"Knowledge and technology replace capital" - a widely circulated view. Alvin Toffler once predicted in "The Power Shift" that as Western society enters the information age, the dominant force in society will shift from money to knowledge. In 1982, John Naisbitt had a similar view in his book "Megatrends". He believed: "Knowledge is the driving force of our economy and society." In the early 1990s, world management guru Peter Drucker proposed: "The productivity of knowledge will increasingly become the decisive factor in the competition of a country, an industry, and a company." Because this view emphasizes the importance of knowledge and technology as elements for other The substitutability of factors has led some later economists to further emphasize that technological factors can change the marginal product line of an input factor when it replaces other factors to play its role. That is, with the increase of technological input factors, the marginal product not only does not It will decrease and it will increase. This is the impact of the view of "knowledge and technology replacing capital" in the theoretical economics community. However, in our opinion, in modern economic society, no matter what angle you emphasize the role of knowledge and technology in the field of production, there are serious problems with the view that technology as a factor of production is opposed to capital. defect. The simple truth is that the substitution between factors is always limited and conditional. Only the combination of factors can form realistic productivity. Without other production factors, no factor can play an independent role in the production process. As for which factor is dominant in the production process, this should ultimately be determined by the status of the owner of the factor in economic life.
Technological progress is an endogenous variable in economic growth - the perspective of the new economic growth theory. After the new economic growth theory emerged after the 1980s, which introduced knowledge and technology as endogenous variables into the production function, the economics community's explanation of economic growth underwent completely new changes. Although the methods and models of new growth theory are different in the process of endogenizing knowledge and technology, they are basically consistent in some basic theoretical aspects. First, accumulation is the result of maximizing choices of rational individuals and manufacturers; second, after endogenizing knowledge and technology, the analytical basis of economic growth theory—the forms of production functions and constraint functions—will change; third, After a series of mathematical derivation, the basic conclusion of the new growth theory is: the realization of economic growth does not require the growth of the labor force and exogenous technological progress; the economic growth rate is positively correlated with the stock of human capital and the research success coefficient; in the new growth theory model, human capital Capital and physical capital are symmetrical. Therefore, the initial stocks of human capital and physical capital play almost equally important roles in economic growth. Judging from some conclusions of the above-mentioned new growth theory, new growth economics combines knowledge, technology and other factors to examine the role of scientific and technological progress in the production process, and points out that there are conditions for the transformation of scientific and technological achievements into production. We believe that these ideas are more credible and more consistent with the actual situation than the view that opposes knowledge, technology and capital. First of all, from a historical perspective, scientific and technological revolutions often occur in the most economically developed countries. The reason is that the initial stock of capital in economically developed countries (this initial stock includes both human capital stock and physical capital stock) is much larger than Economically underdeveloped countries, and this difference in the initial status of stocks between countries is largely caused by unequal and unreasonable international economic systems. Secondly, breakthroughs in market constraints that transform technology into production can only rely on global market capacity. The limited market capacity of any single country will ultimately restrict the transformation of technology into production factors. Therefore, here we can use certain conclusions of the new growth theory to draw policy propositions for using scientific and technological progress to promote economic growth. That is, paying attention to the accumulation of capital stock and making good use of international market resources are the prerequisites for formulating my country's scientific and technological development strategy.
The premise for technology as a factor of production is that technology becomes a commodity - our point of view. The greatest contribution of the new growth theory is to incorporate technology as an endogenous variable into the analysis process of economic growth.
If we assume that the production process of the market economy is the general process of production in modern society, then the analytical conclusions about the role or contribution of scientific and technological elements in the production process in the new growth theory are basically credible and reasonable. But this type of analysis actually only completes a technical analysis of the role of the use value of technological commodities in the production process. If we supplement the value analysis of science and technology as a commodity into the production process of the market economy, then the conclusions in the new growth theory on some constraints on the transformation of scientific and technological achievements into productive technologies will be further revised, and the content of the revision will be more Reflected in institutional innovation.
Looking at technology as a commodity, its value first includes the cost of producing this commodity. The non-exclusive nature of technology as a public product determines that private investors cannot generate commercial profits through the use of technology, which also determines that technology cannot play its role as an independent factor in economic growth, but only as a government Investment in public products exerts its external economic effects. This is why technology, as an important factor in promoting production, has not been included in the perspective of normative economic analysis for a long time. However, if we want to include science and technology as an element into the analytical vision of economics, we need not only the recognition of the role of science and technology, but more importantly, the institutional solution to the non-profit nature of science and technology investment in the early stage and the profit-making principle of the market economy. paradox. This is not a technical issue, but an institutional arrangement issue.
The measurement of the value of any renewable factor is related to its use value in the production process. However, the difference between technological products and other factors is that the production of technological products itself means a breakthrough in traditional technology. . Therefore, its contribution to material production cannot be measured backwards, but must be anticipated forwards.