本田財団レポート No.118
第 27 回本田賞授与式 記念講演（２００6 年 11 月 17 日）「人間のノウハウの不均等進化」

コロンビア大学名誉教授

リチャード・R・ネルソン博士

On the Uneven Evolution of Human Know-how
Commemorative Lecture
at the Twenty-seventh Honda PrizeAwarding Ceremonyon the 17th November 2006 in Tokyo

Dr. Richard R. Nelson
George Blumenthal Professor of International and Public Affairs,
Business, and Law, Emeritus, Columbia Universityリチャード・R・ネルソン博士
コロンビア大学名誉教授

George Blumenthal Professor of International andPublic Affairs, Business, and Law, Emeritus,
Columbia University

Dr. Richard R. Nelson■Personal History■略歴1952 年

オベリン大学（米オハイオ州）卒業

1952

B.A., Oberlin College

1956 年

イエール大学大学院卒業（博士号取得）

1956

Ph.D., Yale University

1957 年

オベリン大学助教授

1957

Assistant Professor, Oberlin College

1957～1960 年 および 1964～1968 年
ランド研究所エコノミスト

1957-1960, 1964-1968
Economist, the RAND Corporation
1960-1961

Associate Professor, Carnegie Institute ofTechnology

1961-1963

Staff Senior Member, Council of Economic
Advisors

1960～1961 年

カーネギー工科大学助教授

1961～1963 年

経済諮問委員会上級諮問委員

1968～1986 年

イエール大学経済学部教授

1968-1986

Professor of Economics, Yale University

1980～1986 年

イエール大学社会政策研究所所長

1980-1986

Director, Institute for Social and Policy
Studies, Yale University

1986～2005 年

コロンビア大学教授

1986-2005

Professor, Columbia University,

2005 年～現在

コロンビア大学名誉教授

2005-Present

Professor Emeritus■主な受賞暦■Ｍajor Awards Received

Tinbergen lecturer
Leontief Award / Tufts University Veblen-Commons Award
Sreveral honorary degrees

Tinbergen lecturer
Leontief Award / Tufts University Veblen-Commons award
Sreveral honorary degrees

ネルソン博士は、長年にわたる研究を通じて、技術が社会でThroughout his long research life, Dr. Nelson has
deepened consideration in technology’s roles in society.
Especially remarkable is his pioneering analysis on theimpact of innovations in science and technology, as well as
those in social institutions, on the growth and decline of agiven society’s industry and economy.

果たす役割について考察を深め、科学技術の進歩や社会制度におけるイノベーションが、産業や経済の成長・衰退に与える研究に着目し、他に先駆けて学術的分析を行った。
ネルソン博士の代表的業績である「経済変動の進化理論」(An Evolutionnary Theory of Economic Change, Nelson &Winter,1982)の発表以来、世界中で様々な研究がなされ、先進国のみならず途上国の健全な発展や社会の変革に大きな影響を与えた。

Publication of Dr. Nelson’s hallmark work “An
Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change” (Nelson &Winter, 1982) led to numerous studies around the world
with significant contributions to sounder development andsocial change in both developing and industrialized
nations.

このレポートは、平成 18 年（2006 年）11 月 17 日 帝国ホテルにおいて行われた第 27 回本田賞授与式記念講演の要旨をまとめたものです。

17 November 2006 Imperial Hotel, Tokyo

On the Uneven Evolution of Human Know-how
Richard R. Nelson
Columbia University
I. Introduction
The last two centuries have seen enormous improvements in the standard of living of muchof the world’s population. Scholars from many different disciplines, not just economists, are inaccord that the central driving force behind this progress has been the advance of technology,
or more broadly the know-how that human society is able to marshal as it goes about various
activities involved in the production of goods and services.. The advances in know-how thathave been achieved are partly measured in the statistics on national product and income percapita. However, these numbers only partially reflect the capabilities we now have to do things
that were impossible in an earlier era, like our massive modern capabilities in information andcommunications technologies, or to prevent or cure many infectious diseases.

The Uneven Evolution of Human
Know-how• Information processing, transportation,
control of many diseases• Education, many cancers, managing
health care systems• What lies behind uneven progress in
know-how?

