Technical Choice Innovation and Economic Growth
Essays on American and British Experience in the Nineteenth Century

This book deals with technological innovations of the nineteenth century.

Paul A. David (Author)

9780521098755, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 28 February 1975

348 pages
22.9 x 15.4 x 2 cm, 0.532 kg

This book deals with technological innovations of the nineteenth century. In a number of self-contained but related essays it treats the salient aspects of technological change that have interested modern economists and economic historians, as well as historians of technology: economically induced invention and innovation, learning by doing in industrial operations, the diffusion of new production techniques, and the bearing of these upon the growth of a society's productivity. The studies are detailed, in the sense that they focus not upon the economy as a whole, but rather upon the experiences of specific industries, branches of manufacturing, and individual productive units such as the mid-Victorial grain farm and the New England cotton textile mill. They attempt to integrate traditional historical methods and materials with a more explicit reliance on economic theorizing and applications of statistical analysis to test hypotheses.

Acknowledgements
Introduction: technology, history and growth
Part I. Concepts and Preconceptions: 1. Labor scarcity and the problem of technological practice and progress in nineteenth-century America
Part II. Generation: 2. Learning by doing and tariff protection: a reconsideration of the case of the ante-bellum United States cotton textile industry
Addendum: estimated rates of labor equality change
3. The 'Horndal effect' in Lowell, 1834–56: a short-run learning curve for integrated cotton textile mills
Part III. Diffusion: 4. The mechanization of reaping in the ante-bellum Midwest
Addendum: threshold farm size
5. The landscape and the machine: technical interrelatedness, land tenure and the mechanization of the corn harvest in Victorian Britain
Appendix A: technical notes
Appendix B: source of the parameters and variables
Part IV. Ramifications: 6. Transport innovations and economic growth: Professor Fogel on and off the rails
References
Index.

Subject Areas: History [HB]