Technology and Human Capital in Historical Perspective: An Introduction

Few would deny that technological change has transformed both production and everyday life since pre-industrial times. The implications of this statement produce divergent opinions, however. Even if it is mostly agreed that everyday life has changed for the better, opinions differ on how technology has altered production, and continues to do so. For example, the inter-play between technological change and economic growth has been labelled a ‘black box’ (Rosenberg 1982; 1994). It is difficult to know what goes on inside the black box, and it is hard to find factors that determine technological change, or at least to find a linear relation between certain factors and the economic performance. Throughout history efforts have been made to incorporate technological or technical change into economics, but no coherent theory has earned universal consent.2 Mainstream economics have instead regarded technology as a given exogenous factor that greatly influences the economy but which is not itself affected by the economy. Recently this has changed among economists with the emergence of endogenous growth theory. For economic historians, however, technological change is an old issue. The present book is an attempt to combine different approaches to technological change. Common to these approaches is the dimension of time, whether nineteenth-century history or the more recent past.