Fig 1〈Fig 1〉Less attention has been given to the fact that the advances in know-how that havebeen achieved have been far more impressive in certain areas of human activity than in others.
Thus, in comparison with the vast advances in know-how that have been achieved in various
areas of medicine, there has been very little progress made in the productivity and effectivenessof educational practice. Within medicine, while a number of diseases that used to be terrors
now can be prevented or treated effectively, little progress has been made on curing, much lesspreventing, various kinds of cancers. We now have the know-how to palliate AIDS, but not
cure it, and the cost of treatment is extremely high.
If attention is shifted from operating technologies and practice to modes of coordinating andmanaging work in the organizations that operate those technologies, one sees a comparable−15−

unevenness of progress. Within business organizations there have been great advances inability to manage inventories, but it is not clear that strategic decision making regarding what
new markets to enter is any better now than it was fifty years ago. And while we now havemedicines and practices for dealing effectively with a variety of diseases, the management of
hospitals, and the governing of the healthcare system more broadly, remain serious problems invirtually all societies.
Clearly I am defining know-how here relatively broadly, including not only know-how
bearing on “technology”as that term conventionally is conceived, but also know-how bearing
on operating practice more generally, as the know-how involved in teaching children how toread. I also am including as know-how the learned skills involved in managing a complex ofmany people and activities that need to be coordinated if the desired results are to be achieved.
These latter kinds of “know-how”seem to be significantly harder to advance than know-howthat is associated with technologies in the more narrow sense of that term. But if that is so, thatis an important insight, and a phenomenon that needs to be explained.

Why Has Progress Been so
Uneven?
• Uneven allocation of resources.
Differences in the strength of effective
demands• Progress more difficult in some areas thanin others• Uneven progress in scientific knowledge?
But if so, why?

Fig 2

〈Fig 2〉For some years now I have been trying to develop a better understanding of whatlies behind the very uneven evolution of human know-how, in the sense above, and of what, if
anything, can be done to speed up the advance of know-how in areas where to-date progresshas been very limited.
One obvious potential explanation is that significant resources have been put into efforts toadvance know-how of certain kinds, while only limited resources have been put into trying toadvance other kinds of know-how. This certainly is part of the reason why, for example, there
has been much more progress in preventing or dealing with diseases that afflict residents of richcountries, than diseases which are mainly prominent in countries where the people and thegovernment are very poor.
However, aside from cases like this, I would argue that differences in “effective demand”−16−account for only a small portion of the uneven evolution of human know-how that we haveexperienced. Thus, progress in dealing with breast cancers, while nontrivial, is nowhere nearas great as progress in dealing with small pox, despite the very large amounts of money, bothprivate (drug companies) and public (government agencies), that has been put into finding acure for breast cancer. While it is true that far fewer resources have been put into trying toadvance educational practice than trying to improve medical practice, an important reason forthis is that little has been achieved from the efforts to advance educational practice that havebeen mounted, and there is widespread skepticism that simply putting more money into theeffort would accomplish much.
I think it evident that a principal reason that certain areas and kinds of know-how, whose
advance is widely agreed would yield large payoffs, have progressed hardly at all is that
progress in these areas has proved very difficult to achieve.
Particularly among scientists it has been proposed that the reason why certain fields ofpractice, certain bodies of know-how, are able to advance rapidly, while others are very
difficult to advance, lies in differences in the strength in the underlying sciences. I believe
there is merit to this argument. However, I will argue that the relationships between the ability
to advance practical know-how, and the strength of the scientific knowledge underlying thatknow-how, are complex, not simple. Among other things, it very often is the case that thescientific knowledge that is key to enabling a technology to advance was developed withexactly that objective in mind, rather than through research aiming for knowledge for its own
sake, as often is assumed to be the norm. In any case, a theory that tries to explain the unevenevolution of know-how on the uneven strength of scientific understanding would seem to haveto come to grips with the question of why certain bodies of scientific knowledge seem to haveadvanced much more rapidly than others.
These issues will be the focus of this talk.
II. Technological Advance as an Evolutionary Process: What Makes Progress Easy or
DifficultOver the past half-century a large interdisciplinary body of scholarship has developed
concerned with understanding the processes through which technologies, of the sort generally
given that name, evolve over time. In contrast, there has been much less research and writingon the evolution of teaching practices, or modes of business organization and management. In
the first part of this discussion, where I will be reviewing what is known about how“technologies”advance, the referent will be mostly technologies of the sort conventionally sodesignated. Later, where I explore what makes progress hard or easy, I open up the term toinclude “know-how”more widely construed.
First of all, scholars of technological advance from a wide variety of disciplines have−17−

