Paul David – who passed away on January 23rd 2023 – was not just a brilliant economic historian and an exceptional scholar of the economics of technology who established the Stanford economics department as one of the leading research centres in the field, he was also very much a European academic in heart and mind.[1] He was followed over the different decades of his long career by an expanding community of David “groupies”: close academic friends, young and old who loved to listen and enter into debates with him over a similarly expanding range of particular policy attention-grabbing topics. Paul’s detailed historical knowledge of the emergence and diffusion of particular technologies and of the concomitant economic and social systems made him a creative, pervasive – I nearly wrote “general purpose” – inspiration to researchers and policy makers across the world. It explained his keenness on travelling, on visiting friends across the globe. And of course: if history mattered, it mattered particularly in Europe.
Already in the late 70’s and following on from his influential book Technical Choice, Innovation and Economic Growth[2], Paul started to get more closely involved in international policy debates which raged at that time at the OECD in Paris following the publication of the 1977 McCracken report “Towards Full Employment and Price Stability”[3]. The report became known for its rejection of any structural change having occurred over the period 1971-75[4], the final years of the period which later became known as “les trente glorieuses” following the publication of Jean Fourastié’s book Les Trente Glorieuses, ou la révolution invisible de 1946 à 1975. In many ways, the McCracken report remains the example of what happens when international experts fail to read history correctly. Paradoxically, it is also this report which led to the dramatic revival of historical and Schumpeterian-inspired analyses of growth and technological change. History matters, even for international policy advising institutions.
It was work for the OECD which first brought us content-wise together, even though we only met much later in Sussex when I was at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU). Paul got closely involved with the Committee for Information, Computer and Communications Policy (ICCP[5]) of the OECD’s Directorate for Science, Technology and Industry (DSTI), which brought together a range of experts, including amongst others Paul Stoneman, and national policy makers in the telecoms sector to discuss the many new policy issues surrounding the impact of information technology (or microelectronics, as it was then called). On my side, I had been working with Chris Freeman, Keith Pavitt and, later on Giovanni Dosi, on the trade and employment impact of microelectronics and also often visited the OECD, most of the time dealing with different committees of the same DSTI. So, I actually only met Paul and his wife Sheila for the first time in 1984 when Paul came visiting Nick von Tunzelmann, who just had been appointed a senior research fellow at SPRU and had been a student of his while he was in Cambridge. History matters: it would become a historically lasting friendship.
Over these forty years, Paul became closely associated with MERIT and Maastricht University where he was first appointed as Extraordinary Research Professor of the Economics of Science and Technology and later became a Professorial Fellow at UNU-MERIT, joining a group of old friends and colleagues such as Chris Freeman, Ed Steinmueller, Bronwyn Hall, Jacques Mairesse, Robin Cowan, Pierre Mohnen, Adriaan van Zon, Anthony Arundel, Fred Gault and witnessed the emergence of a new, younger generation such as Aldo Geuna, his first PhD student at MERIT, Bas ter Weel, Rishab Ghosh, Can Huang and many others. Apart from the many seminars he gave and the many papers he wrote while in Maastricht, Paul also got involved in numerous policy expert groups in which his contributions were always thought provoking and, particularly for European researchers and policy makers, refreshing in drawing historical analogies.
