Ben Jones on the Burden of Knowledge

5 March 2009 at 10:39 am Peter G. Klein 5 comments

| Peter Klein |

Ben Jones, who does very interesting work on innovation and economic growth, has a new paper on the “burden of knowledge,” the idea that as an economy’s knowledge base increases, the amount of education necessary to be an effective innovator increases as well, mitigating the effects of knowledge accumulation on growth. Abstract:

This paper investigates a possibly fundamental aspect of technological progress. If knowledge accumulates as technology advances, then successive generations of innovators may face an increasing educational burden. Innovators can compensate through lengthening educational phases and narrowing expertise, but these responses come at the cost of reducing individual innovative capacities, with implications for the organization of innovative activity – a greater reliance on teamwork – and negative implications for growth. Building on this burden of knowledge mechanism, this paper first presents six facts about innovator behaviour. I show that age at first invention, specialization, and teamwork increase over time in a large micro-data set of inventors. Furthermore, in cross-section, specialization and teamwork appear greater in deeper areas of knowledge, while, surprisingly, age at first invention shows little variation across fields. A model then demonstrates how these facts can emerge in tandem. The theory further develops explicit implications for economic growth, providing an explanation for why productivity growth rates did not accelerate through the 20th century despite an enormous expansion in collective research effort. Upward trends in academic collaboration and lengthening doctorates, which have been noted in other research, can also be explained in this framework. The knowledge burden mechanism suggests that the nature of innovation is changing, with negative implications for long-run economic growth.

Entry filed under: - Klein -, Innovation, Recommended Reading.

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5 Comments Add your own

1. Michael F. Martin | 5 March 2009 at 1:15 pm

One problem for any long-term sample is that the Internet was not widely available until the late ’90s, and even now not used as effectively as it could be to facilitate collaboration. Consider how the printing press alleviated the knowledge burden.
2. Bo | 5 March 2009 at 9:13 pm

Does this not pose a causality issue; as the level of education increases so do the level of technological innovation? Admittedly, I have yet to read this paper, however, I fail to see longer education phases as a “response to knowledge accumulation and technological advance” – though this is probably a result of my burden of lack of knowledge…
3. Michael F. Martin | 5 March 2009 at 9:20 pm

Link to ungated version please?
4. Peter Klein | 5 March 2009 at 10:27 pm

Click to access BurdenOfKnowledge.pdf
5. Michael F. Martin | 6 March 2009 at 1:30 pm

Thanks.

As expected, the sample cuts off right as the Internet became widely available.

That being said, I think this “knowledge burden” theory has the right problem in mind — as knowledge increases, so to must divisions of labor and (just as importantly) the mechanisms for coordinating these successively finer divsions.

Some new technologies (including speech, writing, printing, and now the Internet) are sufficient, if used well (a big if!), to substantially loosen the constraints that the need for coordination places on continued exponential growth.

Lincoln had a similar idea:

http://brokensymmetry.typepad.com/broken_symmetry/2008/04/lessons-from-li.html