converged on the proposition that technological advance needs to be understood as proceeding
through an evolutionary process. The process is evolutionary in the sense that at any time there
is generally a wide variety of efforts going on to advance the technology, which to some extent
are in competition with each other, as well as with prevailing practice. The winners and losers
in this competition are determined largely through an ex-post selection process.

Technological Advance is an
Evolutionary Process• Variation in practice, and ex-post selection• But not fully like biological evolution–Major role of human purpose–Innovation not fully blind, but guided byunderstanding
The important role of the application oriented
sciences, and engineering disciplines
Fig 3〈Fig 3〉However, the proposition that technology advance is evolutionary in this sense in
no way denies, or plays down, the role of human purpose in the process, or the often extremely
powerful body of understanding and technique used to guide the efforts of those who seek toadvance technology. Efforts at invention or innovation are by no means totally blind, or strictly
random, as often is assumed to be the case regarding biological “mutation.” A strong base ofunderlying knowledge helps those that attempt to improve technology to focus their efforts on
pathways that have considerable promise, and to avoid those that are likely dead ends. A
strong knowledge base also often permits a variety of tests to be made in the course of an
inventive effort that can confirm earlier expectations or indicate changes that need to be made.
However, hard proof of what works and what does not, and what works better than what, mustbe learned through actual experience and actual competition.
As the above discussion suggests, technology needs to be understood as comprising both abody of practice, and a body of understanding. Professionals in the field possess not only aconsiderable amount of “know-how”regarding effective practice, but also a body of more
analytic knowledge that explains or rationalizes why practices work as they do, illuminates
current limitations of the technology, and suggests promising ways through which
improvements may be achieved. And in the process of technological advance, practice andunderstanding co-evolve. The development of a particular new product or process generally
brings with it a wider body of new understanding that includes, but transcends, the particularsof the new artifact or practice. New understandings learned through this route in turn provide−18−

clues and opportunities to the further advance of technique.
But, of course, there is much more to the story about how understanding advances thansimply learning by doing and using. In the contemporary world, most important technologies
are associated with specific institutionalized fields of engineering or applications oriented
science. The codified part of the relevant body of understanding is largely contained in thesefields, and serves as the basis for the training of new technologists and applied scientists. And
these also are fields of research. I will say more about these fields of science shortly.
From this perspective -- that the advance of know-how is an evolutionary process, but withefforts to improve practice guided by the prevailing body of understanding -- what are thecharacteristics of a field that can enable progress to be rapid and cumulatively great, or on theother hand, limit the possibilities for sustained progress? I propose the following

What Enables Rapid Sustained
Progress in a Field?
• Practice must be controllable, replicable• Ability to learn from variation• Ability to focus and learn from deliberate
experimentation. Ability to experiment offline (through R and D)• Criteria for good performance clear andstableFig 4• 〈Fig 4〉First, those that employ a practice must be able to identify and control
relatively tightly what they are doing, and to return it to a standard if it inadvertently
wanders away. They must be able to replicate it, when they attempt the task the next time,
if they so desire. The evolutionary perspective points to ability to learn from variation,from experiments natural or deliberate, as the key to being able to make progress. But one
can not learn from experiments if one does not have ability to identify, control, andreplicate. These characteristics also are necessary for a successful practice used by one
actor is to be imitable by others. In the language developed some time ago by Sidney
Winter and myself, for progress to be made the practices involved must have a certain
amount of the “routine”about them.
• Second, the criteria for better performance must be clear and relatively stable, andcompeting practices must differ non-trivially in efficacy under those criteria. Further, theevidence of efficacy must be relatively sharp, and available in a timely fashion.
• Third, while under favorable conditions a lot can be learned from unplanned natural−19−