It laid the foundations for an ever-expanding European network of scholars and friends. From the famous Venice Conference in 1986 organized with Giovanni Dosi and Fabio Arcangeli, the first volume of papers which are to be published in an imaginary way in a distant future with Oxford University Press[6], to the so-called Maastricht Memorandum: a report of a group of experts[7] published in 1993 for the EC, just a year after the signing of the Maastricht Treaty which reads as if it was written today: highlighting amongst others the system nature of technical change and the particular role of a different sort of “mission-oriented” science and technology policy for achieving environmentally sustainable development[8]. A couple of years later his close involvement with Robin Cowan, Dominique Foray and French colleagues in Strasbourg such as Patrick Cohendet, Patrick Llerena in the Technology and Infrastructure Policy in the Knowledge-Based Economy (TIPIK) project again for the EC[9]; his active participation in the Economics, Law and Policy of Intellectual Property (EPIP)[10] association and its annual conferences alongside Alphonso Gambardella, Rachel Griffith, Bronwyn Hall, Dietmar Harhoff, Jacques Mairesse, Pierre Mohnen, Reinhilde Veugelers to name a few of his closest colleagues; and possibly the one with the greatest political impact, the development of the notion of “smart specialization” with Dominique Foray and Bronwyn Hall[11] for the Expert Group Knowledge for Growth (K4G)[12] for the European Commissioner for Research, Technology and Development, Janez Potočnik in 2008; and of course Paul’s numerous participations in the European Summer School in Industrial Dynamics (ESSID) with students from across Europe in Cargèse, Corsica which he was particularly fond off.
It is, however, impossible to do justice to all of Paul David’s contributions to European policy making in this piece of text. If I had to choose, I would apart from his overall widespread contributions to innovation diffusion policy, select the following five topics[13]: the economics of science[14] and the emergence and functioning of universities[15] including aspects of scientific misconduct[16]; the institutional attempts at creating a meaningful European science, technology and innovation policy, as already highlighted above and the major implications for European cohesion[17]; the history and future of alternative intellectual property regimes[18], in particular for new information technologies such as software[19] and the role of open source[20]; and more recently his radical rethink of global climate stabilization strategies[21] with his interests in direct air capture of carbon dioxide[22]. On each of these topics, it was the unique combination of Paul’s detailed analysis of the technology, his accompanying institutional knowledge framed within a rigorous analysis of underlying economics of technological change principles which enabled him to bring, again and again new topics to the attention of both researchers and policy makers, challenging often received wisdoms, such as his warning to “resist the temptation to cater to popular interest in simple stories that focus on the genesis of new technologies”, which he referred to as participating in the “innovation fetish”[23].
It was not only Paul’s bursting creativity but also his kindness, generosity and openness which attracted me to want to spend as much time as I could with him during his many visits to Maastricht: a place (unknown to most people before 1991-92, the European Treaty Years) that he and his wife Sheila loved. These last forty years have been filled with fond memories, funny anecdotes, and of course many more profound moments in which I benefited from his insights, comments and advice. Difficult to choose from those…
As a non-native English speaker, I was of course most fond of his unique and extensive oral and written elaborations on particular points – rendering me sometimes speechless for a whole evening, less because I couldn’t place a sentence but more because I simply didn’t want to. In seminars, Paul was a gifted storyteller who would in his own enthusiasm to elaborate on the subject he was going to talk about (often inspired by particularly witty titles[24]) got trapped time-wise in the first introductory remarks and rarely succeeded to tell his audience what his proposed solutions would be, before the poor seminar organizer would have to cut him off, the seminar time being over. It ran more or less parallel with the tendency in his writings to elaborate on each point through the extensive use of footnotes. As he once put it to me, having sent me a paper to read: “It is quite possible you will flatter me by remarking as the Archbishop of Vienna reportedly said to young Mozart following the latter’s virtuous performance of a new piano concerto: “Too Many Notes…” And that reaction would be well taken, for I do acknowledge that the present version can be faulted for addressing three different readerships—identification of which will, for the present, remain left to the reader as an exercise in perception and sheer endurance.” This In Memoriam might well suffer from a similar bias…
