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rosenb[s83,jmc]		Nathan Rosenberg's Inside the Black Box:

%3Rosenberg, Nathan (1982)%1: %2Inside the Black Box: Technology
and Economics%1, Cambridge University Press.

p. 42 "Science itself can never be extensively applied to the productive
process so long as that process continues to be dependent on forces the
behavior of which cannot be predicted and controlled with strictest
accuracy".  Certainly many inventions have the character of doing
automatically what was previously done under human control.  However,
other inventions have a different character.  The bulldozer and
other earth moving machinery keep the process under detailed human
control and merely amplify human muscle.  So do trucks and airplanes.
Computer aided design is difficult to classify in Rosenberg's
categories.  It increases the control of the outcome by one human -
the designer - and reduces that by those who do the manufacture.

However, its hard to see that the point is essential to the point of
Rosenberg's exhumation of Marx.

p. 42 In discussing the two sector model including the capital
goods industry, Rosenberg neglects to make the point that improvements
in the productive processes of the capital goods industry can
reduce the ratio of capital to labor by making capital goods
cheaper.  In fact, the ratio of capital to labor is lower in
the U.S. than it was in the past and lower than in less developed
countries.  It took in 1969? 1.6 dollars of capital goods to produce
one dollar of output per year.  In the Soviet Union the ratio was
2.6, and I was told that in Iran the ratio was 3.3.  One gets the
subjective impression that before modern industry this ratio was
very high.  The number of man years of labor in each person's
housing was also very high.

p. 45 "It was one of Marx's enduring accomplishments that he was
among the first to perceive the inevitability of the trend
toward bigness".  I don't see the inevitability.  Everything
depends on the actual technology available.  The electronics
industry has undergone waves of concentration and dispersal
according to whether mass production or innovation was more
important.  The American individual farmer is more efficient
than the collective farmer, and it is hard to see how the latter
can possibly catch up.  The construction industry also undergoes
waves of fragmentation and concentration.  Rentable robots and
expert systems will permit a single person to build a house.
Once this becomes possible, competition will force enormous
improvements in efficiency.
As I understand it, since World War II the trucking industry
has substantially fragmented.  The owner-operator of a rig
has been able to beat out the company employee and buy increasingly
expensive trucks with every possible luxury for the driver.

Anyway is this supposed to be an economic law or a law of technology?

p. 48 "But, more seriously the last sentence can be read as a
striking anticipation of some of the central ideas of Abbott
Payson Usher, probably the most careful twentieth-century student of the
history of technology".  Reading things as striking anticipations
is a pious vice.

Rosenberg has certainly mastered the modern Marxist style with
its reliance on quotes from the master and the absence of the
slightest criticism of the master.  Only the references to the
"bringing into life the decisions of nth Party Congress" are
missing.  I trust he won't continue in this vein in the articles
published in less sycophantic journals than %2Monthly Review%1.

p. 58 It is interesting to consider water as a commodity, since its
availability is still limited by transportation costs.  Note that
the cost of a barrel of oil and an acre foot of water (about
8,000 barrels) are the same in many markets.

p.60 Don't forget the transformer and AC; Edison did.