experiments and the variety of practice at any time, it clearly is of great potential
advantage to advancing a practice be able to engage in deliberate experimentation. But
for deliberate experimentation to be effective, it must be possible to focus
experimentation on pathways likely to be promising, and gain reliable information
relatively quickly as to whether an approach being explored is promising or not.
All of these abilities obviously depend to a considerable degree on the strength of theunderstanding underlying the technology in question. Thus a strong body of understanding canenable identification of the key elements of a practice that determine performance, and hence
facilitate effective control and replication, as well as help focus experimentation. Similarly,
strong understanding enhances ability to identify key indicators of strong or weak performance,and hence to facilitate evaluation of prevailing practice, and guide attempts at improvements.
I note that, if the underlying understanding is strong enough, it may be possible to learn
from analysis and experiments done off-line, in R and D as it were. There are major advantages
in being able to do this. The ability to learn from R and D obviously presupposes the three
conditions I laid out above. But it requires more. For off-line R and D to be effective,
understanding must be strong enough so that what one learns from theoretical calculations andthrough experimenting with simplified models can be applied to actual practice.
`The discussion above supports, and fleshes out, the common proposition that progress inoperating know-how in a field is greatly facilitated if there is a strong body of underlying
scientific understanding. It seems to be widely believed that the scientific understanding thatenables new technology to be developed generally is won through efforts where the motivation
was to advanced basic understanding, and the opening of the possibility of new technologies
hardly thought about at all. That certainly fits the case of Maxwell’s work which opened thedoor to radio and kindred technologies. However, I want to ague that this is only a small part ofthe story.

The Role of the Applications
Oriented Sciences• Sciences oriented to enabling practicalprogress in a field• Involves study of practice and factors that
influence effectiveness• Can enable conditions needed for practicalprogress to be achieved, but can bestymied if these cannot be made to exist

Fig 5

−20−

〈Fig 5〉Rather, as I suggested above, the body of scientific understanding underlying atechnology tends to be contained in the applications oriented sciences, including theengineering fields, and it is a mistake to see these kinds of sciences as simply applications of
the fundamental knowledge garnered by more “basic”fields of study. These fields of science
are explicitly oriented to understanding of the technology, and the subject matters that thetechnologies are intended to deal with. A large part of the research that goes on in these kindsof fields involves analysis of and experimentation with aspects of practice, or the subject
matter that practice addresses. If that research is successful, these fields provide powerfulparadigms (to use Thomas Kuhn’s term) for advancing practice. The paradigms they provide
may, or may not, have a solid basis in more fundamental science, although for reasons I will
discuss later the most powerful of such fields do have such a basis. But they are bodies oftechnique and knowledge in their own right.
On the other hand, while it is broadly understood that a strong body of scientificunderstanding enables technological progress to be rapid and sustained, conventional wisdom
tends to be blind to the fact that the causation here runs from the nature of the technology to theability to develop a strong underlying science, as well as from a strong science to ability toadvance the technology. I have highlighted that much of the research in the engineering
disciplines and applications oriented sciences aims to develop understanding of what is goingon in the operation of the relevant field of practice, so as to illuminate how to advance it.
However, if one can not closely identify, control, manipulate, reproduce, and evaluate what one
is experimenting with, one can not learn much from this kind of research.
Put more generally, while the rapid sustained advance of a field of practice is greatly
facilitated by the existence of a strong relevant body of scientific understanding, the principlethat practice and understanding co-evolve holds for the scientific part of that understanding, as
well as the part gained through learning by doing and using. When the advance of practice in afield is difficult for the reasons I laid out above –lack of ability to control and replicate, limited
ability to evaluate performance of different methods - it may be difficult to advance the sciencethat underlies that field, and for the same reasons.
I now turn from the general to the particular. I now will discuss how these matters play out
in several different areas of practice.

