A Great Leap Forward: 1930s Depression and U.S. Economic Growth

摘要

The findings of Alexander J. Field's provocative study of the changing patterns of U.S. labor productivity have great relevance to historians of science and technology, particularly those interested in industrial and service sector innovation. Field, an econometrician, revisits and extends to the contemporary era the earlier work of Robert Solow, Moses Abramovitz, Paul David, and others who analyzed productivity trends through the first three quarters of the twentieth century. Like his scholarly antecedents, Field concentrates primarily on evaluating Total Factor Productivity (TFP), a metric that estimates how much of productivity change is attributable to two factors: the quality of labor and capital inputs, and the extension of knowledge in technology and management. Although not measurable directly, TFP is a residual that represents the difference between the change in real output during a period from the change in real labor and capital inputs.