This was an interesting post, it got me thinking a bit about the right way to represent “technology” in a mathematical model.
I think I have a pretty solid qualitative understanding of how technology changes impact economic production—constraints are the right representation for that. But it’s not clear how that feeds back into further technological development. What qualitative model structure captures the key aspects of recursive technological progress?
A few possible threads to pull on:
Throwing economic resources at research often yields technological progress, but what’s the distribution of progress yielded by this?
Some targeted, incremental research is aimed at small changes to parameters of production constraints—e.g. cutting the amount of some input required for some product by 10%. That sort of thing slots nicely into the constraints framework, and presumably throwing more resources at research will result in more incremental progress (though it’s not clear how quickly marginal returns decrease/increase with research investments).
There are often underlying constraints to technologies themselves—i.e. physical constraints. It feels like there should be an elegant way to represent these in production-space, via duality (i.e. constraints on production are dual to production, so constraints on the constraints should be in production space).
Related: in cases of “discrete” technological progress, it feels like there’s usually an underlying constraint on a broad class of technologies. So representing constraints-on-constraints is important to capturing jumps in progress.
If there are production constraints and constraints on the constraints, presumably we could go even more meta, but at the moment I can’t think of any useful meaning to higher meta-levels.
This was an interesting post, it got me thinking a bit about the right way to represent “technology” in a mathematical model.
I think I have a pretty solid qualitative understanding of how technology changes impact economic production—constraints are the right representation for that. But it’s not clear how that feeds back into further technological development. What qualitative model structure captures the key aspects of recursive technological progress?
A few possible threads to pull on:
Throwing economic resources at research often yields technological progress, but what’s the distribution of progress yielded by this?
Some targeted, incremental research is aimed at small changes to parameters of production constraints—e.g. cutting the amount of some input required for some product by 10%. That sort of thing slots nicely into the constraints framework, and presumably throwing more resources at research will result in more incremental progress (though it’s not clear how quickly marginal returns decrease/increase with research investments).
There are often underlying constraints to technologies themselves—i.e. physical constraints. It feels like there should be an elegant way to represent these in production-space, via duality (i.e. constraints on production are dual to production, so constraints on the constraints should be in production space).
Related: in cases of “discrete” technological progress, it feels like there’s usually an underlying constraint on a broad class of technologies. So representing constraints-on-constraints is important to capturing jumps in progress.
If there are production constraints and constraints on the constraints, presumably we could go even more meta, but at the moment I can’t think of any useful meaning to higher meta-levels.