Back to the past: the historical roots of labor-saving automation

AbstractThis paper, relying on a still relatively unexplored long-term dataset on U.S. patenting activity, provides empirical evidence on the history of labor-saving innovations back to early nineteenth century. The identification of mechanization/automation heuristics, retrieved via textual content analysis on current robotic technologies by Montobbio et al. (Robots and the origin of their labour-saving impact, LEM Working Paper Series 2020/03), allows to focus on a limited set of CPC codes where mechanization and automation technologies are more prevalent. We track their time evolution, clustering, eventual emergence of wavy behavior, and their comovements with long-term GDP growth. Our results challenge both the general-purpose technology approach and the strict 50-year Kondratiev cycle, while they provide evidence of the emergence of erratic constellations of heterogeneous technological artefacts, in line with the development-block approach enabled by autocatalytic systems

In Order to Stand up You Must Keep Cycling: Change and Coordination in Complex Evolving Economies

In this work we discuss the main building blocks, achievements and challenges of an evolutionary interpretation of the relation between mechanisms of coordination and drivers of change in modern economies, seen as complex evolving systems. It is an evident stylised fact of modern economic systems that there are forces at work which keep them together and make them grow despite rapid and profound modifications of their industrial structures, social relations, techniques of production, patterns of consumption. We suggest that a fruitful interpretation of the two processes rests in what we call the "bicycle conjecture": in order to stand up you must keep cycling. However, changes and transformation are by nature "disequilibrating" forces. Thus there must be other factors which maintain relatively ordered configurations of the system and allow a broad consistency between the conditions of material reproduction (including income distributions, accumulation, available techniques) and the thread of social relations

The “Schumpeterian” and the “Keynesian” Stiglitz: Learning, Coordination Hurdles and Growth Trajectories

This work, which shall contribute to the Fest “A Just Society: Honouring Joseph Stiglitz”, discusses a major unifying theme in Joe Stiglitz monumental work, namely, the analysis of economies characterised by persistent learning and coordination hurdles. In his analysis Joe is in many respects a “closet evolutionist”who in fact highlighted and explored many evolutionary properties of contemporary economies in a Schumpeterian spirit. And he went further introducing genuinely Keynesian properties e.g. coordination failures and the possibility of path-dependent multiplicity of growth trajectories which are far and beyond Schumpeterian concerns. In this short essay, we shall illustrate this point with reference to some of Stiglitz works, out of many, linking them with significantly overlapping contributions from the evolutionary camp. We group them by two major themes, namely, the consequences of learning and dynamic increasing returns, and “Keynesian” coordination failures with the ensuing possibility of multiple growth paths, fluctuations, small and big crise

Looking for the roots of economic fluctuations: a formal exploration of 'Classic' and 'Keynesian' endogenous business cycles.

Can we still consider real crises and downturns as the effect of exogenous shocks? We are strongly persuaded that, in order to have a better understanding of the behaviour of the economy as a whole, the idea of capitalism as a self-sustained balanced system should be abandoned. This work addresses two main tasks. First, it attempts to retrace the seminal contributions on endogenous business cycle theory, devoting particular attention to Keynesian and Classical/Marxian models. Second, we develop a model able to encompass, at the same time, Keynesian and Marxian drivers of fluctuations. What we obtain is an important interpretive puzzle

The wage-productivity nexus in the world factory economy

This paper highlights new findings on the wage-productivity nexus in the World Factory Economy. After presenting the long-run macro-elasticity characterizing the phase of Chinese economic development since the eighties, we look at the wage-productivity nexus from a micro level perspective using a detailed firm-level dataset covering the period of ownership restructuring (1998-2007). A few results are quite robust under different estimation strategies. First, throughout the impressive Chinese economic miracle, elasticities of real wages to productivities – that is the ratios of rates of variations of the former to the latter – are always positive both under pooled and longitudinal estimates, both at firm- and sectoral-levels. Second, such elasticities are dramatically low, and falling in many distinct phases since the late seventies. That is, even in the manufacturing sector, the distribution of gains from the impressive labour productivity growth appears to be markedly uneven. Finally, third, governance institutions seem to matter a lot, with the majority of ownership types exhibiting firm-specific wage determination processes. The low elasticities of wages to productivity are plausibly the consequence of the massive flow of migrant workers from the rural areas to the coasts, somewhat resembling the early phase of the English Industrial Revolution with the pattern of enclosure in the country-side and massive migrations to the industrial towns

