Back to the Future
How many singularities are near and how will they disrupt human history?
Christopher Magee & Tessaleno Devezas
Technological Forecasting and Social Change, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper reviews a large number of approaches that have been used for considering technologically driven profound societal change. We agree with Vinge's suggestion for naming events that are "capable of rupturing the fabric of human history" (or leading to profound societal changes) as a "singularity". This is a useful terminology especially since a mathematically rigorous singularity seems impossible for technological and related societal change. The overview of previous work is done within the context of a broader look at the role of technological change within human history. The review shows that a wide variety of methods have been used and almost all point to singularities in the present century particularly in the middle of the century. The diversity of the methods is reassuring about the potential robustness of these predictions. However, the subjectivity of labeling events as singularities (even well studied past events) is a concern about all of the methods and thus one must carefully pause when relying in any way on these predictions. The general lack of empirical research in this area is also a concern. Quantitative considerations (by proponents and opponents) about past singularities or future singularities often confound two types of metrics. The first type is essentially related to diffusion of technologies (or bundles of technologies) where the logistic curve is empirically well established as the proper time dependence. The second type of metric is for technological capability where hyper-exponentials are empirically well established for their time dependence. In this paper, we consider two past singularities (arguably with important enough social change to qualify) in which the basic metric is alternatively of one type or another. The globalization occurring under Portuguese leadership of maritime empire building and naval technological progress is characterized by a metric describing diffusion. The revolution in time keeping, on the other hand, is characterized by a technological capability metric. For these two cases (and thus robust to the choice of metric type), we find that: • People undergoing profound technologically-driven societal change do not sense a singularity; • The societal impacts depend in complicated ways on human needs, institutional variables and other more uncertain factors and thus are particularly hard to project; • The societal impact is apparently not determined by the rate of progress on either type of metric or by projections to mathematical points with either kind of metric. This finding supports the existing concept that social change due to technology is a more holistic phenomenon than can be characterized by any technical metric. In the final section, we use these empirical findings as the basis for exploring the possibilities for and nature of future singularities. In this we speculate that the potential for a future strong singularity based upon computational capability does not appear particularly probable but that one may already be occurring and is not fully noticed by those (us) going through it. Other possible 21st century singularities (life extension and fossil fuel elimination are two examples considered) may also be already underway rather than waiting for the predicted mid-century changes.
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Long-Term Barriers to the International Diffusion of Innovations
Enrico Spolaore & Romain Wacziarg
NBER Working Paper, August 2011
Abstract:
We document an empirical relationship between the cross-country adoption of technologies and the degree of long-term historical relatedness between human populations. Historical relatedness is measured using genetic distance, a measure of the time since two populations' last common ancestors. We find that the measure of human relatedness that is relevant to explain international technology diffusion is genetic distance relative to the world technological frontier ("relative frontier distance"). This evidence is consistent with long-term historical relatedness acting as a barrier to technology adoption: societies that are more distant from the technological frontier tend to face higher imitation costs. The results can help explain current differences in total factor productivity and income per capita across countries.
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Information Technology and Economic Change: The Impact of The Printing Press
Jeremiah Dittmar
Quarterly Journal of Economics, August 2011, Pages 1133-1172
Abstract:
The printing press was the great innovation in early modern information technology, but economists have found no macroeconomic evidence of its impact. This article exploits city-level data. Between 1500 and 1600, European cities where printing presses were established in the 1400s grew 60% faster than otherwise similar cities. Cities that adopted printing in the 1400s had no prior advantage, and the association between adoption and subsequent growth was not due to printers choosing auspicious locations. These findings are supported by regressions that exploit distance from Mainz, Germany-the birthplace of printing-as an instrument for adoption.
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Examiner Characteristics and Patent Office Outcomes
Mark Lemley & Bhaven Sampat
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this paper, we show that there are important differences across patent examiners at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). We show that more experienced examiners cite less prior art, are more likely to grant patents, and more likely to grant patents without any rejections. These results suggest that the most important decisions made by the patent office are significantly affected by the happenstance of which examiner gets an application. They also point to human resource policies as potentially important levers, hitherto neglected, in patent system reform.
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The Firm Strikes Back: Non-compete Agreements and the Mobility of Technical Professionals
Matt Marx
American Sociological Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study explores how firms shape labor markets and career paths using employee non-compete agreements. The sociology of work has overlooked non-competes, but data indicate that nearly half of technical professionals in the United States are asked to sign such employment contracts. Fearing loss of investments in talent and trade secrets, firms use non-competes to "strike back" against technical professionals' increased mobility following the decline of internal labor markets. In-depth interviews with 52 randomly sampled patent holders in a single industry, coupled with a survey of 1,029 engineers across a variety of industries, reveal that ex-employees subject to non-competes are more likely to take career detours-that is, they involuntarily leave their technical field to avoid a potential lawsuit. Moreover, firms strategically manage the process of getting workers to sign such contracts, waiting for workers' bargaining position to weaken. These findings inform our understanding of the social organization of work in the knowledge economy.
