Abstract

In his very interesting and provocative book, David Warsh (2006) offers that there has been a recent “revolution ” in economic science, “a new economics of knowledge.” While Warsh is sens itive to the history of economic thought and offers some critical insights into how it “progresses, ” a 1990 essay by Paul Romer is credited with precipitating this recent revolution. AS Warsh writes: it was until 1990, when “Romer published a mathematical model of economic growth in a mainstream journal that the economics of knowledge at least came into focus, after more than two centuries of informal and uneasy presence in the background ” (2006: xv). But Warsh is ambivalent on the question of a whether there really has been a revolution. On the one hand, he has a chapter entitled “The Invisible Revolution ” which seems to imply that few have noticed what should be a revolutionary shift in thinking. Moreover, as regards his “tale of how one paper in technical economics ” precipitated “a new economics of knowledge, ” he asks, “What has changed as a result ” and answers “not much—at least not yet ” (Warsh, 2006: 408). We need to consider this provocative ambivalence in what follows. Part of the answer resides in considering the considerable continuity in the history of economic