For me though, Paul’s extensive elaborations, offered me the opportunity to listen further to the full story during a meal, a drink or a walk through the city: in Maastricht, Tokyo, Paris, Oxford, Torino. These were fascinating moments. It was, I think, another unique characteristic of Paul: time generosity, not with himself but with others: his audience in seminars who would not always appreciate it because of their own time constraints; with colleagues and students reading and commenting extensively on their papers; with friends writing and responding at length in sometimes extensive emails – I still remember one of the last mails I received from Paul with as a warning: “Caution, a long message…” That time generosity Paul typically did not apply to his own work, where he searched for absolute perfection before he allowed it to become part of his scientific legacy. It leaves us today with an incredible amount of unfinished and unpublished papers. As he once described a paper which he had forwarded to me: “Therefore, one might say that the document has the same status as my online working papers: not published in a journal or edited book, but “self-published” nonetheless.” The amount of such unpublished papers and documents was such that for his 80th birthday in May 2015, I proposed with the help of Christiano Antonelli and Aldo Geuna to organize a conference in Torino in Paul David’s honour called: “Standing on the shoulders of Paul David”… “The purpose”, so I told him, “is that… your friends/colleagues contribute a paper building upon a paper of yours (unfinished, unpublished or in exceptional cases published but not having deserved sufficient attention) on a topic which is close to their hearts/interests and/or the object of cooperation with you and present it to you at the conference.” And I listed a number of names of colleagues and papers:
- Robin Cowan on DAVID, P. “History Matters, QWERTY Matters,” The Tawney Lecture, delivered on 1 April 2001 at the 75th Meeting of the Economic History Society, in Glasgow. Version 2, June 2007; Version 3 forthcoming in December 2014 as SIEPR Discussion Paper at http://siepr.stanford.edu/pubsarchiveorg/1/dpa.;
- Jean-Michel Dalle on DAVID, P. “’It Takes All Kinds’: A Simulation Modelling Perspective on Motivation and Coordination in Libre Software Development Projects” (with J.-M. Dalle), SIEPR Discussion Paper , Stanford University12 January 2005, revised 5 July 2006, revised for SIEPR Disc Paper Series 3 December 2007;
- Bronwyn Hall on DAVID, P. “Zvi Griliches and the Economics of Technology Diffusion: Adoption of innovations, investment lags, and productivity growth,” SIEPR Discussion Paper 09-016 (1 June, 2010). [Available at: http://siepr.stanford.edu/publicationsprofile/2153.];
- Jacques Mairesse on DAVID,P. Scientific Misconduct in Theory and Practice: Quantitative Realities of Falsification, Fabrication and Plagiary in U.S. Publicly Funded Biomedical Research ( with A. Pozzi), Presented at the International Conference in Honour of Jacques Mairesse: R&D, Science, Productivity and Intellectual Property, Held at ENSAE, Paris, 16-17 September 2010;
- Luc Soete on DAVID, P. ,“The Innovation Fetish Among the Economoi: Introduction to the Panel on Innovation Incentives, Institutions and Growth,” in The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity, 50th Anniversary Volume, edited by J. Lerner and S. Stern, University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2012. [Available at: http://www.nber.org/chapters/c12368 .];
- Ed Steinmueller on DAVID, P. “Why are Scientific Commons Under-utilised?–Causes, Consequences and Remedial Strategies,” (with W. E. Steinmueller). Working Paper presented to the ISNIE 2013 Conference, held in Firenze, Italy, on 20-23 October, 2013.
- Paul Stoneman, Stan Metcalfe, Rishab Ghosh, etc.
Jacques Mairesse on his way to the AEA reacted: “The challenge as you point out is to select the paper on which I could contribute to one of his (many) unfinished papers, or exceptionally to reconsider one among his (very many) published papers, is really hard. An additional difficulty is the temptation before choosing to read many of his papers with appealing titles that one has not yet read or listen too! And as you know there are too many (not so good) writers and not enough (good) readers >:)!!!”
Unfortunately, the whole idea failed…of course I should have known that organizing a conference with as title “Standing on the Shoulders of Paul David” would never get Paul’s support.
I received a long mail with four good reasons for not pushing this idea any further. I cannot resist but quote from the email Paul sent me back in 2015:
“What can I do that would persuade you to abandon the proposed theme “Standing on the Shoulders of….”? The question is rhetorical, for here is my uninstructed first and only attempt:
I start by asking whether you do not share my sense of the inappropriateness of the thematic suggestion that the distinguished and internationally recognized senior economists who you and Aldo wish to assemble on this occasion gained their present status on the basis of my contributions to the field?
