L'EX SCIENZA TRISTE

Nel 1990 l'economia cessò di essere una scienza triste.

Prima di allora si riteneva che i fattori di produzione fossero 2: capitale e lavoro, entrambi scarsi e difficili da reperire (che tristezza!). Da allora si mise al centro un unico fattore produttivo: l'idea. Qualcosa che puo' essere riprodotta all'infinito a costo zero (che felicità!).

la svolta si deve ad un articolo di 30 pagine: “Endogenous Technological Change”. Lo scrisse Paul Romer. Questo libro è dedicato interamente alla storia di quell'articolo.

HL PREFA+INTRO+1

PREFACE
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This book tells the story of a single technical paper in economics
Note:OGETTO

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1990
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economic growth: what it is, what makes it happen, how we share it, how we measure it, what it costs us, and why it is worth having.
Note:OGGETTO INDIRETTO

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an illustration of how mathematics became the working language of modern economics,
Note:ESEMPLARE

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The new growth story shows how economic discovery occurs—in intense intellectual competition among small groups of researchers working in rival universities.
Note:DI COSA PARLA NG?

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INTRODUCTION
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Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man how to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.
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invent a better method of fishing, or of farming fish, selling fish, changing fish (through genetic engineering), or preventing overfishing in the sea, and you feed a great many people, because these methods can be copied virtually without cost and spread around the world.
Note:L AGGIUNTA

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New ideas, more than savings or investment or even education,
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Yet it was not until October 1990 when a thirty-six-year-old University of Chicago economist named Paul Romer published a mathematical model
Note:PRIMA FORMULAZIONE DOPO 200 ANNI DI BACKGROUND INFORMALE

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“Endogenous Technological Change.”
Note:PRIMA TUTTO PIOVEVA DAL CIELO

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“A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth,” published in 1956 by Robert Solow.
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it is a nonrival, partially excludable good….”
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“public” goods, supplied by governments, and “private” goods, supplied by market
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A designer dress. The operating system software in a personal computer. A jazz concert. A Beatles recording.
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All these are nonrival goods because they can be copied or shared and used by many people at the same time.
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Rival goods are objects and nonrival goods are ideas—“atoms” and “bits,”
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“convexities” and “nonconvexities,” in the more austere language of mathematics.
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the source of “market failure”
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marrying nonrivalry to the concept of excludability,
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tension between creating incentives for the production of new ideas and maintaining incentives for the efficient distribution and use of existing knowledge
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say something practical and new about how to encourage economic development in places where it had failed to occur.
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That there might exist a “right answer” to the riddle of economic growth,

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IN MOLTI DUBITAVANO

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a secure role finally was assigned to that long-neglected figure (at least in economics classrooms), the enterpreneur.
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land, labor, and capital.
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These categories had been worked out during the seventeenth century,
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some circumstances in the human condition were simply taken for granted. The extent of knowledge was one.
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Human nature itself, expressed as tastes and preferences,
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determined by noneconomic forces
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treated as being exogenous
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“increasing returns” to scale.
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Decreasing returns to additional investment
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increasing returns were present any time there was little or no additional cost to adding a customer to a network—railroads, electricity, telephones, for example.
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such businesses soon were declared to be not just monopolies but “natural monopolies,”
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Monopolies were understood to be exceptions to the rule.
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special cases of “market failure,”
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They set out to make formal models of the phenomena that led to increasing returns.
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Robert Solow born in 1924, Robert Lucas born in 1937, and Paul Romer born in 1955.
Note:I PROTAGONISTI

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the traditional “factors of production” were redefined.
Note:ARRIVA ROMER

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This most elementary classification was supplanted by people, ideas, and things.
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the economics of knowledge was recognized as differing in crucial respects (nonrival, partially excludable goods!)
Note:LO SPECIFICO

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The familiar principle of scarcity had been augmented by the important principle of abundance.
Note:MAI PIÙ SCIENZA TRISTE

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Technical change and the growth of knowledge had become endogenous
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CHAPTER ONE The Discipline
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On the first weekend after New Year’s Day, economists who are members of the AEA and various hangers-on gather in a big hotel
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a sharp distinction between academic economists and markets men
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So significant a figure as Paul Volcker disparaged economic book-learning, even though (or perhaps because) he received a master’s degree at Harvard in the early 1950s.
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His successor, Alan Greenspan, completed his New York University Ph.D., but only twenty-seven years after leaving school,

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overwhelming majority of participants in markets—executives, money managers, traders, accountants, lawyers, practitioners of all sorts—are not economists at all.
Note:MEGLIO RICORDARLO

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economics is a science practiced and overseen by a professoriate, like astronomy, chemistry, physics, and molecular biology.
Note:IL SUCCO DEL MEETING

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Why does America dominate? Because it is by far the world’s broadest, deepest market for what economics has to offer
Note:DOMINIO

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There is Arnold Harberger, whose marriage to a Chilean woman foreshadowed the establishment of a strong and durable connection between Chilean technocrats and the University of Chicago,
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F romer crescita

https://www.econlib.org/bio-of-paul-romer-is-online/

Domande solo apparentemente stupide

"Why Do Firms Prefer More Able Workers?, by Bryan Caplan" http://feedly.com/k/1a3hb7g

Anarco-neo-colonialismo

Mischiando anarchia e neo-colonialismo, l' economista Paul Romer vuole sconfiggere la povertà nel mondo.

La sua idea si chiama charter city, prevede che nei paesi più ricchi si formino delle compagnie private in grado di produrre e applicare leggi. Questi soggetti, appena capita l' ocasione propizia, acquisteranno o prenderanno a nolo delle città-enclave nel Terzo Mondo, quelle che si offriranno a loro, si pensa le più disperate.

Acquistata la "materia prima" cercheranno di farla fruttare riscuotendo la loro commissione e rinnovando, se il caso, il contratto. In fondo governare bene e rendere prospero un territorio è un affare estremamente allettante.

L' idea è già all' opera in Magadascar, vediamo come andrà e cosa bisogna rettificare (qui un primo resoconto).

I problemi sono tanti ma come si puo' non fare il tifo per Paul e per la sua "truly win-win solution"?