POL S 588 A: Special Topics In Comparative Political Economy

This course is an introduction to the political economy of innovation. We explore the causes and consequences of innovation—including both efficiency and distributional issues. The questions that will be examined are several; here is a small sample of the bigger ones:

• What was the Great Economic Divergence in which modern, industrial economic growth was ignited and “the West” began to outpace the so-called Rest?
• Why should we care about the aforementioned phenomenon?
• What is innovation? What is technology? What is science? How are they different?
• How does innovation, technology, and science interact with the other mechanics of development—capital accumulation, education/training, and greater specialization through trade—to fuel prosperity and generate different distributions of income, assets, and opportunities?
• Have there been distinct “industrial revolutions” over history and what sets them apart?
• Are there different causes behind each of the industrial revolutions?

In examining these questions, we explore the role of institutions, culture, the state, property rights, policies, politics, and business strategy. We also cover these specialized topics:

• Capitalism & creative destruction
• Intellectual property rights
• Financial markets
• Basic scientific research
• Research and development
• Industrial strategy
• General Purpose Technologies
• Technological diffusion & the transfer of technology across borders
• The development of steam engines & textile automation
• The development of steel, electricity & mass-produced automobiles
• Computers, microprocessors & the internet
• Digital platforms, wireless networks, the Internet of Things & artificial intelligence

In doing all this, we will embrace a multidisciplinary approach that combines insights from economics, economic history, business history, the history of technology, management studies, sociology, political science, and futurology. We explore both developed and developing countries, with a bit more emphasis on the former, and take both a cross-national and historical approach, with a bit more emphasis on the latter. We will also gain some, albeit limited, exposure to issues around sound causal inference achieved through advanced econometric techniques and quasi-experimental methods.

My overall strategy is to expose you to as much as possible, most often in relatively small bites, and try to avoid too much of the overly technical formal models written in Greek Letters and requiring advanced calculus; however, when we can’t escape those, we will try to simplify them down to their essential intuitions.