Induced technical innovation and medical history: an evolutionary approach

Abstract

The argument of this paper is simple.In its barest version, it just says that the more we know about a particular subject, the more likely it is that techniques of any kind will be able to adjust to environmental changes and thus generate induced technological change.Many years ago, Nathan Rosenberg (1976) pointed out that for a demand-induced mechanism to work in technological change, the technological capabilities have to exist.In a paper published subsequently, I relied on Rosenberg to question the importance of demand factors in bringing about major episodes of technological progress such as the Industrial Revolution (Mokyr, 1985).The point was not so much that demand played no role, as much as that as a general phenomenon, human preferences for a higher standard of living of some kind were given, and thus wide-ranging episodes of technological progress in which many diverse areas of production were affected seem unlikely to have been the consequences of exogenous demand changes or even the effects of sharp changes in relative prices for whatever reason.In its crudest form, the "necessity is the mother of invention" theory of technological change, this approach succeeds in being at once a cliché and a historical fallacy.