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The impact of research grant funding on scientific productivity
Brian Jacob & Lars Lefgren
Journal of Public Economics, October 2011, Pages 1168-1177
Abstract:
In this paper, we estimate the impact of receiving an NIH grant on subsequent publications and citations. Our sample consists of all applications (unsuccessful as well as successful) to the NIH from 1980 to 2000 for standard research grants (R01s). Both OLS and IV estimates show that receipt of an NIH research grant (worth roughly $1.7 million) leads to only one additional publication over the next five years, which corresponds to a 7 percent increase. The limited impact of NIH grants is consistent with a model in which the market for research funding is competitive, so that the loss of an NIH grant simply causes researchers to shift to another source of funding.
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Bruce Kogut & Muir Macpherson
Research Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
Economic policies are innovations that have important effects on countries and their social welfare. Far from being simply technical in nature, such policies are often ideological innovations. This paper examines three economic policy innovations (privatization, central bank independence, and pension reform) and shows how the diffusion of these policies depended not only upon the mobility of American-trained Ph.D. economists to adopting countries, but also the state of agreement among economists on the value of these policy innovations. By estimating hazard models for adoption times, the effects of mobility and policy agreement are shown to explain the adoption patterns. The implications of this analysis are to treat the creation and diffusion of economic policies as innovations that are subject to trial and error revision as well as to the changing consensus within an academic community.
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Does Software Piracy Affect Economic Growth? Evidence across Countries
Antonio Andrés & Rajeev Goel
Journal of Policy Modeling, forthcoming
Abstract:
We examine the effect of software piracy on medium term growth using cross-country data over 2000-07. While the empirical literature has focused on identifying the causes of software piracy, our contribution is to examine its effects. Our findings suggest that software piracy reduces economic growth over the medium term but the relationship is non-linear - the rate of decrease in economic growth diminishes with piracy increase. This growth reducing effect is especially pronounced in low income countries. Policy implications are discussed.
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Ethnic Innovation and U.S. Multinational Firm Activity
Fritz Foley & William Kerr
NBER Working Paper, August 2011
Abstract:
This paper studies the impact that immigrant innovators have on the global activities of U.S. firms by analyzing detailed data on patent applications and on the operations of the foreign affiliates of U.S. multinational firms. The results indicate that increases in the share of a firm's innovation performed by inventors of a particular ethnicity are associated with increases in the share of that firm's affiliate activity in their native countries. Ethnic innovators also appear to facilitate the disintegration of innovative activity across borders and to allow U.S. multinationals to form new affiliates abroad without the support of local joint venture partners. Thus, this paper points out that immigration can enhance the competitiveness of multinational firms.
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Has the Bayh-Dole act compromised basic research?
Jerry Thursby & Marie Thursby
Research Policy, October 2011, Pages 1077-1083
Abstract:
We examine three hypotheses regarding the effects of the Bayh-Dole Act on research effort of faculty. The first hypothesis we call the status quo hypothesis and it asserts that there has been no effect on research profiles. The second hypothesis, which we call the negative hypothesis, asserts that faculty have been diverted from their traditional role in basic research toward research with more commercial potential. Our final hypothesis is derived from prior theoretical work that suggests that both basic and applied research is greater when faculty can benefit from commercialization of their research effort; we refer to this as the positive hypothesis. The data we examine are the research and invention disclosure of faculty at 8 US universities over the period 1983-1999. Using a citation based measure of basic research publications we relate basic research effort to invention disclosures. Our findings are clear in that they do not show any support for the negative hypothesis and they show substantially greater support for the positive hypothesis than for the status quo hypothesis.
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The million-year wait for macroevolutionary bursts
Josef Uyeda et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
We lack a comprehensive understanding of evolutionary pattern and process because short-term and long-term data have rarely been combined into a single analytical framework. Here we test alternative models of phenotypic evolution using a dataset of unprecedented size and temporal span (over 8,000 data points). The data are body-size measurements taken from historical studies, the fossil record, and among-species comparative data representing mammals, squamates, and birds. By analyzing this large dataset, we identify stochastic models that can explain evolutionary patterns on both short and long timescales and reveal a remarkably consistent pattern in the timing of divergence across taxonomic groups. Even though rapid, short-term evolution often occurs in intervals shorter than 1 Myr, the changes are constrained and do not accumulate over time. Over longer intervals (1-360 Myr), this pattern of bounded evolution yields to a pattern of increasing divergence with time. The best-fitting model to explain this pattern is a model that combines rare but substantial bursts of phenotypic change with bounded fluctuations on shorter timescales. We suggest that these rare bursts reflect permanent changes in adaptive zones, whereas the short-term fluctuations represent local variations in niche optima due to restricted environmental variation within a stable adaptive zone.
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Structural changes in the 2003-2009 global hyperlink network
Han Woo Park, George Barnett & Chung Joo Chung
Global Networks, October 2011, Pages 522-542
Abstract:
In this study, we examined the structure of the international hyperlink network as a global communication system at two different points in time (2003 and 2009). Research was carried out on the web-based network linking country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) that represent countries, using hyperlink connectivity by the means of network analysis. The results indicate that the 2009 international hyperlink network was completely interconnected. G7 countries and Spain were at the centre of the network. At the periphery were poorer countries from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In addition, several regional clusters based on geography, language and culture emerged. A comparison of the 2003 and 2009 results showed that the level of centralization and diversification among semi-peripheral countries increased. We discuss the results from the perspective of world-systems theory. We propose methodological procedures to overcome potential bias in international hyperlink data.