Two Centuries of Productivity Growth in Computing

By William Nordhaus. 2007

256 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management Science and Operations Research, Strategy and Management, Economics & Operations Research, Social Sciences & Humanities

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Citations in the corpus

When Will AI Exceed Human Performance? Evidence from AI Experts (2017, background): “Several sources provide objective evidence about future AI advances: trends in computing hardware [7], task performance [8], and the automation of labor [9].”
The future of employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation? (2017, background): “During the 1980s and 1990s, computing costs declined even more rapidly, on average by 64% per year, accompanied by a surge in computational power (Nordhaus, 2007).13 At the same time, bar-code scanners and cash machines were spreading across the retail and financial industries, and the first…”
The Labor Market Impacts of Technological Change: From Unbridled Enthusiasm to Qualified Optimism to Vast Uncertainty (2022, background): “Concretely, because the real cost of symbolic processing (i.e., what computers do) has been falling by double-digits annually for decades (Nordhaus, 2007), what workers can now earn by carrying out these once well-remunerated but now fully automated information processing tasks is essentially zero.”
Technical Change and Industrial Dynamics as Evolutionary Processes (2009, background): “Semiconductors offer an archetypical example of a trajectory driven by miniaturization efforts yielding the so-called Moore’s law involving the doubling of the density of elementary transistor-per-chip and later microprocessors every 2-3 years (cf. Fig. 2; more details in Gordon and Munson,1981; Dos”
Where Have the Middle-Wage Workers Gone? A Study of Polarization Using Panel Data (2016, background): “The key identifying assumptions for the estimationof thewage equation are that ðiÞ unobservable 7 See Nordhaus ð2007Þ for evidence on the fall in the cost of computing power and Bartel, Ichniowski, and Shaw ð2007Þ on firm-level evidence on the effects of IT adoption on firms’ skill requirements and…”
Skills, Tasks and Technologies: Implications for Employment and Earnings. NBER Working Paper No. 16082. (2010, unknown): “Nordhaus ( 2007 ) estimates that the real cost of performing a standardized set of computational tasks— where cost is expressed in constant dollars or measured relative to the labor cost of performing the same calculations— fell by at least 1 .”
A low carbon industrial revolution? Insights and challenges from past technological and economic transformations (2012, background): “6 Computing costs halved between 1950 and 2005, for example (Nordhaus, 2007), whereas the cost of steam power fell by only about 7/8ths between 1760 and 1910 (Crafts, 2004, 2010b).”
How predictable is technological progress (2015, unknown): “Studies of improvement in computers over long spans of time indicate super-exponential improvement (Nordhaus 2007, Nagy et al. 2011), suggesting that Moore’s law may only be an approximation reasonably valid over spans of time of 50 years or less.”