Organizations and Markets

Nathan Rosenberg (1927-2015)

25 August 2015 at 8:28 am Dick Langlois 5 comments

| Dick Langlois |

I just learned that Nathan Rosenberg has passed away at 87. Nate was unarguably one of the most important economic historians and students of technological change of our era. He was also a one of the most important influences on my work.

I still regret that, out of ignorance, I didn’t take full advantage of all the resources available to me when I was a graduate student at Stanford. But Nate was a partial exception. I sat in on his course on history of economic thought; and when it came time to choose a thesis committee, he was kind enough to agree to be a member. I remember having a number of long conversations with him in his office in Encina Hall, although his greatest influence on me was through his writings. Nate had an eye for looking into — and theorizing about in a non-formal way — the micro structure of technology and innovation. I have always thought that his early work with Ed Ames is wonderful and greatly underappreciated. His work on the machine-tool industry in the United States is a progenitor of the economics of general-purpose technologies and one of the beginnings of what I like to think of as the Stanford School of technology-focused economic history.

I think Nate’s influence shows through on the range of my own work, including that with Paul Robertson. (It turns out that Nate was an associate advisor on Paul’s dissertation committee at Wisconsin before he was a member of mine at Stanford.) I was also fortunate to become part of the invisible college of technology economics of which Nate (along with Dick Nelson and others) was a dean, and I was fortunate to collaborate with other fellow Rosenberg students like David Mowery and Ed Steinmueller on policy-focused industry histories, another Rosenberg specialty.

Entry filed under: - Langlois -, Business/Economic History, Innovation.