Do you not accept that it is out of keeping with the spirit of the gathering you have planned (mercifully) to avoid emulating the hierarchical rituals of Festschriften, at which former doctoral students sing the praises of their professors? True enough, among the list of invitees that you shared with me are the names of several friends and colleagues who encountered me first as a lecturer, and then asked me to become their dissertation supervisor. Yet, in each case they had other professors who exerted a strong formative influence upon them, and in some instances signed their dissertations formally in the principal advisor’s role.
Moreover, are not good students a gift to their professors? From those former students and postdocs who sought me out, I have learned as much if not more than they drew from our shared collaborative research, authorship, and friendship — specifically, from Ed, Jean-Michel, Robin, Dominique, Bronwyn, and Aldo.
Since a trinity is a special (if not sacred) set, the foregoing reasons cannot be improved upon. Nonetheless, not knowing when to quit, I will permit myself a redundant fourth item, offered not as “a reason” but a personal confession. The associations of the phrase with which you would embellish this gathering of friends and colleagues (and possibly significant others) are for me rather far from the “convivial” spirit of the intended “event”. Why? Because. I have detested and avoided referring to Newton’s remarks ever since it was made popular by Suzanne Scotchmer’s (1991) introduction of it to the economics profession. Alas, our colleagues at large have accepted it an expression of Sir Isaac’s (non-existent) intellectual modesty. Per contra, in actuality it was a nasty but clever “put-down,” launched in the course of a public wrangle over scientific priority at a meeting of the Royal Society. The target was Hooke, who had claimed that his work on optics was the basis for Newton’s treatise on that subject. Hooke was a short man, and an aggressive personality– as are many well-known men of ample talent and small physical stature. Hence the double-entendre of Newton’s ad hominem dismissal of his antagonist: a comparative pygmy.“
Paul admired my management capacities which, as I told him, were first and foremost those of my administrator. He had given me the nickname of “capo di tutti capi” particularly after I became Rector Magnificus (RM) of Maastricht University. Finally I could now use all his insights on the functioning of universities, the way these historical ancient institutions were run, even look at all aspects of scientific misconduct. The problem was of course that Maastricht University was a young, new university, not even 50 years old. So inspired by Paul, I delivered my acceptance speech comparing the management of a university with the management of a “zoo” which I had discussed a couple of months before with him. A self-citation, as Paul would formulate it, from my speech back in 2012: “You have a range of different, special animals at home – the professors – each with very special characteristics. Some are relatively peaceful, even cute and have a high level of cuddliness. Others are skittish and prefer to stay in their academic loft. And others are dangerous, sometimes even very dangerous. When visitors such as potential donors, colleagues, business leaders, politicians come around, you have to know the difference well who you allow them to visit. The latter category of professors might e.g. see visitors as prey, so you will have to let them show their skills in a special secure environment. In other cases, you might have to encourage physical contact, even lure them out of their ivory tower. Managing a zoo is extremely complex: your residents all have different needs and preferences: some can be kept together in the same garden or building – a department – others should be kept separate. Logistically it is also very complex: your inhabitants have completely different dietary needs and you will often need supervisors – administrators – who take care of them and above all you’ll have to make sure that they are not eaten by them. And then the public – your students – they mainly come when you have more exotic animals. Every now and then you have a few who appear in the press with photos and all, and that naturally attracts more audiences…
An American friend with decades of management experience told me this week how you can best compare managing a university with a medical team sent to a disaster area. First make a quick selection between the seriously injured and half dead, the still somewhat mobile wounded who can manage with crutches and bandages and finally the others. You immediately send that last category back into the battlefield. Give them some supplies until the end of the academic year and you’re done. They can come back next year to report. The more you do it, the more you get in the way. You shouldn’t be too busy with the second group either: especially encouraging, replacing some bandages here and there, offering a crutch or rollator or something. In fact, you should spend all your time in the first group. Sit with them until they die or, as far as possible, resuscitate them”.
