New Release Books by Nathan Rosenberg

Farming for Our Future examines the policies and legal reforms necessary to accelerate the adoption of practices that can make agriculture in the United States climate-neutral or better. These proven practices will also make our food system more resilient to the impacts of climate change. Agriculture's contribution to climate change is substantial--much more so than official figures suggest--and we will not be able to achieve our overall mitigation goals unless agricultural emissions sharply decline. Fortunately, farms and ranches can be a major part of the climate solution, while protecting biodiversity, strengthening rural communities, and improving the lives of the workers who cultivate our crops and rear our animals. The importance of agricultural climate solutions can not be underestimated; it is a critical element both in ensuring our food security and limiting climate change. This book provides essential solutions to address the greatest crises of our time.

How did the West--Europe, Canada, and the United States--escape from immemorial poverty into sustained economic growth and material well-being when other societies remained trapped in an endless cycle of birth, hunger, hardship, and death? In this elegant synthesis of economic history, two scholars argue that it is the political pluralism and the flexibility of the West's institutions--not corporate organization and mass production technology--that explain its unparalleled wealth.

Schumpeter's profoundly influential work developed the notion of the endogeneity of technology, and offered illuminating historical analyses of how and why some social systems have managed to generate innovation. This new interpretation explores Schumpeter's central ideas, and examines the ways in which the concept of endogeneity can illuminate recent American economic history.

In 1903 the Wright brothers' airplane travelled a couple of hundred yards. Today fleets of streamlined jets transport millions of people each day to cities worldwide. Between discovery and application, between invention and widespread use, there is a world of innovation, of tinkering, improvement and adaptation. This is the world David Mowery and Nathan Rosenberg map out in Paths of Innovation, a tour of the intersecting routes of technological change. Throughout their book, Mowery and Rosenberg demonstrate that the simultaneous emergence of new engineering and applied science disciplines in the universities, in tandem with growth in the Research and Development industry and scientific research, has been a primary factor in the rapid rate of technological change. Innovation and incentives to develop new, viable processes have led to the creation of new economic resources - which will determine the future of technological innovation and economic growth.

Science and technology have become increasingly intertwined in the twentieth century. However, little attention has been paid to the forces that have brought about this phenomena. Indeed, many writers have taken it for granted that causality always runs from science to technology. In this ground-breaking book, Rosenberg's research suggests that history and empirical evidence lead to a reality that is far more complex and interesting. Here, Rosenberg's papers cover a wide range of topics, especially those connected with the innovative process, including electric power, electronics, medicine, chemistry, engineering disciplines, scientific instrumentation, industrial research, and universities considered as economic institutions.

The process of technological change takes a wide variety of forms. Propositions that may be accurate when referring to the pharmaceutical industry may be totally inappropriate when applied to the aircraft industry or to computers or forest products. The central theme of Nathan Rosenberg's new book is the idea that technological changes are often 'path dependent', in the sense that their form and direction tend to be influenced strongly by the particular sequence of earlier events out of which a new technology has emerged. The book advances the understanding of technological change by explictly recognising its essential diversity and path-dependent nature. Individual chapters explore the particular features of new technologies in different historical and sectoral contexts. This book presents a unique account of how technological change is generated and the processes by which improved technologies are introduced.

Abstract: The steam engine is widely regarded as the icon of the Industrial Revolution and a prime example of a 'General Purpose Technology, ' and yet its contribution to growth is far from transparent. This paper examines the role that a particular innovative design in steam power, the Corliss engine, played in the intertwined processes of industrialization and urbanization that characterized the growth of the US economy in the late 19th century. Waterpower offered abundant and cheap energy, but restricted the location of manufacturing just to areas with propitious topography and climate. Steam engines offered the possibility of relaxing this severe constraint, allowing industry to locate where key considerations such as access to markets for inputs and outputs directed. The enhanced performance of the Corliss engine as well as its fuel efficiency helped tip the balance in favor of steam in the fierce contest with waterpower. With the aid of detailed data on the location of Corliss engines and waterwheels and a two-stage estimation strategy, we show that the deployment of Corliss engines indeed served as a catalyst for the massive relocation of industry away from rural areas and into large urban centers, thus fueling agglomeration economies, and attracting further population growth. This illustrates what we believe is an important aspect of the dynamics of GPTs, whether it is electricity in the early 20th century or Information Technologies in the present era: the fact that GPTs induce the widespread and more efficient relocation of economic activity, which in turn fosters long-term growth.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Technology's contribution to economic growth and competitiveness has been the subject of vigorous debate in recent years. This book demonstrates the importance of a historical perspective in understanding the role of technological innovation in the economy. The authors examine key episodes and institutions in the development of the U.S. research system and in the development of the research systems of other industrial economies. They argue that the large potential contributions of economics to the understanding of technology and economic growth have been constrained by the narrow theoretical framework employed within neoclassical economies. A richer framework, they believe, will support a more fruitful dialogue among economists, policymakers, and managers on the organization of public and private institutions for innovation. David Mowery is Associate Professor of Business and Public Policy at the School of Business Administration, University of California, Berkeley. Nathan S. Rosenberg is Fairleigh Dickinson Professor of Economics at Stanford University. He is the author of Inside the Black Box: Technology and Economics (CUP, 1983).

