Another reason for rejecting TEP as a label is that Techno-Economic Paradigm was coined many decades ago by the wonderful Chris Freeman and Carlotta Perez. Of course, it refers to the characteristics of long waves of techno-economic emergence, stabilisation and decline that they identified.
"Keep it simple, STUPID!" I've spent 50 years in the "distribution sector." The ruination of that sector can best be told in the language of "gross profits," and easy access to "capital." How many gross profit dollars can you stuff into a truck, plane, ship, or railcar??? Amazon answered that question by filling up every cubic foot of space on a Fed Ex and UPS truck. Cheap capital was made available via the stock market and low interest rates. It was "Money for nothing and the chicks for free!" The next step for any good capitalist was to go after the gross profit dollars stuffed into the Fed Ex and UPS trucks. So, Amazon bought its own trucks. The game's name is to eliminate the competition to increase gross profit dollars and eventually gross profit percentage. All of this is made possible by access to cheap CAPITAL. That's why we call it CAPITALISM. Read about Plutus, Woodrow Wilson's CPI, and then the creation of Madison Ave. Our problem today has nothing to do with facts and numbers, the objective. Our problem today has everything to do with the subjective, me and you. It belongs to a "sector" named addiction/ habit. You economists call it CONSUMERISM. People with addiction destroy themselves before they change. We are just people. A guy out at Stanford wrote a revealing book, The Great Leveler. It will sober you up! It did me!
But why the need to replace the term ‘political economy’? It’s what I’ve spent a lifetime trying to teach, as opposed to Economics or Business Studies!
In the old Cambridge sense of the said tripos at the time of JMK and, more pertinently, his dad, it encompasses everything you are addressing here. After all, the given level of technology is explicitly taken into account in the basic supply side function;
Adam I like this interest in 'sectors' and how they relate more broadly to the history of capitalism and the interactions that involves. But I do wonder if it is problematic to think in terms of economic sectors (the basic building blocks of so much economic analysis) when the unit homogeneity of sectors is shrinking and the differences between sectors being eroded by changes in technology hard and soft and shifts in income elasticities of demand, etc. There is the idea of 'servicification' (Baldwin et al); but also what with colleagues I have called the 'industrialization of freshness', the idea that increasingly (it's an old story but an accelerating one) global production and trade in high-value perishable 'fresh' goods is industrial and is linked to many of the features development economists have often attributed (Kaldor, Amsden, etc.) with manufacturing (increasing returns, linkages, knowledge-intensity and so on). None of this would have surprised Allyn Young whose 1928 paper laid a basis for much of the work we all need to be doing now in escaping and working around the problematic distinctions between 'sectors'.
Another reason for rejecting TEP as a label is that Techno-Economic Paradigm was coined many decades ago by the wonderful Chris Freeman and Carlotta Perez. Of course, it refers to the characteristics of long waves of techno-economic emergence, stabilisation and decline that they identified.
"Keep it simple, STUPID!" I've spent 50 years in the "distribution sector." The ruination of that sector can best be told in the language of "gross profits," and easy access to "capital." How many gross profit dollars can you stuff into a truck, plane, ship, or railcar??? Amazon answered that question by filling up every cubic foot of space on a Fed Ex and UPS truck. Cheap capital was made available via the stock market and low interest rates. It was "Money for nothing and the chicks for free!" The next step for any good capitalist was to go after the gross profit dollars stuffed into the Fed Ex and UPS trucks. So, Amazon bought its own trucks. The game's name is to eliminate the competition to increase gross profit dollars and eventually gross profit percentage. All of this is made possible by access to cheap CAPITAL. That's why we call it CAPITALISM. Read about Plutus, Woodrow Wilson's CPI, and then the creation of Madison Ave. Our problem today has nothing to do with facts and numbers, the objective. Our problem today has everything to do with the subjective, me and you. It belongs to a "sector" named addiction/ habit. You economists call it CONSUMERISM. People with addiction destroy themselves before they change. We are just people. A guy out at Stanford wrote a revealing book, The Great Leveler. It will sober you up! It did me!
TEPID?
Techno-Political-Industrial. Not poking fun (except at the acronym), really enjoyed this article
But why the need to replace the term ‘political economy’? It’s what I’ve spent a lifetime trying to teach, as opposed to Economics or Business Studies!
In the old Cambridge sense of the said tripos at the time of JMK and, more pertinently, his dad, it encompasses everything you are addressing here. After all, the given level of technology is explicitly taken into account in the basic supply side function;
O = f [l, L, K + t, ent]
Adam I like this interest in 'sectors' and how they relate more broadly to the history of capitalism and the interactions that involves. But I do wonder if it is problematic to think in terms of economic sectors (the basic building blocks of so much economic analysis) when the unit homogeneity of sectors is shrinking and the differences between sectors being eroded by changes in technology hard and soft and shifts in income elasticities of demand, etc. There is the idea of 'servicification' (Baldwin et al); but also what with colleagues I have called the 'industrialization of freshness', the idea that increasingly (it's an old story but an accelerating one) global production and trade in high-value perishable 'fresh' goods is industrial and is linked to many of the features development economists have often attributed (Kaldor, Amsden, etc.) with manufacturing (increasing returns, linkages, knowledge-intensity and so on). None of this would have surprised Allyn Young whose 1928 paper laid a basis for much of the work we all need to be doing now in escaping and working around the problematic distinctions between 'sectors'.