War Stories--Defense Spending and the Growth of the Massachusetts Economy

The defense industry has been an integral part of the Massachusetts economy since colonial days, and the Watertown Arsenal and Springfield rifle are virtually synonymous with the capital-intensive arms business of the nineteenth century. But after World War II, here as elsewhere, defense production became far more deeply embedded in the state \u27s division of labor, with the result that today it is hard to tell what is of military origin and what is not: the minicomputer and software industries, in their entirety, are properly viewed as a spin-off from the Cold War and the space race, for example. The region\u27s unique claim on these downstream effects of military spending stems partly from Yankee ingenuity, mostly from a highly developed educational establishment and an influential political delegation to Congress. These institutional matrices are also the chief strongholds of Massachusetts\u27s traditional antimilitary liberalism, an arrangement which gives rise to many paradoxes, but wisdom begins with an appreciation of just how intricate and powerful and resistant to challenge is the military industrial complex itself

Economic Analysis of Knowledge: The History of Thought and the Central Themes

Following the development of knowledge economies, there has been a rapid expansion of economic analysis of knowledge, both in the context of technological knowledge in particular and the decision theory in general. This paper surveys this literature by identifying the main themes and contributions and outlines the future prospects of the discipline. The wide scope of knowledge related questions in terms of applicability and alternative approaches has led to the fragmentation of research. Nevertheless, one can identify a continuing tradition which analyses various aspects of the generation, dissemination and use of knowledge in the economy