It’s summer reading lists season & I think I’ll do one here at the weekend for all the saddo folks who (like me) will be taking some economics books away for the summer. Meanwhile, here’s the one from Nature which includes my recommendations: Robert Gordon’s [amazon_link id=”0691147728″ target=”_blank” ]The Rise and Fall of American Growth[/amazon_link], not because I agree with it (I don’t), but because it’s asking the right questions in a compelling way; and James Bessen’s [amazon_link id=”0300195664″ target=”_blank” ]Learning By Doing[/amazon_link], essentially about the same questions (and I do agree with it).

[amazon_image id=”0691147728″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)[/amazon_image]  [amazon_image id=”0300195664″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Learning by Doing: The Real Connection Between Innovation, Wages, and Wealth[/amazon_image]

I’ve been thinking a lot about productivity and GDP measurement, and am doing a paper on why the effect of digital is far more pervasive than much of this work recognises. Just recently I re-read after a very long time a 1994 AER paper by Zvi Griliches, Productivity, R&D and the Data Constraint. Zvi was one of my econometrics teachers when I was at Harvard, and a lovely man although terrifyingly clever (at least to a not very confident PhD student). The paper concludes:

“Knowledge is not like a stock of ore sitting there waiting to be mined. It is an extremely heterogeneous assortment of information in continuous flux. Only a small part of it is in use to someone at a particular point in time, and it takes effort and resources to access, retrieve and adapt it to one’s own use. Thus models of externalities must perforce be models of interaction between different actors in the economy. … Our measurement frameworks are not set up to record detailed origin and destination data for commodity flows and less so for information flows.”