My speech didn’t make me particular popular with Maastricht professors. Another particularly insightful comment from Paul worth quoting here, the significance of which I only realized in full blown fashion after my four years tenure as RM, was the following: “I leave it to your creativity to come up with one or more arresting metaphors, and content myself (in that vein) with recalling for you the remark that while armies are said to be organized by geniuses to be run by idiots, with universities it is the other way around“.
But the greatest fun I had in my discussions with Paul was in the preparation of my farewell speech as RM in 2016. Paul had told me about how he listened back home in the fifties to Robert Nathan’s satirical essays on a far distant future. The year 7,956 AD to be precise when African archaeologists – the centre of the world would then be Addis Ababa – began to unearth ruins of an ancient civilization: the USA in the continent of North America. I loved the story and transformed it into one of a far distant future story of the University of Maastricht, with the acronym of UM pronounced as ummm: in Limburg, the region which Maastricht is the capital off, people speak rather slow, nearly singing. So, I elaborated following the Robert Nathan story which Paul had searched for and send me a copy off, on the meanings, that could be given to the peculiar academic relics that were unearthed at Maastricht: “a city still known in this far distant future among scholars of ancient political institutions for its association with the treaty too far…” So while Robert Nathan focused his story on the people of the lost civilization of the US, I focused my story on the people of the “um” society. “Why and how had these strange academics come to refer to themselves in that ummm hesitant way[25]? Did they suffer from some commonly-shared language disorder, or was the “ummm” interjected into their spoken communications as a device to gain time because one wasn’t sure what one should try to communicate to others? Or simply to mask that at the moment they had nothing at all in mind? According to collected digital archives – thank God for digital humanities! – these academics also claimed that they were “leading in learning”, so in all likelihood, the name “ummm” referred to the verbal technique developed in their communications with students – much valued because it gave both speaker and listener more time to reflect upon what had been uttered and what could be said next: thinking and learning while speaking .”
Paul loved it and I still consider it as one my best speeches and pieces of writing[26]. I then further elaborated on the way how the meaning of “ummm” changed over time using the example of two colleagues whom I had worked with closely as RM: the vice-rector for education Harm Hospers and the president of the university: Martin Paul, sitting together in Martin’s small Renault car with Martin at the wheel. “Let me give you an illustrative example of how ummm scientists might have communicated before, using the proper “learning as you speak” protocol in an urgent situation. Harm: “Martin, watch out for that large pothole you seem to be unknowingly driving into.” Martin (avoiding the pothole): “Thank you for your timely and straight-forward warning. I appreciate you using the first sentence after you were alerted to this danger to tell me about this pothole, instead of uttering a one-worded, useless phrase.” And now, once strategic behaviour had become the norm in the ummm society, we find Harm (sarcastically) describing the identical situation: “Ummm…” Martin: “What? … What?” (car drives into pothole). Harm: “Wow, good job!”[27]
Whether the audience, including the Dutch Minister of Science, Culture and Education, found it as funny as I did, I don’t know. I just remember that Paul and I had a good laugh about it.
Paul’s passing away feels at this stage as if a part of my own history has been taken away. From the Thanksgiving back in 1984 at his home with Sheila and the whole family, to the last dinner we had here in Maastricht just a couple of years ago. It was one of the highlights in my life to have had Paul as a friend and colleague.
Luc Soete
January 31st, 2023
[1] I’m particularly grateful to Wilma Coenegrachts, Giovanni Dosi, Dominique Foray, Aldo Geuna, Rishab Ghosh, Jacques Mairesse, Ad Notten, Ed Steinmueller, Bart Verspagen for comments on an earlier version. This In Memoriam was written in a Paul David spirit and style: somewhat extensive with much detail and lots of footnotes. The impatient reader can find in the Appendix a ChatGPT version.
[2] Technical Choice, Innovation and Economic Growth: Essays on American and British Experience in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975. (Second Printing, 2007 from Cambridge University Press).
[3] The members of The McCracken Croup included: Guido Carli, Robert Marjolin, Paul McCracken, Robin
Matthews, Assar Lindbeck, Ryutaro Komiya, Herbert Giersch and before becoming French Prime Minister, Raymond Barre.