Hierarchies, Knowledge, and Power Inside Organizations

This paper contributes to an old and still unresolved question in the theory of organizations, namely, what do bosses do? Whether and to what extent managerial functions are productive or not for the well functioning of an organization has to be understood with respect to the tension between knowledge and power. Here, we start addressing such a tension with reference to the very nature of organizations. Next, we discuss its historical unfolding in two archetypical organizational modes of production, Taylorism and Toyotism. Third, these two archetypical configurations are studied by means of a model of organizations populated by three sets of agents, workers, managers, and the principal, endowed by different attributes and functions. The fitness of alternative organizational setups is studied under diverse degrees of complexity of the landscape

The Effects of Labour Market Reforms upon Unemployment and Income Inequalities: an Agent Based Model

This work analyses the effects of labour market structural reforms by means of the labour-augmented ‘Schumpeter meeting Keynes’ (K+S) Agent-Based model. We introduce a policy regime change characterized by a set of structural reforms on the labour market. Confirming a recent IMF report, the model shows how structural reforms reducing workers’ bargaining power and compressing wages tend to increase (a) unemployment, (b) functional income inequality and (c) personal income inequality. We further undertake a global sensitivity analysis on key variables and parameters which corroborates the robustness of our findings

From particles to firms: On the kinetic theory of climbing up evolutionary landscapes

This paper constitutes the first attempt to bridge the evolutionary theory in economics and the theory of active particles in mathematics. It seeks to present a kinetic model for an evolutionary formalization of economic dynamics. The new derived mathematical representation intends to formalize the processes of learning and selection as the two fundamental drivers of evolutionary environments [G. Dosi, M.-C. Pereira and M.-E. Virgillito, The footprint of evolutionary processes of learning and selection upon the statistical properties of industrial dynamics, Ind. Corp. Change, 26 (2017) 187-210]. To coherently represent the aforementioned properties, the kinetic theory of active particles [N. Bellomo, A. Bellouquid, L. Gibelli and N. Outada, A Quest Towards a Mathematical Theory of Living Systems (Birkhäuser-Springer, 2017)] is here further developed, including the complex interaction of two hierarchical functional subsystems. Modeling and simulations enlighten the predictive ability of the approach. Finally, we outline the potential avenues for future research.Fil: Bellomo, Nicola. Universidad de Granada; España. Politecnico di Torino; ItaliaFil: Dosi, Giovanni. Sant'anna Scuola Universitaria Superiore Pisa; ItaliaFil: Knopoff, Damián Alejandro. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Córdoba. Centro de Investigación y Estudios de Matemática. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Centro de Investigación y Estudios de Matemática; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Matemática, Astronomía y Física; ArgentinaFil: Virgillito, Maria Enrica. Sant'anna Scuola Universitaria Superiore Pisa; Itali

A multiscale network-based model of contagion dynamics: Heterogeneity, spatial distancing and vaccination

Lockdown and vaccination policies have been the major concern in the last year in order to contain the SARS-CoV-2 infection during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we present a model able to evaluate alternative lockdown policies and vaccination strategies. Our approach integrates and refines the multiscale model proposed by Bellomo et al., 2020, analyzing alternative network structures and bridging two perspectives to study complexity of living systems. Inside different matrices of contacts we explore the impact of closures of distinct nodes upon the overall contagion dynamics. Social distancing is shown to be more effective when targeting the reduction of contacts among and inside the most vulnerable nodes, namely hospitals/nursing homes. Moreover, our results suggest that school closures alone would not significantly affect the infection dynamics and the number of deaths in the population. Finally, we investigate a scenario with immunization in order to understand the effectiveness of targeted vaccination policies towards the most vulnerable individuals. Our model agrees with the current proposed vaccination strategy prioritizing the most vulnerable segment of the population to reduce severe cases and deaths.Fil: Aguiar, Maíra. Università Di Trento; Italia. Basque Center For Applied Mathematics (bcam); España. Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation For Science; EspañaFil: Dosi, Giovanni. Sant'anna Scuola Universitaria Superiore Pisa; ItaliaFil: Knopoff, Damián Alejandro. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba; Argentina. Basque Center For Applied Mathematics; España. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Córdoba. Centro de Investigación y Estudios de Matemática. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Centro de Investigación y Estudios de Matemática; ArgentinaFil: Virgillito, Maria Enrica. Sant'anna Scuola Universitaria Superiore Pisa; Itali