Nathan Rosenberg


Nathan Rosenberg was an American economist specializing in the history of technology.

Biography

Rosenberg earned his PhD from the University of Wisconsin in 1955, and taught at Indiana University, the University of Pennsylvania, Purdue University, Harvard University, the University of Wisconsin and Stanford University, where he was the Fairleigh S. Dickinson, Jr. Professor Emeritus of Public Policy in the Department of Economics. In 1989 he was visiting Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at the University of Cambridge.
Rosenberg's contribution to understanding technological change was acknowledged by Douglass C. North in his Nobel Prize lecture entitled "Economic Performance through Time". In 1996 he was awarded the Leonardo da Vinci Medal, the highest award of the Society for the History of Technology.
In 1986's How the West Grew Rich, Rosenberg and co-author L.E. Birdzell, Jr. argued that Western Europe's economic success grew out of a loosening of political and religious controls, and that Western medieval life was not actually organized in castles, cathedrals, and cities; but that it was organized more in the rural areas in huts and in places with reliable access to food. This is why, the book states, most of the population was to some extent involved in agriculture and its related occupations of transporting produce from place to place. The importance of these ideas have since been more fully recognized by the discipline of international economic history. The Rosenberg-Birdzell hypothesis is that innovation is produced by economic competition among politically independent entities. This hypothesis is tested and supported by Joel Mokyr in his contribution to the Festschrift-issue of Research Policy, which was published in honor of Nathan Rosenberg in 1994.

Publications

Books