A few weeks ago I wrote a short memorial piece in which I focus on his  
writings in the history of economics:
http://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/2015/08/rip-nathan-rosenberg-1927-1915.html
Perhaps it is of interest.
Sincerely,
Eric Schliesser
Citeren "Rosser, John Barkley - rosserjb" <[log in to unmask]>:

> I am glad to see that this memorial by Joel Mokyr also noted Nate  
> Rosenberg's work in history of economics, although this was clearly  
> secondary to his work in economic history.  But I shall add that he  
> did teach courses in history of economic thought at times, and I was  
> privileged to take that course from him in my first semester of grad  
> school in Fall, 1969, which also happened to be his first semester  
> at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  All that Mokyr says about  
> him persoanlly and professionally is true.  He was a great scholar  
> and gentleman.
>
> ________________________________
> From: Societies for the History of Economics [[log in to unmask]] on  
> behalf of Humberto Barreto [[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Monday, September 07, 2015 9:36 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: [SHOE] OBIT -- Nathan Rosenberg by Joel Mokyr
>
>
> Nathan Rosenberg, 1927-2015/Joel Mokyr
>
> The economic history profession has lost one of its most original,  
> creative, and wide-ranging minds in the passing of Nathan Rosenberg  
> on Aug. 24, 2015. Rosenberg was one of the founding fathers of  
> Cliometrics, a member of the first group of Cliometricians that with  
> coining the term ?congregated at Purdue University in the late  
> 1960s, and which included other luminaries among them Lance Davis,  
> Jonathan Hughes, and Stanley Reiter (who is widely credited  
> Cliometrics?). By 1970, this group had moved away from West  
> Lafayette and dispersed to institutions such as Northwestern and  
> CalTech. Rosenberg was hired by the University of Wisconsin, and was  
> a member of a different group of influential and distinguished  
> economic historians in Madison, including at one time or another  
> Jeffrey Williamson, Peter Lindert, Morton Rothstein, Rondo Cameron,  
> and Claudia Goldin. While at Wisconsin, Rosenberg was the editor of  
> the Journal of Economic History and instrumental in its growing  
> focus on the new economic history that was theoretically informed by  
> economics and quantitatively more sophisticated ? the very essence  
> of the Cliometric Revolution.
> In 1974, Rosenberg moved to Stanford, where he taught for more than  
> a quarter century until his retirement in 2002. As department chair  
> at Stanford between 1983and 1986 he helped build the department and  
> maintain its position as one of the top economics departments in the  
> country. Moreover, his leadership guaranteed that economic history  
> remained an integral part of the undergraduate and Ph.D. programs  
> and includes some of its most distinguished practitioners such as  
> Gavin Wright and Avner Greif, as well as younger and promising  
> scholars. Today, thanks to Rosenberg?s initiative and  
> entrepreneurship, the Stanford department is housed in a gorgeous  
> building named after Ralph Landau, whose support for research and  
> teaching in economics was first stimulated by a fortuitous meeting  
> with Rosenberg. The partnership with Landau, a chemical engineer and  
> entrepreneur fascinated by economics, led to a fruitful scholarly  
> collaboration between him and Rosenberg, especially in two  
> well-regarded collections they edited together. Thanks in large part  
> to Rosenberg?s resourcefulness, the graduate program at Stanford has  
> thrived and produced many distinguished members of the economic  
> history profession and applied economists working on innovation.  
> While not all of them worked with him directly, his influence on the  
> flourishing of economic history at Stanford was undeniable. Many of  
> the former graduate students he trained and inspired co-authored and  
> co-edited papers and books with him, such as David Mowery with whom  
> he wrote Technology and the Pursuit of Economic Growth (Cambridge  
> University Press, 1989). Without exception these young economists  
> admired and adored him; two of them, Scott Stern and Shane  
> Greenstein, were my former colleagues, and the three of us were  
> instrumental in Northwestern awarding him an honorary doctorate in  
> 2006, in the same class of honorary degrees as the then little-known  
> junior senator from Illinois. If ever there was an academic  
> conspiracy that can be called a true labor of love, this was it.
> As a scholar, much of Rosenberg?s most important and influential  
> work is captured by the title of his Inside the Black Box, a  
> collection of essays on the nature of technology (Cambridge  
> University Press, 1982). In it, he stated from the onset that  
> ?economists have long treated technological phenomena as events  
> transpiring inside a black box...the economics profession has  
> adhered rather strictly to a self-imposed ordinance not to inquire  
> too seriously into what transpires inside that box. The purpose of  
> this book is to break open and to examine the contents of the black  
> box? (p. vii). That metaphor captures the central theme of  
> Rosenberg?s career.
