Farm Report

TECHNOLOGY From Polymers to Power PCs

SYNERGY: In his new book, Rosenberg explains how innovations across industries drove 20th-century economic growth. Courtesy News Service FORGET THE INTERNET. Economics professor Nathan Rosenberg has turned his mind to earlier breakthroughs -- the automobile, computers and nylon. In Paths of Innovation: Technological Change in 20th-Century America (with David C. Mowery; Cambridge University Press, 1998), he analyzes how technological change and economic growth intersected in the last 100 years. STANFORD: You say the automobile industry has spurred much of America's economic progress. Why? Rosenberg: Think of the chemical industry and automobiles together. To produce a car, you need rivers of paint and you need rubber and glass. You have an interindustry flow. Synthetic rubber, paints, glass -- these are industries that had to grow and did grow spectacularly to accommodate the automobile industry. You don't really get the picture thinking about different sectors of the economy as if they are separate units. It's the interactions, the interdisciplinary flows that turn out to be critical. Don't some people argue that U.S. economic growth was inevitable because we controlled so many natural resources? That's correct, but many of those natural resources had no economic use until a great deal of research was done. In a very real economic sense, petroleum was not terribly important back in 1860. It was chemical engineers who converted petroleum into a very important economic resource. It became obvious that petroleum was an extremely valuable intermediate input into a whole range of products produced by polymer chemists, like nylon. So, which resources have economic value is the result of human ingenuity, systematically applied to certain kinds of problems. What role did universities play in all of this? My next book is going to be on universities as economic institutions. American universities are highly decentralized and highly competitive. For the most part, it is much more difficult in Europe for talented, ambitious people to distinguish themselves. Our system is much more open-ended, much more competitive. A Harvard professor was offered a position at Columbia University for $300,000. That's serious competition. One of the most important ways in which universities compete is by introducing a person's research material to the teaching curriculum. That results in the creation of entirely new disciplines like chemical engineering and computer science.