The debate on technological unemployment ended with an optimistic view. Not all inventions give rise to unemployment. Unemployment depends on the types of machines or inventions. Above all, technological unemployment is a matter of temporary displacement rather than job loss. The National Research Project (NRP) initiated the first empirical program on technological change and concluded similarly: technological change leads to economic progress (productivity). Then Rupert Maclaurin opened the black box of technological change, and identified research as a key factor of technological change. Now, technological change becomes strictly economic and is equated to economic progress, called technological progress. “Technology in itself implies technological progress†, stated Ferdynand Zweig. Zweig understood progress as upgrading civilization and increasing man’s control over nature (Zweig, 1936: 28). He illustrated his assertion by proposing a classification of stages in the development of technology: primitive (tools), qualitative (workshop tools) and quantitative (machine) (pp. 28-32). Scholars subsequently made technological progress a matter of economic issues. “Economic progress which results from a change in knowledge is known as technological progress†, claims Vernon Ruttan (1924-2008), economist at the University of Minnesota and a prolific scholar on technological change in the 1950s and after (Ruttan, 1954: 1). As another economist put it later on: “Technical progress is knowledge that make[s] it possible to produce (1) a greater volume of output [technological change] or (2) a qualitatively superior output from a given amount of resources†(technological innovation) (Rosenberg, 1982: 3). In this context, efficiency (in converting input into output) is the key word. This representation gave rise to an economic field or specialty, even a tradition of research.