On economics and technical change

Summary

The article is divided into four sections. The first consists of a review of a few main lines of Heertje's thoughts on the relation between economics and technical change. It appears that Dr. Heertje has chosen to write a basically non-mathematical book dealing with the history of technology, production theories and the significance of technical development for economic growth, monopoly power and economic policy. The general comments in the second section make it clear that his study is an excellent survey of the literature on the subject. It covers an overwhelmingly large number of topics and includes copious notes at the end. However, the author's assigned task of filling a gap in the literature for a varied audience of undergraduates, post-graduate students and working economists as well as those doing research in the field of technical development inevitably proved to be too difficult. It means that many conclusions have to be accepted at their face value. On the contrary, at the end of the second section of thepresent article a ‘CS’ model is constructed that allows for a more exact analysis of the important question about the absorptive power of an economic system with regard to the consequences of labour-saving technological pushes. The third section deals more fully with the author's treatment of Von Böhm-Bawerk's roundabout production theory. Improvements are suggested in this section as well as in the concluding fourth section.