The purpose of Professor Rosenberg's work is to break open and examine the contents of the black box.

The main theme of this work is a concern with the emergence and diffusion of economic ideas. The book brings together a range of Professor Rosenberg's contributions to the history of economic thought. Topics include the development of capitalist institutions and technological dynamism.

Fifteen papers, revised and updated from their original presentation at a conference held at Stanford U., September 1989, and unified by an introduction, emphasize that it is the factors affecting the commercialization of technology, rather than the development of the technology itself, that constitute the missing link in discussions of science and technology policy, as well as in macroeconomic policy discussions directed toward issues of international competitiveness. Paper edition (unseen), $16.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Some origins of American Technology; The generation of new technologies; Diffusion and adaptation of technology; Natural resources, environment and the growth of knowledge;

In 1982, Vaclav Smil turned upside down traditional perceptions of China as a green paradise in "The Bad Earth". Updating and expanding its basic arguments and perceptions, this volume is an inquiry into the fundamental factors, needs, prospects, and limits of modern Chinese society.

This volume undertakes the examination and appraisal of the economic controls employed by the British Labor Government in attempting to regulate the output of the building industry in the years immediately following the Second World War. An unfortunate consequence of earlier preoccupation with purely income-generating aspects of investment activity was that insufficient consideration was given to the allocation of investment resources. It was precisely this latter problem, however, which became a matter of major concern to the Labor Government. Its building program in the postwar years is examined here with particular reference to the program's peculiar structure and organization and the availability of building workers and materials. Discussion also covers the Government's administrative machinery for regulating building demand and for determining the uses to which building resources were put, as well as the priorities which the Government attempted to impose upon the industry and the consequences of specific policy decisions which were made in attempting to enforce these priorities. The British experience during the years between 1945 and 1949 provides numerous insights into the requirements and the problems associated with centralized planning of the operation of a private industry. The attempt to regulate the building industry is of increasing relevance in view of the growing recognition that nationalization is no panacea and that government planning must be more and more concerned with influencing the behavior of privately-operated industries. The importance of the present study is further enhanced by the fact that it deals with a strategic investment­ goods industry which must inevitably play a major role in the current and future development planning of underdeveloped countries. This work, therefore, is of special interest to economists concerned with the problems of government economic planning. Moreover, because of its strong focus upon the organizational and administrative aspects of government planning, Economic Planning in the British Building Industry is of vital interest to political scientists and all students of public administration.

While researchers have extensively studied the growth in the number of small farms reported in the Census of Agriculture between 1982 and 2012, there has been little discussion of trends in farm operators who do not sell any agricultural products. Using previously unreleased Census of Agriculture data collected between 1982 and 2012, this research brief empirically examines these “zero-sales farmers” for the first time. There was a large increase in the number of zero-sales farmers from 104,000 in 1982 to 466,000 in 2012, as well as a remarkable rise in their share of the farming population, which went from 5% in 1982 to 22% in 2012. Female and minority farmers were disproportionately likely to be zero-sales operators: 30% or more of female, Native American, and black farmers reported no sales in 2012. Older and beginning farmers were also more likely to report zero sales in 2012 than younger and experienced ones, respectively. Zero-sales farmers dramatically influenced recent census results on farm income, farm size, and operator age, among other results, due to their substantial share of the overall population. In order to effectively utilize Census of Agriculture data, practitioners, policymakers, and researchers should include zero-sales farms in their analyses. There are several steps the United States Department of Agriculture can take to make information about zero-sales farmers more readily available and widely understood.