−21−

III. Medical Practice

The Advance of Practice in
Medicine• Scientific research generally oriented
closely to advancing practice. Successresults in a paradigm for developing
effective practice• Effective practice oriented around artifacts
and routines• Deeper understanding often follows rather
than leads development of effective
practice
Fig 6〈Fig 6〉The conquest of many infectious diseases, at least in countries where the people
and the government are rich enough to afford the treatments, surely ranks among the advancesin know-how achieved over the last century and a half that have brought greatest benefit tohumankind. I now want to argue that the kind of understandings developed by the evolving biomedical sciences, that underlay and enabled these developments, was and continues to belargely oriented towards illuminating paths to better treatments of disease. Where successful,
one tends to find both the practice, and efforts to improve practice, proceeding under relatively
tight paradigms. The more basic understanding under the applications oriented paradigms may
be strong, but often are relatively shallow.
The latter certainly was the case when Pasteur first provided convincing evidence for thetheory (which some had held for a long time) that at least certain diseases were caused by
microorganisms. This enabled researchers concerned with particular diseases to try to identify aparticular microorganism as a cause. And the treatment Pasteur developed for a couple of thediseases he was studying -- a vaccine employing dead or weakened microorganisms implicatedin the disease --provided a general model that was followed by others in the search fortreatments of other diseases.
However, Pasteur and other researchers who followed his lead did not provide any light onjust how microorganisms caused disease. That knowledge came later. Understanding of why
and how vaccines worked (on certain diseases) had to await the development many years laterof understanding of the immune system. Nor was it clear for many years just what humandiseases were the result of infections and which ones, like vitamin deficiency diseases, andmost cancers, were not.
The point I want to make here is that the kind of understanding made by Pasteur and the−22−other great scientists who contributed to the field in the late 19th century was very much“practice”and “problem”oriented. While the understanding it gave was not very deep, that
understanding provided light for the search for causes and treatments. It pointed efforts to deal
with a disease towards trying to find a microbe that was the culprit. If a particular microbe
could be firmly associated with a particular disease, experience suggested a way to develop a
vaccine.
If an effective vaccine or serum was developed, the techniques of vaccine production andapplication tended to be reliable enough, at least after a period of learning by doing and using,so that vaccines and a vaccinations became part of a well specified routine to deal with thatdisease. This paradigm for research to deal with disease proved successful across a broad front,even though the deeper scientific reasons as to why it was successful were only gradually
discovered.
While a microorganism theory of diseased clearly pointed in this direction, the identificationand development of chemical compounds, natural or man made, that killed microorganisms inthe body came later. As with treatment by vaccines and serums, use of antibiotics (to use themodern term) was and is effective on certain diseases because the substances and procedures
are highly routinized, and they work with almost all patients that have the disease in question.
However, until recently at least the search for effective antibiotics has tended to proceedwithout deep understanding of why a particular substance might be effective. And, even today,
the reasons why many antibiotics work as they do is not well understood.
More generally, my reading of the history of the evolution of effective know-how for
disease prevention and treatment tells me that in the successful cases the effective procedure
involved a well specified routine, generally built around a chemical substance or other artifactof some kind. The research which led to the successful development involved study of thenature of the disease which identified at least broadly the kind of artifact that might be effective,
a search for or attempt to design such an artifact, and the testing it out first in “models”of thehuman system (both in vitro and animal models) and later on humans. In many of thesuccessful cases I know about, there was a broad paradigm available which had proved helpful
in the search for cures in related illnesses. In turn that broad paradigm was supported, but inmost cases only loosely, by deeper scientific understanding.
As I have pointed out, such a paradigm has existed for a long time for infectious diseases,
and it has been improved significantly over time. While there are cases where it has not led to a
success, or success has been limited, AIDS being a good example, by and large biomedical
scientists now know how to go about finding preventions or cures for infectious diseases. It isinteresting that discovery that peptic ulcers largely were the result of microbes at work rather
quickly led to much more effective treatments of that ailment.
In contrast, no broadly effective paradigm has been developed that can deal with cancers.