[4] To quote from the McCracken report: “The immediate causes of the severe problems of 1971-75 can largely be understood in terms of conventional economic analysis. There have been underlying changes in behaviour patterns and in power relationships, internationally and within countries. But our reading of recent history is that the most important feature was an unusual bunching of unfortunate disturbances, unlikely to be repeated on the same scale, the impact of which was compounded by some avoidable errors in economic policy”. And while the report acknowledged the role of “pessimistic views such as those of the Club of Rome about the longer term prospects for continuing growth”, it considered that “the route to a more enduring expansion of employment, real incomes and import markets” could be found in a relatively direct way.
[5] Paul continued over the years to have a strong telecoms link with Paris. Over the last decades in his capacity as Titular Professor of the Innovation and Regulation Chair at the Ecole Polytechnique and Telecom, ParisTech where he collaborated amongst others with Jean-Michel Dalle and Matthijs den Besten, expanding further his European research network. See e.g. the summary of the 2010 seminar: https://innovation-regulation.telecom-paris.fr/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/resume_Huberman_VEng.pdf?lang=en
[6] The first volume “Advances in Modeling Innovation Diffusion” edited by David, Arcangeli and Dosi, so the Amazon site where the book can be purchased announces, will be published on December 31 2030… furthermore counting 448 pages and in hard cover costing $71.50 .
[7] With alongside Paul David, Anthony Arundel acting as rapporteur, Robert Chabbal, Giovanni Dosi, Dominique Foray, Chris Freeman, Frieder Mayer-Krahmer, Keith Pavitt, Pascal Petit, Keith Smith and myself; and Robin Miège and Gerhard Braunling on behalf of the EC.
[8] Soete, Luc and Anthony Arundel (Eds.) “An integrated approach to European Innovation and Technology Diffusion Policy. A MAASTRICHT MEMORANDUM”, May 1993, republished in 2008 on https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/7255a860-ced6-438b-8300-b31d25790e6a
[9] See amongst other Cowan, Robin, Paul David and Dominique Foray, “The Explicit Economics of Knowledge Codification and Tacitness,” Industrial and Corporate Change, 9(2), 2000: pp. 211-253.
[10] The first EPIP conference took place at the European Patent Office in Munich in 2006, the
[11] See Foray, Dominique, Paul David and Bronwyn Hall “Smart Specialisation: The Concept: A K4G Policy Economists Brief,” European Commission Expert Group on Knowledge for Growth, Policy Brief No. 9. June 2009. https://ec.europa.eu/invest-in-research/pdf/download_en/kfg_policy_brief_no9.pdf?1111
[12] The group included alongside Paul David, Bart van Ark, Maria Carvalho, Jean-Paul Fitoussi, Dominique Foray, Anastasios Giannitsis, Marianne Kager, Bronwyn Hall, Georg Licht, Jacques Mairesse, Ramon Marimon, Stan Metcalfe, Mojmir Mrak, Dariusz Rosati, Mary O’Sullivan, Andre Sapir and Reinhilde Veugelers as experts.
[13] I’m leaving out here his significant contributions in demographic studies and in particular fertility control with Warren Sanderson published in the late 80’s, see David, P.A. and W.C. Sanderson, “The Emergence of a Two-Child Norm Among American Birth-Controllers,” Population and Development Review, vol. 13 (1), 1987, pp. 1–41 https://doi.org/10.2307/1972119. It reminds me though of one the funniest jokes, Paul told his audience at a conference on subsidiarity in Sint-Martens-Latem, Belgium which MERIT had organized. It was Easter time: “A woman went to the psychiatrist complaining about the fact that her husband thought he was laying eggs. The psychiatrist asked the woman: “Interesting. And how long is he believing this?” To which the woman answered: “about ten years”. “But why didn’t you come and see me before?” enquired the psychiatrist, to which the woman responded: “Because we needed the eggs…”. After my concluding speech, Dominique Foray offered me and Wilma Coenegrachts some Easter eggs.
