Stories about economics and technology

This essay offers an unsystematic sketch of seval ways in which economists have approached the need to represent and model changes in technology. It begins with the failures of Ricardo and Mill to respond adequately to the continueing increase of productivity after the Industrial Revolution, and ascribes it to the lack of appropriate analytical technique. It goes on to the question of classification of inventions posed by Hicks, with responses from other authors. It concludes with comments on the current intereste in endogenizing technical profress as a routine profit-seeking activity, with the thought that an uneasy compormise between exogeneous and endogeneous may be the best that can be done.