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Schumpeter's profoundly influential work developed the notion of the endogeneity of technology, and offered illuminating historical analyses of how and why some social systems have managed to generate innovation. This new interpretation explores Schumpeter's central ideas, and examines the ways in which the concept of endogeneity can illuminate recent American economic history

Economists have long treated technological phenomena as events transpiring inside a black box and, on the whole, have adhered rather strictly to a self-imposed ordinance not to inquire too seriously into what transpires inside that box. The purpose of Professor Rosenberg's work is to break open and examine the contents of the black box. In so doing, a number of important economic problems be powerfully illuminated. The author clearly shows how specific features of individual technologies have shaped a number of variables of great concern to economists: the rate of productivity improvement, the nature of learning processes underlying technological change itself, the speed of technology transfer, and the effectiveness of government policies that are intended to influence technologies in particular ways. The separate chapters of this book reflect a primary concern with some of the distinctive aspects of industrial technologies in the twentieth century, such as the increasing reliance upon science, but also the considerable subtlety and complexity of the dialectic between science and technology. Other concerns include the rapid growth in the development of costs associated with new technologies as well as the difficulty of predicting the eventual performance characteristics of newly emerging technologies

Perspectives on Technology consists of papers written by Nathan Rosenberg over a ten-year period, from the early 1960s to the early 1970s. Their origin was in Professor Rosenberg's interest in long-term economic growth processes and, especially, in the behaviour of industrializing societies. The form and direction which this book has taken reflect two basic influences: (1) a growing awareness of the centrality of technological phenomena in generating economic growth, and (2) a growing sense that, in spite of the basic and genuine insights into technological phenomena provided by the neo-classical economics, a deeper and richer understanding of the phenomena can only be achieved by a willingness to step outside the limited intellectual boundaries of this mode of reasoning

Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Preface -- I Technology in Historical Perspective -- II The Economic Matrix -- III The Nineteenth Century: America as Borrower -- IV The Nineteenth Century: America as Initiator -- V The Twentieth Century -- VI Technology and Social Options -- Index.