2020/34 | LEM Working Paper Series | |
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Back to the past: the historical roots of labour-saving automation |
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Jacopo Staccioli and Maria Enrica Virgillito |
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Keywords | ||
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Labour-Saving Technologies; Search Heuristics; Industrial Revolutions; Wavelet analysis.
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JEL Classifications | ||
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O3, C38, J24
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Abstract | ||
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This paper, relying on a still relatively unexplored long-term dataset
on U.S.~patenting activity, provides empirical evidence on the history
of labour-saving innovations back to early 19th century. The
identification of mechanisation/automation heuristics, retrieved via
textual content analysis on current robotic technologies by Montobbio et
al. (2020), allows to focus on a limited set of CPC codes where
mechanisation and automation technologies are more prevalent. We track
their time evolution, clustering, eventual emergence of wavy behaviour,
and their comovements with long-term GDP growth. Our results challenge
both the general-purpose technology approach and the strict 50-year
Kondratiev cycle, while provide evidence of the emergence of erratic
constellations of heterogeneous technological artefacts, in line with
the development-block approach enabled by autocatalytic systems.
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