> What, then did Rosenberg find inside that black box? In his typical  
> self-deprecating way, he once remarked to me that once you open the  
> big black box of technology, you find inside a smaller black box,  
> and so on, much like Russian matryoshkadolls. Maybe, he reflected,  
> in the end this is what scientific progress really consists of? But  
> of course, opening the black box led Rosenberg to considerably more  
> important insights on the nature of technological change. I will  
> list only a few that I find the most insightful ? others can have  
> other preferences. One is his emphasis on the subtle and complex  
> interplay between science and technology stressed in his magnificent  
> essay ?How Exogenous is Science??. In it he points out the many  
> feedback effects that run from technology to science, and debunked  
> the ?linear model? that draws the main arrow of causality from  
> Science to Applied Science to Technology. Since Rosenberg?s work,  
> historians of technology have heaped scorn on the linear model.  
> Technology in his view is not the mechanical ?application of  
> science? to production; it is a field of knowledge by itself, quite  
> different in its incentives, its modes of transmission, and its  
> culture. It is affected by science, but in turn provides ?pure  
> research? with its instruments and much of its agenda. In many  
> cases, he noted, scientists were confronted by the fact that things  
> they had previously declared to be impossible were actually carried  
> out by engineers and mechanics and had to admit somewhat sheepishly  
> that were possible after all. More than a decade later, in his later  
> book Exploring the Black Box, he returned to the important but  
> often-neglected link between technology and scientific progress,  
> provided by scientific instrumentation.
> A second item Rosenberg found inside his black box early on was the  
> importance of the machine industry in the generation of  
> technological change and economic growth, a topic he explored early  
> in his career in his influential 1963 Journal of Economic History  
> paper, ?Technological Change in the Machine Tool Industry? reprinted  
> in his Perspectives on Technology (Cambridge University Press,  
> 1976). The paper stressed the crucial importance of machine tools in  
> creating the mechanization that was at the heart of the Industrial  
> Revolution in the United States and Britain, and showed that without  
> the improvements in lathes, planers, milling machines and precision  
> grinders, much of the growth of modern manufacturing could not have  
> happened. In his later book Technology and American Economic growth  
> (Harper & Row, 1972) he explained how the ever-growing  
> specialization, and not just the quality improvement and lower  
> prices of these precision metal-cutting and shaping devices,  
> stimulated and supported the rise of modern industry. In his  
> citation for the Leonardo Da Vinci medal that the Society for the  
> History of Technology awarded Rosenberg in 1995, David Hounshell  
> wrote that ?His 1963 article remains to this day perhaps the single  
> most influential essay ever written in our discipline. In it,  
> Rosenberg grasped the essential nature of the technical knowledge  
> embedded in the machine tool industry and recognized how that  
> knowledge would not fit easily into existing economic models.?
> A third item that many historians of technology, whether economists  
> or not, have found extremely insightful in Rosenberg?s black box is  
> his concept of ?focusing devices,? first enunciated in his 1969  
> Economic Development and Cultural Changepaper ?The Direction of  
> Technological Change,? (reprinted in Perspectives on Technology). It  
> is an intuitively powerful concept that essentially proposes that  
> much of technological progress occurs because a firm, a group, or  
> the government realizes that there is an urgent need for a clear  
> solution to a pressing and well-defined social issue or bottleneck  
> in production. The solution is not always forthcoming of course ?  
> Rosenberg cited with great glee Hotspur?s decisive riposte to  
> Glendower?s claim that he could call the spirits from the vastly  
> deep: ?why, so can I, so can any man; but will they come when you  
> call for them?? (see his Technology and American Growth, p.51). But  
> when the solution is arrived at, it often solves far more than it  
> was intended for and overshoots its target, and thus it creates a  
> new bottleneck. This leapfrogging or ?compulsive sequences?  
> phenomenon was used to describe the eighteenth century cotton  
> manufacturing, but in fact it applies to much of the rest of the  
> technological revolutions of the eighteenth century. At the start of  
> the century, British society knew well that it faced a number of  
> hard but well-defined problems: finding longitude at sea, pumping  
> water out of deep-shaft coal mines, ridding society of smallpox, and  
> turning pig iron into wrought iron cheaply and rapidly. By 1800  
> these problems had all been solved. Rosenberg?s essay deals with  
> firms and their recognition of an opportunity for profit, but one  
> can easily add other motives, from the altruism of Jonas Salk, the  
> driving ambition of James Watson to the political ideology of the  
> men and women working on Project Manhattan.
