Learning from ‘Learning by Doing’: Lessons for Economic Growth

This book by a Nobel laureate in economics begins with a brief exposition of Kenneth J. Arrow’s classic paper The Economic Implications of Learning by Doing (1962). It shows how Arrow’s idea fits into the modern theory of economic growth, and uses it as a springboard for a critical consideration of spectacular recent developments that have made growth theory a dynamic topic today. The author then develops a new theory that combines learning by doing (identifying it with the concept of continuous improvement) with a separate process of discrete innovations. Learning by doing leads to a fairly smooth reduction in labor required per unit of output, tied to the rate of gross investment in new capital equipment. Innovations arrive at random; when one of them happens, the labor requirement takes a jump downward.