The Medium Is the Message, or How Context Matters: The Rand Corporation Builds an Economics of Innovation, 1946–1962
The Medium Is the Message, or How Context Matters: The Rand Corporation Builds an Economics of Innovation, 1946–1962
This chapter documents and analyzes the development within RAND of a body of pioneering literature in what has come to be known as the economics of technical change. Although undertaken in the 1950s and early 1960s to help RAND fight the Cold War and plan for World War III, RAND’s research on technical change remains part of the foundation of knowledge in the economics of technical change. As the chapter shows, this research emerged from a growing sense within RAND that the corporation’s main stock in trade could not effectively deal with technological change. The dynamics of technological change seemed to some RAND researchers central to understanding the dynamics of complex technological systems, such as modern air warfare. The optimization promised by RAND’s systems analysts either would have to be limited to more stable systems with lower orders of uncertainty, or it would have to incorporate a fundamental understanding of technological change into its methods.
Keywords: technical change, RAND, Cold War, World War III, technological change, complex technological systems, modern air warfare
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