Data, knowledge, innovation

Humans have always lived in ages of anxiety with the times busily trying the souls of men and women alike. Ironically, levels of anxiety and soul wrenching are positively correlated with resources and the income (GDP) we are producing. Because resources have never been so plentiful, levels of fretting are also reaching new highs. But do these emergent concerns correlate with some measure of how critical our real global problems now are? Growing GDP and income stem from the growth in quantity and productivity of our resources: populations and skill levels have grown; high investment furnishes greater volumes of capital; working populations are becoming more productive, and therefore GDP continues to grow. Productivity growth, most easily defined as increases in the ratio of outputs to inputs, depends mainly on innovation, which brings us to the main theme of this paper. Innovation is vital in making labor and capital more productive and raising living standards. Equally important, innovation is vital to the research and development efforts needed to solve our most pressing global and local problems. The objective of the paper, then, is to summarize basic ideas as to the economics of innovation in the context of global change.