−23−

Over the years, a number of broad theories about the nature of cancers have been fashionable,
but to date none has served as the basis for a powerful paradigm guiding the search forpreventions or cures. It remains to be seen whether the paradigm motivated by new
understandings of genetic changes that cause cells to become cancerous will prove powerful
and broadly effective. On the other hand, it is very interesting that, similarly to the case of
peptic ulcers, discovery that cervical cancers often were the result of microbes has quickly led
to the development of a vaccine.
In stressing the importance of practice oriented paradigms as guiding successful efforts todeal with diseases, I am not trying to deny the important role that basic scientific understandingof the human body and of disease processes often have played in sharpen these paradigms, or
leading to new and better ones. Thus understanding of body chemistry and the working of cells
in regulating those processes has been important in the discovery and design of drugs that havebeen effective in cardiovascular disease. Understanding of the genetic changes in cells thatmake the cancerous has led to a new orientation of searching for effective ways to stop cancers.
But I note that the scientific knowledge here has, for the most part, been won throughresearch that was strongly motivated by the objectives of finding a cure for a disease, rather
than by simple scientific curiosity. It is relevant that very often the more basic scientificresearch that helps guide efforts to find better treatments comes after, and is oriented by, thediscovery that something works but for reasons not well understood. As a result of this research,and the better understanding that may come with it, the original treatment may be greatly
improved, and other uses identified.
I note that the picture here is far from the one that many enthusiasts of basic scientificresearch have put forth, where research leads and the development of better practice follows.
The process in most of the successful cases that I know about has involved a back and forth
between practice, awareness of its problems and weaknesses, research to try to identify
potential improvements, experimental practice that tests these out and identifies strengths andweaknesses, more research, etc. There is considerable learning by doing, as well as learning
through research, and the interactions are strong.
I also note that there are a number of cases where a disease is relatively well understoodscientifically, no effective prevention or cure has yet been developed. Thus biomedical
scientists now understand what goes wrong in body chemistry under cystic fibrosis, and thegenetic sources of the problem. That understanding may ultimately lead to an effective
paradigm for finding or developing better treatments. But to date progress has been halting at
best.
But to return to my opening observation regarding progress in medical practice, that
progress has been remarkable in many areas. I want to turn now to an area of human activity
where there has been very little progress.

−24−IV. Education

Education• Effective teaching practice quite sensitive
to backgrounds and interests of students,
skills of teacher, particular circumstances• Absence of powerful artifacts, general
purpose routines• Scientific knowledge does not provide
much practical illumination• Very little has been learned in R and D• Situation similar regarding organizationand management
Fig 7〈Fig 7〉Today, virtually all modern societies are frustrated with the performance of theirsystems of primary and secondary education. Costs per student have been rising briskly, a
symptom of the fact that productivity in education has been almost static, in contrast with therapid rates of productivity growth in many other sectors of the economy. And there is growing
dissatisfaction with the effectiveness of the system in providing children with a strong
education, with particular concerns that a large fraction of children in disadvantaged economic
conditions are not taking to what is taught.
In the United States over the past thirty years there have been a number of attempts to raise
educational productivity and effectiveness through expanding and reforming educational
research and development. The example of the success of research in various areas of medicine
has been used as an example which gives hope for similar success in education. But very littleof value has come out of the efforts. It seems apparent that the conditions that make research
powerful in some other areas are not strong in education.. There do not seem to be any ways oflearning what will work in practice through theoretical analysis, or experiment short of a fullscale trial that is effect a controlled on-line operation. And what works in a controlled fullscale trial setting is often very hard to transfer to another setting without experiencing
significant modification.
The situation in education thus contrasts sharply with that in medicine, where in many cases
a lot can be learned from in vitro research and research on animal models, and where, after aperiod of testing and adjustment, a new pharmaceutical or practice usually can be transferredreliably from operation in a controlled setting, to more general use.
The principal reason, I would argue, is that the first two basic conditions for a field ofpractice to progress that I laid out earlier are not there in education. There is only limited ability−25−

