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Series:   Elements in Evolutionary Economics

Explaining Technology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 August 2023

Roger Koppl ,
Roberto Cazzolla Gatti ,
Abigail Devereaux ,
Brian D. Fath ,
James Herriot ,
Wim Hordijk ,
Stuart Kauffman ,
Robert E. Ulanowicz  and
Sergi Valverde
Roger Koppl
Affiliation:
Syracuse University, New York
Roberto Cazzolla Gatti
Affiliation:
Università di Bologna
Abigail Devereaux
Affiliation:
Wichita State University, Kansas
Brian D. Fath
Affiliation:
Towson University, Maryland
James Herriot
Affiliation:
Herriot Research
Wim Hordijk
Affiliation:
SmartAnalytiX
Stuart Kauffman
Affiliation:
Institute for Systems Biology, Washington
Robert E. Ulanowicz
Affiliation:
University of Florida
Sergi Valverde
Affiliation:
Spanish National Research Council

Summary

A long tradition explains technological change as recombination. Within this tradition, this Element develops an innovative combinatorial model of technological change and tests it with 2,000 years of global GDP data and with data from US patents filed between 1835 and 2010. The model explains 1) the pace of technological change for a least the past two millennia, 2) patent citations and 3) the increasing complexity of tools over time. It shows that combining and modifying pre-existing goods to produce new goods generates the observed historical pattern of technological change. A long period of stasis was followed by sudden super-exponential growth in the number of goods. In this model, the sudden explosion of about 250 years ago is a combinatorial explosion that was a long time in coming, but inevitable once the process began at least two thousand years ago. This Element models the Industrial Revolution as a combinatorial explosion.
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Keywords

economic growthcombinatorial evolutioneconomic niche emergenceIndustrial Revolutionadjacent possible
Type
Element
Information
Series: Elements in Evolutionary Economics
Online ISBN: 9781009386289
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication: 31 August 2023

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