The Burden of Knowledge and the 'Death of the Renaissance Man': Is Innovation Getting Harder?

Benjamin Jones

No 11360, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper investigates, theoretically and empirically, a possibly fundamental aspect of technological progress. If knowledge accumulates as technology progresses, then successive generations of innovators may face an increasing educational burden. Innovators can compensate in their education by seeking narrower expertise, but narrowing expertise will reduce their individual capacities, with implications for the organization of innovative activity - a greater reliance on teamwork - and negative implications for growth. I develop a formal model of this "knowledge burden mechanism" and derive six testable predictions for innovators. Over time, educational attainment will rise while increased specialization and teamwork follow from a sufficiently rapid increase in the burden of knowledge. In cross-section, the model predicts that specialization and teamwork will be greater in deeper areas of knowledge while, surprisingly, educational attainment will not vary across fields. I test these six predictions using a micro-data set of individual inventors and find evidence consistent with each prediction. The model thus provides a parsimonious explanation for a range of empirical patterns of inventive activity. Upward trends in academic collaboration and lengthening doctorates, which have been noted in other research, can also be explained by the model, as can much-debated trends relating productivity growth and patent output to aggregate inventive effort. The knowledge burden mechanism suggests that the nature of innovation is changing, with negative implications for long-run economic growth.

JEL-codes: I2 J2 O3 O4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-ino and nep-tid
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Published as Jones, Benjamin. "The Burden of Knowledge and the 'Death of the Renaissance Man': Is Innovation Getting Harder?" Review of Economic Studies 76, 1 (January 2009): 283-317.
Published as Benjamin F. Jones, 2005. "The burden of knowledge and the ‘death of the Renaissance man’: Is innovation getting harder?," Proceedings, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

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Journal Article: The Burden of Knowledge and the "Death of the Renaissance Man": Is Innovation Getting Harder? (2009)
Journal Article: The burden of knowledge and the ‘death of the Renaissance man’: Is innovation getting harder? (2005)
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