Invention and Rebellion: Why do Innovations Occur at all? An evolutionary approach

Introduction How are we to think of the fundamental causes of technological change? I should like to argue here-but not demonstrate-that standard neoclassical economic models perform poorly in explaining technological progress. In a recent paper, Edward Prescott (1997) has noted the failures of standard theory to explain the huge differences in incomes and productivity. Instead of criticizing standard analysis again, I propose to experiment with an alternative. In the paper below, I propose to sketch out the rough outlines of a model based not on standard neoclassical analysis but on evolutionary dynamics. The idea that knowledge can be analyzed using an evolutionary epistemology based on blind variation and selective retention was proposed first by