to control tightly, specify accurately, and replicate educational practices, that seems to beeffective. Related to that, it has proved nearly impossible to identify the key elements that lie
behind effective practice when that occurs, other than very broadly. As a result, experience withtrying to transfer to another setting a practice that seems to be working well has not been
particularly good.
Also, there are significant problems in assessing the performance of an educational practice,even when a practice can be tightly identified. Test scores measure only a part of what
education is trying to achieve. And the long run effects of education on ability to get a good job,be productive generally, be a good citizen, take many years to see, and even then are almost
impossible to disentangle from other factors influencing a persons life and success.
These same problems obviously limit ability to design experiments that have a good chanceof being productive, as well as limiting the ability to spread widely practices that look good inan experimental setting
These characteristics reflect, again as both effect and cause, that the scientific understanding
bearing on educational practice is not strong. The fields of research that one would hope would
illuminate the educational process and guide efforts at improvement in fact shed only a dim
light. On the one hand, as I have argued, research that is focused directly on educational
practice at best seems to yield course grained and unreliable conclusions. On the other hand,scientific research that limits itself to subject matter where relatively fine grained and reliable
results can be attained, as modern study of the physical workings of the brain, tends to generate
results that are a far distance from anything useful in the educational process. There is no field
like electrical engineering, or bacteriology or oncology, that relates to and guides analysis andexperiment bearing on educational practice.
I believe a major reason why this is so is that little success has been achieved to date increating or discovering in education tight routines, or aspects of them, that are powerfully
effective and have wide applicability. Physical equipment used in education, like textbooks,
film, recently computers and computer programs, build in elements of the routine. However, todate no artifact has been developed for educational purposes that has the power of an antibiotic
for dealing with an infection, or a computer used for data processing. Artifacts in education
play a role as tools an effective teacher can use as elements of the practices he or she employs,
but do not provide the core of those practices. Effective practice seems to be closely tuned tothe skills and personality of the individual teacher, and the backgrounds, knowledge andmotivations of the student body. This is a context in which good educational practice canemerge. But it is not one within which it is easy to make significant and continuing progress inteaching methods that are broadly applicable to the student population.

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V. Physical and Social Technologies, and the Problems of Organizing and Governing
Human Activity
One very important feature of the practice of education, at least in the standard school
setting, is that issues of organization and governance are central. There are many children in theclassroom. The teacher has to maintain order in the classroom, and establish and hold in placean environment where a student’s peers support learning rather than denigrating it. Teaching
would be a hard enough task absent these complications, and it would be difficult to find ordevelop a well defined set of routines that would work effectively for most teachers andindividual students, without a lot of individualized tuning, even if they were not there. But thefact that they are there certainly is an important reason why it has proved so hard to develop
simple effective routines of teaching children to read, analogous to what doctors do to deal witha child’s throat infection.
Bhaven Sampat and I have used the term “social technologies”to refer to ways of doing
things where interaction among people is a much larger part of what is going on than in
activities where people largely interact with artifacts of some kind to get things done; the latter
we called “physical technologies”. We have argued that it is much more difficult to achievesignificant cumulative progress of social technologies than physical technologies. Education
clearly involves social technologies to a significant extent. There is only limited employment ofphysical technologies. The governance of large organizations is largely through social
technologies. This, I would argue, is why our know how regarding governance and organization
has progressed so slowly.
There certainly are examples of aspects of organizational management where progress has
been dramatic. As I suggested earlier, inventory management is one such area. But the reason
for such progress here clearly is that physical equipment, computers and a linked electronic
network registering sales and generating new orders, that is a physical technology, has come toreplace what had been largely a social technology. An interesting question is why efficient low
cost computer related technology was able to be employed so effectively in inventory
management, when it has proved so difficult to develop effective teaching practices in which
computers play the central role. The answer, I would argue, is that the criteria for effective
inventory management involve only a few dimensions, and the particular routines used to
manage inventories can be kept in relative isolation from other activities that are involved inbusiness organization and practice.
The contrast with the apparent inability of business management to do significantly better
than they have in the past with decisions and processes of mergers and acquisitions is striking.
Here, the criteria for “success”are complex in the short run, and if long run profitability is theultimate criterion, this cannot be assessed except in the long run. And in any case, what amerger brings to a firm cannot be isolated from a wide variety of firm operations. Because of−27−

the complex and often highly unpredictable interactions that take place and influence how amerger works, and which cannot be tightly controlled, no generally effective tight routine formaking mergers work has emerged. Under these conditions, while there may be some learningof particular things to avoid, one would not expect much progress to occur over time inmanaging mergers.
The same sort of considerations obtain regarding activities at a hospital. Decision making
and administration of some activities can be routinized, because the objectives are relatively
simple and performance easy to evaluate, and because how the operations in question are
performed has little impact on and is not much affected by operations in other arenas. This is
not so of other kinds of activities. It is possible to advance the effectiveness of the former
through operations research and in some cases by mechanization, while the latter may be very
difficult to advance over time.
VI. The Science-Technology Connection

