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He did so many things. I personally think the most interesting/stimulating contribution was his paper "The Economic Implications of Learning by Doing" from 1962
by kriro 10y ago
He did so many things. I personally think the most interesting/stimulating contribution was his paper "The Economic Implications of Learning by Doing" from 1962.
- dpfu 10y agoYou have made me curios, so I'm going to read the paper. It lives under this DOI [10.2307/2295952](https://doi.org/10.2307/2295952 https://doi.org/10.2307/2295952) (paywalled).
- curioustom 10y agoI am having a hard time understanding the paper. Would one of you be able to summarize the implications of the paper? I found this part interesting: "I advance the hypothesis here that technical change in general can be ascribed to experience, that it is the very activity of production which gives rise to problems for which favorable responses are selected over time."
- taylorwc 10y agoThere is actually a little blurb in the linked NYT article on this topic: Take “learning by doing,” a notion that Professor Arrow examined in the early 1960s. The basic idea is straightforward: The more that a company produces, the smarter it gets. Decades later, economists incorporated this idea into sophisticated theories of “endogenous growth,” which have a country’s rate of economic growth depending on internal policies that promote innovation and education — the very forces that Professor Arrow’s writings anticipated." edit: I always forget which markdown pieces HN uses/doesn't use. Italicized rather than failed attempt at blockquote
- kriro 10y agoAdd this to the search string: "http://eclass.uoa.gr" http://eclass.uoa.gr" should lead you to a non-paywalled version of unknown legal status.
- wslh 10y agoThe paper is freely available at: http://faculty.msmc.edu/hossain/grad_bank_and_money_policy/the%20economic%20implications%20of%20learning%20by%20doing_arrow.pdf http://faculty.msmc.edu/hossain/grad_bank_and_money_policy/t... (you should always try to search for a copy on Google Research)
- keithpeter 10y agoExperience would presumably need to be retained and transmitted to have the desired effect in reducing the costs of new models in production. I'm wondering how our modern approach to workforces facilitates knowledge retention?
- simonh 10y agoAt the scale of an economy though, a flexible and transferable work force could facilitate the dissemination and expansion of access to institutional knowledge, benefiting both individual organizations (which receive as well as lose knowledge) and society as a whole. So I imagine there's a balance to be struck between retention and transfer.
- Tloewald 10y agoThe 1990s management fad of "core competencies" addresses this, so long as your correctly identify core competencies.