Ökonomie (OSP)

Einführend

Josh Lerner, Jean Tirole: The Simple Economics of Open Source

Paul A. David, Dominique Foray: Economic Fundamentals of the Knowledge Society

Politische Ökonomie

Andre Gorz: Wissen, Wert und Kapital

Ökonux, Texte

Paul Romer

Post-Scarcity Prophet

Economic Growth

Economic growth occurs whenever people take resources and rearrange them in ways that are more valuable. A useful metaphor for production in an economy comes from the kitchen. To create valuable final products, we mix inexpensive ingredients together according to a recipe. The cooking one can do is limited by the supply of ingredients, and most cooking in the economy produces undesirable side effects. If economic growth could be achieved only by doing more and more of the same kind of cooking, we would eventually run out of raw materials and suffer from unacceptable levels of pollution and nuisance. Human history teaches us, however, that economic growth springs from better recipes, not just from more cooking. New recipes generally produce fewer unpleasant side effects and generate more economic value per unit of raw material.

Take one small example. In most coffee shops, you can now use the same size lid for small, medium, and large cups of coffee. That wasn't true as recently as 1995. That small change in the geometry of the cups means that a coffee shop can serve customers at lower cost. Store owners need to manage the inventory for only one type of lid. Employees can replenish supplies more quickly throughout the day. Customers can get their coffee just a bit faster. Such big discoveries as the transistor, antibiotics, and the electric motor attract most of the attention, but it takes millions of little discoveries like the new design for the cup and lid to double average income in a nation.

Every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources and undesirable side effects would pose if no new recipes or ideas were discovered. And every generation has underestimated the potential for finding new recipes and ideas. We consistently fail to grasp how many ideas remain to be discovered. The difficulty is the same one we have with compounding: possibilities do not merely add up; they multiply.

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Thinking about ideas and recipes changes how one thinks about economic policy (and cows). A traditional explanation for the persistent poverty of many less developed countries is that they lack objects such as natural resources or capital goods. But Taiwan stared with little of either and still grew rapidly. Something else must be involved. Increasingly, emphasis is shifting to the notion that it is ideas, not objects, that poor countries lack. The knowledge needed to provide citizens of the poorest countries with a vastly improved standard of living already exists in the advanced countries. If a poor nation invests in education and does not destroy the incentives for its citizens to acquire ideas from the rest of the world, it can rapidly take advantage of the publicly available part of the worldwide stock of knowledge. If, in addition, it offers incentives for privately held ideas to be put to use within its borders - for example, by protecting foreign patents, copyrights, and licenses, by permitting direct investment by foreign firms, by protecting property rights, and by avoiding heavy regulation and high marginal tax rates - its citizens can soon work in state-of-the-art productive activities.

Some ideas such as insights about public health are rapidly adopted by less developed countries. As a result, life expectancy in poor countries is catching up with the leaders faster than income per capita. Yet governments in poor countries continue to impede the flow of many other kinds of ideas, especially those with commercial value. Automobile producers in North America clearly recognize that they can learn from ideas developed in the rest of the world. But for decades, car firms in India operated in a government-created protective time warp. The Hillman and Austin cars produced in England in the 1950s continued to roll off production lines in India through the 1980s. After independence, India's commitment to closing itself off and striving for self-sufficiency was as strong as Taiwan's commitment to acquiring foreign ideas and participating fully in world markets. The outcomes - grinding poverty in India and opulence in Taiwan - could hardly be more disparate.

For a poor country like India, enormous increases in standards of living can be achieved merely by letting in the ideas held by companies from industrialized nations. With a series of economic reforms that started in the early 1990s, India has begun to open itself up to these opportunities. For some of its citizens such as the software developers who now work for firms located in the rest of the world, these improvements in standards of living have become a reality. This same type of opening up is causing a spectacular transformation of life in China. Its growth in the last 25 years of the twentieth century was driven to a very large extent by foreign investment by multinational firms.

Leading countries like the United States, Canada, and the members of the European Union cannot stay ahead merely by adopting ideas developed elsewhere. They must offer strong incentives for discovering new ideas at home, and this is not easy to do. The same characteristic that makes an idea so valuable - everybody can use it at the same time - also means that it is hard to earn an appropriate rate of return on investments in ideas. The many people who benefit from a new idea can too easily free-ride on the efforts of others.

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