----------------------
Trivially true, yet if the very sucess of the innovation is the main cause of the significant rise in population it does seem odd to say an innovation caused a fall in innovative activity. Otherwise we seem to be talking about somewhat weak, if not, spurious correlations. Are the Swedes more innovative than the Chinese simply by virtue of the fact that they've got a much smaller populace?
>
> > And let's not forget the US military doesn't get as much cash to do
> > scientific research as it used to, so there could be other motivating
> > factors leading Heubner to massage the data.
>
> There are many factors that lead to increases or limitations in
> innovation; goverment funding for research is certainly one of them.
> However, that's not really the point here. It's highlighting our
> presentism and hubris: we think we live in this amazing,
> unparallelled era of technological innovation and we discount the
> huge technological changes people accomplished 100 years ago.
------------------------
Well, the author seems to making a plurality of points so I'm not sure if the article is highlighting the problems of presentism and hubris or you are. :->
I'm fully in agreement that presentism and hubris are enormous problems, but they seem to have been so since at least the Greeks. Every generation discounts the past and the future. Problems ensue when we go 'the other way' however and we swamp the present as an insignificant speck on the wide open seas of history; everything becomes trivialized and the temptation towards deus ex machina narratives of technological change creeps in. That being said I'd rather wait to comment further on Heubner's paper given neither of us have seen the nuts and bolts of his methodology.
>
> Look at it this way: the qualitative jump from no telephone to
> a telephone is a far more significant technological change than
> the jump from land lines to wireless phones. This applies to
> most of the technology we use today: electricity, cars,
> recording devices, radio.
>
> Miles
--------------------
Quite, Fritz Machlup brought up and analyzed this very issue many years ago.
If Heubner is borrowing analytical tools from the 'new' endogenous growth' theories of technological change, I won't be suprised if he gets a drubbing. Ian Steedman, for one, has written a rather devastating piece on the problems of measuring r&d knowledge as part and parcel of modeling innovation dynamics:
<http://growthconf.ec.unipi.it/papers/Steedman1.pdf>
Similar problems plague Joel Mokyr's "The Lever of Riches" as he abstracts away a lot of the substantive differences between antiquity, feudalism, capitalism........you know, the mode of production problematic and the periodization of history.
Perhaps we can take this up again if/when the piece is made available to the public?
As for Heubner's predictions of the future.........I'll take the lazy way out and ask Doug to repost, yet again, that great quote from Keynes.
Ian