As the Wall Street Journal correctly notes, Julian Simon would not be surprised by this example of human ingenuity in response to increased scarcity of resources. (HT David Feith)
Here’s the abstract of a new paper by Zorina Khan on the industrial revolution:
Endogenous growth models raise fundamental questions about the nature of human creativity, and the sorts of resources, skills, and knowledge inputs that shift the frontier of technology and production possibilities. Many argue that the nature of early British industrialization supports the thesis that economic advances depend on specialized scientific training, the acquisition of costly human capital, and the role of elites. This paper examines the contributions of different types of knowledge to British industrialization, by assessing the backgrounds, education and inventive activity of the major contributors to technological advances in Britain during the crucial period between 1750 and 1930. The results indicate that scientists, engineers or technicians were not well-represented among the British great inventors, and their contributions remained unspecialized until very late in the nineteenth century. For developing countries today, the implications are that costly investments in specialized human capital resources might be less important than incentives for creativity, flexibility, and the ability to make incremental adjustments that can transform existing technologies into inventions that are appropriate for prevailing domestic conditions.
Peter Calcagno and Ed López get to the roots of today’s fiscal imprudence.
Mark Perry unearths an important distinction made by Milton Friedman between “fair” and “free.”
When I teach I emphasize to my students the enormous amount of highly specialized capital equipment that workers in the global economy work with. This equipment is key to making these workers as productive as they are – and, hence, key to making these workers as highly paid as they are and key to making humanity as wealthy as it is today. Here’s a video showing the production of modern tennis balls. (HT my old friend John Kunze)
Like Joey Clark, I, too, would be appalled were my son to pursue political office.