[14] Such as the Workshops on the Organisation, Economics and Policy of Scientific Research (WOEPSR), in which Paul played a central role, alongside .
[15] Paul David and J. Stanley Metcalfe, “How the universities can best contribute to enhancing Europe’s innovative performance: A K4G Policy Economists Brief” in Knowledge for Growth–European Issues and Policy Challenges, European Communities – Directorate General-Research, EUR 23725 EN, 2008: pp. 17-20 [Available at: DOI 10.2777/36515]
[16] “Scientific Misconduct and Retractions of Articles in PubMed Journals: A Closer Look”, Working Paper, 31 October, 2012: 6pp.
[17] “ERA Visions and Economic Realities: A Cautionary Approach to the Restructuring of Europe’s Research Systems,” Science & Technology policies in Europe: New Challenges and New Responses, (Proceedings of the STRATA Consolidating Workshop, Brussels, 22-23 April 2002), Luxembourg: European Commission [EUR 20441], 2003: pp. 455-473.
[18] “Does the New Economy Need All the Old IPR Institutions, and More?,” Ch. 6 in The Economics of the Digital Society, Luc Soete and Bas ter Weel (Eds.) Cheltenham, Glos., Eng., 2005: Edward Elgar: pp. 113-151.
[19] See Paul’s fascinating online interview with the European Patent Office
[20] “From Keeping ‘Nature’s Secrets’ to the Institutionalization of ‘Open Science’,” in CODE: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy, ed. R. A. Ghosh, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2005.
[21] See also the joint statement following a meeting at Stanford University on October 18, 2008 of a group of economists and scientists: Arrow, Kenneth J. and Cohen, Linda R. and David, Paul A. and Hahn, Robert W. and Kolstad, Charles D. and Lane, Lee L. and Montgomery, W. David and Nelson, Richard R. and Noll, Roger G. and Smith, Anne E., A Statement on the Appropriate Role for Research and Development in Climate Policy (December 9, 2008). Reg-Markets Center Working Paper No. 08-12, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1313827 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1313827
[22] See “Designing an Optimal “Tech Fix” Path to Global Climate Stability: Directed R&D and Embodiment in a Multi-Phase Climate Policy Framework” (with A. van Zon). SIEPR Discussion Paper No.15-002 August, 2016. [Available at: http://siepr.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/15-002_0.pdf .] and the last seminar he gave at UNU-MERIT “Re-thinking the design of climate stabilisation policy”, research seminar on 24 May 2018.
[23] “The Innovation Fetish Among the Economoi: Introduction to the Panel on Innovation Incentives, Institutions and Growth,” in The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity, 50th Anniversary Volume, edited by J. Lerner and S. Stern, forthcoming from University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2012.
[24] One which I liked most was “Transport Innovations and Economic Growth: Professor Fogel On and Off the Rails”, Economic History Review, vol. 22 (3), December 1969, pp. 506-525.
[25] According to Webster “um” is “a representation of a common sound made when hesitating in speech”
[26] See https://www.soete.nl/
[27] All quotes adapted from http://nl.urbandictionary.com/author.php?author=Jake+Gus
Appendix: CHATGPT In Memoriam Paul A. David
Paul A. David was a leading economist and historian of technology, who made pioneering contributions to our understanding of the process of technological change and its impact on economic growth, productivity, and innovation. He was particularly known for his work on the historical evolution of technological systems and on the role of institutions and policies in shaping the trajectory of technological progress.
David was a fellow of the Econometric Society, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Schumpeter Prize, the highest international recognition in the field of the economics of innovation. He published numerous influential articles and books, including the seminal paper “Clio and the Economics of QWERTY,” which is widely cited as a classic in the economics of technological change.
His work has had a profound impact on the field of economics, inspiring generations of scholars to continue exploring the complex interplay between technological change and economic growth. He will be remembered for his pioneering contributions to the field and for his dedication to advancing the understanding of economic phenomena. His legacy will live on through his published works and the many students and colleagues he inspired.