Technical Change: Subject definition List

<Still working on this one,
you may encounter barred links>

Technical change is one of the biggest problems for prediction in economics: the predictability of technical change and its effect on the economy is very limited. If we would know what we will know in the future, we would know it now! Only the routine type of technical improvement, that is, the improvement in the application of techniques we already essentially dispose of, can be foreseen, and even this only partly.

This problem is serious because there is general agreement that technical change is, and always has been vital to the explanation of economic changes in societies.

The question here is: how do economists deal with the problem of the absence in principle of reliable knowledge concerning the future of our technical abilities and their effects on societies?