The Science-Technolgy
Connection• Strong and progressive technologies are supported
by strong applications oriented sciences• Strong applications oriented sciences aresupported by strong basic science• Key is development of effective routinized practice,generally based on artifacts, which is broadly
effective, and which in turn can be studied andunderstood scientifically• In some areas it has proved impossible (as yet?) toachieve this: Education, Management, Economics
Fig 8〈Fig 8〉I want to conclude this talk by pulling together some of the comments I havemade on the connections between technological advance and the strength of the underlying
sciences, and extend them a bit. I have stressed the key role of the applications oriented
sciences in the advance of practical know-how. I note here that in several recent survey studies,industry respondents almost always have said that the applications oriented sciences are theones from which they draw most in their efforts to develop new products and processes.
This finding should not be interpreted as indicating that the fundamental sciences, likemolecular biology, or theoretical physics, or mathematics, are irrelevant to technologicalprogress. The stronger of the applications oriented sciences and engineering disciplines draw
extensively and productively on sciences “upstream”from them, as it were. Since the fields of−28−

technology that are advancing rapidly almost always are supported by a strong underlying
applications oriented science, and the latter tend to be marked by good ability to draw from themore fundamental sciences, in effect one sees rapid advance of practical know-how where thepractice, the applications oriented science, and basic scientific understanding, are relatively
closely connected.
My reading of technological histories in such fields suggests that the key has been thedesigning of practice around what is known scientifically. This has been far easier in fields ofpractice where artifacts –chemical substances, mechanical or electrical devices -- can be madeto play key roles. Where this is the case, it has proved possible to develop strong fields ofapplications oriented sciences concerned with the nature of these artifacts and the context inwhich they operate, in good part because the artifacts are amenable to control, and replication,and therefore are good subjects for experimentation. In turn, these applications oriented
sciences can draw on the understandings of the natural, and particularly the physical sciences.
Note that the strength here is the result of a two-way connection. On the one hand, theprominent use of artifacts facilitates the development of a strong applications oriented science.
On the other hand, an applications oriented science focused on artifacts and their context of use
can draw on the strong natural sciences. I can identify a few bodies of strongly effective knowhow where artifacts do not play a central role, but not many.
However, in many fields of practice it has not been possible to find or develop artifacts thatare effective in enabling productive routines. As noted, many human diseases still lack aneffective prevention or cure. And in fields like education, or stopping crime, while it is possiblethat new artifacts will help performance to increase somewhat, it is extremely unlikely that they
will be effective, like an antibiotic is for an infection. Thus practice in these fields, and theapplications oriented sciences underlying practice, have little contact with the strong naturalsciences.
I suggested above that the areas of know-how where we have had the greatest difficulty
achieving significant progress have been those where practice mostly involves social
technologies, and there has been little success in discovering or inventing powerful physicaltechnologies to help with the work. These social technologies in turn are illuminated by the
behavioral and social sciences, most of which support both basic and applied research. But theillumination is dim. The knowledge that has been won by these fields is far less powerful than
the knowledge that had been won through the natural sciences. I would argue that the reason
lies in the nature of the ontologies. By now what I think are the key differences should be
obvious.
I find it interesting that in recent years a number of philosophers of science have given up on
the idea that the behavioral and social sciences ultimately can be as strong as physics, or thatthey productively can use the methods that have worked so well in physics. I think they are−29−

quite correct on this judgment. And I think this means that the bodies of practice that aresupported by the behavioral and social sciences will continue to be areas where the progress ofknow-how is slow.
I am an economist. These last remarks would seem naturally to lead me into somecomments on the nature of my “science”and its relationship to economic policy making. But I
have run out of time.

■This report can be viewed in the Honda Foundation’s website.

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