> Academic work was the center of Rosenberg?s life. After his  
> retirement, he continued to write and publish. Together with Bronwyn  
> Hall, he edited the massive two-volume Handbook of the Economics of  
> Innovation (Elsevier, 2010), which contains wonderful survey essays  
> by every serious scholar working in the area. He also published a  
> sparklingly original and creative paper (jointly with Manuel  
> Trajtenberg) in the Journal of Economic History (2004) on the  
> economic significance of the Corliss steam engine and its effect on  
> American industrialization. The brand new Handbook of Cliometrics  
> (2015) contains an essay by Rosenberg jointly with Stanley Engerman  
> on ?Innovation in Historical Perspective.?
> There was much more to Rosenberg?s intellectual persona than his  
> interest in innovation and technical knowledge. He was fascinated by  
> the ?greats? of economics ? especially Smith and Marx, on whom he  
> wrote perceptive essays, as well as lesser but equally fascinating  
> figures such as Charles Babbage. He published a collection of his  
> essays on the History of Economics as he saw it (often from the  
> point of view of technology), entitled The Emergence of Economic  
> Ideas: Essays in the History of Economics ? idiosyncratic, perhaps,  
> but never dull. In the editors? introduction to the first volume of  
> the Economics of Innovationcompilation, Rosenberg and Hall cite a  
> long passage from Schumpeter?s preface to the Japanese edition of  
> his 1937 book The Theory of Economic Development.Schumpeter  
> recounted a debate he had with Walras on whether economics should  
> concern itself only with statics or should also be concerned with  
> the rapid changes in the economy. These kinds of historical issues  
> held endless fascination for Rosenberg. The first essay in his  
> published Graz Lectures, Schumpeter and the Endogeneity of  
> Technology: Some American Perspectives (Routledge, 2000), was  
> entitled ?Joseph Schumpeter and the Economic Interpretation of  
> History.? He cited at length and with almost palpable delight  
> Schumpeter?s statement that economic history was absolutely required  
> for the scientific study of economics. Rosenberg was also interested  
> in modern medical research and its place in the modern American  
> research university. He surely was the only economic historian to  
> have published a paper both in The New England Journal of Medicine  
> and The Energy Journal (and probably the only one to have published  
> in either).
> Rosenberg was one of the broadest and most intellectually curious  
> minds I ever met. He was, as Ken Arrow remarked in his eulogy, an  
> enormous lover of books and owned many thousands of them ? yet  
> ironically his own preferred format was the short pointed essay or  
> at most a short and summary book such as his briefTechnology and  
> American Economic Growth. Having read papers on science and  
> technology his entire life, he may have adopted the scientist?s  
> preferred mode of communication over the long and heavily-detailed  
> books written by the typical economic historian. He never wrote a  
> single-authored magnum opus on economic history. The closest he ever  
> came to a big-think ambitious ?explanation of everything? was the  
> set of Rosenberg?s lecture notes that L.E. Birdzell collected and  
> then together published as a book How the West Grew Rich. It is a  
> lovely and often insightful book, but it lacks the grandeur and  
> sweep of a David Landes, Douglass North, or Eric Jones, who have  
> written books with similar themes. Rosenberg?s comparative advantage  
> was the brief essay, and the books he published were mostly  
> collections of these essays. These essays were, without exception,  
> beautifully written: he had the gift of expressing a complex and  
> nuanced economic relation in a short and elegant phrase. They are  
> still read by students and scholars all over the world.
>
>
> As a person, Rosenberg was deeply loved and admired by those who  
> knew him well. He was urbane and erudite even by the high standards  
> of the great economic historians of his generation. He was witty to  
> the point of being hilarious, and could be sarcastic and cutting  
> when he wanted. He was also a deeply caring husband, father and  
> grandfather, the emblematic Jewish father who knew that investment  
> in human capital and family cohesion were the essence of Jewish  
> culture. He was a great colleague and a warm and wonderful friend.  
> Of all the many senior economic historians of that generation whom I  
> knew and admired over the years, he was the only one whom I regarded  
> as much as a relative as a colleague. I will never forget you, Uncle  
> Nate.


BOF Research Professor, Philosophy and Moral Sciences, Ghent  
University, Blandijnberg 2, Ghent, B-9000, Belgium. Phone:  
(31)-(0)6-15005958