REFLECTIONS ON TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE*
| Date | 01 June 1972 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9485.1972.tb00514.x |
| Author | Sir Alec Cairncross |
| Published date | 01 June 1972 |
REFLECTIONS ON TECHNOLOGICAL
CHANGE*
SIR ALEC CAIRNCROSS
I
The renewed interest
in
economic development since the war has brought
back into the literature an emphasis on the importance of technological
change that was sadly lacking before the war. Much of the discussion, in this
country at any rate, still seems to be misconceived. Just as many economists
in the 20's and early
30's
tried to explain unemployment
on
assumptions that
ruled out the possibility of unemployment
so
one still finds attempts to
develop a theory of economic development that practically rules
it
out by
abstracting from technological change. Even the analysis of technological
change very often pays no regard to the facts about it but is cast in theoreti-
cal terms assigning
an
excessive importance to changes in factor proportions.
These strictures do not apply to the growing literature about invention and
its impact on economic growth. Much of this literature is American and
seems to be largely unfamiliar to British economists; but even in this country
it is well over
10
years since the work of Carter and Williams (1958) or the
publication by Jewkes and others (1958) of
The
Sources
of
Invention
and
there has been a growing interest in the origination and diffusion of techno-
logical change.
It is not my purpose to comment
on
this literature. But there are
a
num-
ber of points that emerge from
it
which seem to merit further discussion.
First of all, much of what has appeared deals with the factors governing
the rate and direction
of
technological change, concentrating
on
the process
of invention itself. It has been shown fairly conclusively by Schmookler
(1966) that there is
no
close and direct connection between this and the
growth
of
scientific knowledge although progress in scientific understanding
is an important prerequisite of various forms of technological change, par-
ticularly in chemical, electrical and aeronautical applications.
Oh
the other
hand, progress in science often follows rather than precedes technological
development since invention can and does go on empirically without neces-
sarily resting on a full understanding
of
the processes involved.
It has also been shown by Schmookler and others that invention responds
to demand pressures either in the sense of market opportunities and pros-
pects of profit or in the sense of obstacles to an enlargement of supply in the
form of bottlenecks, breakdowns, etc.' Progress in science may reflect some-
*The text
of
the Presidential Address
to
the Scottish Economic Society Annual
General Meeting, held in the University
of
Glasgow on 23rd March,
1971.
A good illustration
is
provided by Schmookler's horseshoes case. He shows that
the number
of
patents
for
improvements in horseshoes in the United States in the 19th
century grew with the market and declined when the market began to decline.
107
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