social science production (was: Dark Sides of 'Solidarity'?)

[Brad De Long]

>>  .  .  .
>> As long as you recognize that in this form of economist-speak
>> "technological" means "anything other than demand for goods or the supply
>> of factors of production," little harm is done--but of course not
>> one op-ed
>> writer in 100 realizes that economists have an... elastic definition of
>> "technological."
>
>If this "economist-speak" is shorthand, it is a very strange
>type.  "Unexplained residual" or "caused by other or (God
>help us) unknown factors" would be consistent with economic
>terminology and, as H. Kissinger would say, have the added
>advantage of being true.

Yup.

This is the principal reason that Edward Denison and many others tried to
stomp the phrases "technological progress" and "technology" out of growth
theory and growth accounting, and replace them by either the term
"residual" or (in Martin Baily's case) "multifactor productivity."

This would have been a good thing.

But for reasons that remain somewhat mysterious to me, they failed.

Brad DeLong