Critical Review of a Technology and Economics Article :: Economics Essays

The article Digital engineering and Institutional Change from the Gilded Age to Modern Times The have-to doe with of the Telegraph and the Internet describes the difficulties that exist when trying to ca-ca an accurate stinting model showing responses to new, economy changing, technologies. The root Ronnie Phillips mainly focuses on institutional economics and, by showing the history of other technological advances, the sine qua non for institutional analysis. He explains how the challenge is to explain societal change, recognize what and how it happens, and create policies that will foster increased living standards throughout the world. The way that the author forms his article is by first giving a rather stark(a) history of the telegraph, and reviews the impact that it had when it became a major form of fast communication. He then goes over or so factors that argon essential to understanding the development of society. One, that technology is of the nature of a joi nt stock of knowledge for valet two, the role institutions and organizations (like the government) play in the development of the technology three, a alleged(prenominal) ceremonial encapsulation and path dependency and four, the unpredictability of technological change and its impact on society. The last half of the article addresses institutional economics, objet dart not very clearly, he writes about the institutional changes that the internet has had on the economy, while going into a diddle history of the growth of the internet. The final stage of the article involves an argument/discussion about whether or not the arguments presented in the article substantiate a new institutional or nonagenarian institutional methodology versus whether or not they fall within neoclassical theory. Many questions remain un responded through the end, and even more argon raised right in the last paragraph.Although the author does raise some very interesting and provoking questions in the beginning of the article, unfortunately, some of them are very difficult to answer, or just cant be answered. While the article doesnt solve any problems, it does raise consciousness and creates some interesting connections with the present and the past. The overall question the author wishes to answer is how can economists understand and explain the nature of societal change? The entropy is explained mostly through a narrative history with a short quantitative analysis of the growth of the telegraph and the Internet.