Sociedade, Tecnologia e Inovação Empresarial - Presidente da ...

The famous conclusion drawn from a set of such studies was thatincreases in capital intensity could explain only a limited proportionof the growth of labor productivity that had been experienced sincethe early 1900s. A considerable portion had to be attributed to anupward shift in the production function, which was assumed due totechnological advance.Partly as a result of these findings, there began to grow up in economicsa group of scholars who studied the processes of technologicaladvance in considerable detail. A number of us who were engagedin that effort would argue that such studies not only confirmed thecentrality of technological advance in economic growth, but also stronglyindicated that neoclassical growth theory provided an extremely limited,and indeed obfuscating, picture of the economic growth processas it actually was experienced.One important matter, which I can touch on here only lightly, isthat detailed examinations of how productivity was actually increasedin a number of particular industries suggested strongly that circumstanceswhere one saw significant increases in capital intensity of productionwere almost always associated with technological advancewhich made greater mechanization possible and productive. Thus thinkof the development and implementation of the mechanized assemblyline at Ford. Adam Smith’s account had got it right. Rising capital intensitywas in virtually all cases the result of technological advances whichenabled operations that had been done by hand to be mechanized.More generally, while the earlier studies using neoclassical theory had,correctly, come to the conclusion that one could not explain the economicgrowth we had experienced without admitting the central roleof technological advance, they gravely underestimated just how centralthat role was. No technological advance, and economic growthquickly comes to a standstill.Perhaps even more important, many of the economists studyingtechnical advance gradually came to the point of view that the basicperspective on the behavior of the human and organizational actorscontained in neoclassical theory, which assumed that the actors weresufficiently knowledgeable about their choice context to make deci-Richard Nelson2 6 7Technology, institutions and economic growth