ABSTRACT
Economists have long seen technological change as an autonomous process. The discovery of the ‘residual’, the unexplained part of growth, by Abramowitz in 1956 and Solow in 1957 – although Tinbergen in fact had made the same discovery 15 years earlier – gave rise to an impressive body of literature in which attempts were made to divide the residual into different parts. Much of this, however, left unanswered the why and how of technological change. It was assumed, but not explained. This lack of interest in the process of technological change was characteristic of mainstream economics, but did not apply to all its practitioners. Heterodox authors such as Schumpeter, Kuznets, Schmookler, Rosenberg and Heertje, have always worked from a different perspective.
