Event Date: Tuesday, April 16, 2019
Is Technological Progress a Thing of the Past?
Presented by Joel Mokyr
Department of Economics, Northwestern University
April 16, 2019, 3:00 pm,
McKellar Theatre, University Community Centre
There is a debate right now between techno-optimists and techno-pessimists, with the pessimists saying the best is over, that all the low hanging fruit have been picked, and we’ve made the inventions we can make. Techno-optimists say that the best is yet to come, and that society will create inventions that we can only dream of. Drawing on the past experience from tech progress in the last 300 years, Mokyr will shed some like on this debate.
Joel Mokyr conducts research on the economic history of Europe specializing in the period 1750-1914. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the Cliometric Society and a member of the of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He served as President of the Economic History Association from 2002-2003. In 2006, he was awarded the biennial Heineken Prize for History offered by the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences. In 2018, he was named as a Distinguished Fellow by the American Economic Association.