Talk:Productivity-improving technologies/Archive 1

Irrational beginning to this article

It seems to me that writers are starting this series from way after people were using wind power for irrigation and that was after people and animals were powering irrigation machines.

Can someone research and write about the beginings? Lin (talk) 23:42, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

I have a little information on the origins of productivity improving technologies but did not add them here because it is not my area of interest. That is because the real big improvements in productivity did not happen before the industrial revolution. Lynn Townsend White, Jr. wrote about technology in the middle ages, such as the spinning wheel, three field rotation and the horse collar. Robinson and Musson wrote about the beginnings of the industrial revolution. In addition to the technologies already Wikilinked, much more information is already on Wikipedia and could be linked. If we try to include all the history it would distract from what really mattered.Phmoreno (talk) 00:53, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Hi Phmoreno, Agree that there shouldn't be a reiteration of stuff in other articles, but there needs to be a suitable, wide-ranging if possible, intro with the main articles listed immediately after.

Even more we need, possibly, a common understanding of what is meant by "productivity improving technologies". Only then can we limit how far back to go into the centuries when people first settled beside streams or in wind-lanes to make use of water- and wind-power. I'm wary of anyone saying, for example, that a certain nation was the first to develop those sources without good reason for asserting that. Telling us that there are archaeological examples from a civilisation is not evidence of first-use and I'm, as a lay-person, very wary of certain claims made by monopoly-archaeologists! Lin (talk) 07:15, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

This article addresses the interaction between technology and economics. It is intended to list the technologies, put them in time perspective and describe what they did for lowering inputs (labor, materials, energy, capital). This is distinctly different than the History of technology. The historical part of the title is to distinguish it from today's use of technology to mean information communications technologies (ICT).

I changed the first sentence of the lede to a definition. Hopefully this will make clearer that this is not about the History of technology.Phmoreno (talk) 16:11, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

I also moved all the history from the lede to the history section and added a see also for the History of technology.

Addition of Chinese technology and its transfer to the West should satisfactoraly address the early origins.Phmoreno (talk) 03:00, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

I read the article, and to tell you the truth, while there is a lot of content unsourced, and the rest seems somewhat interesting OR, it seems that 100% of the subject matter is already covered in multiple articles. It would be better to reduce its content, and use WP:SUMMARY style, with {{main}} to the appropriate articles. Tagged accordingly. - Cwobeel (talk) 22:54, 28 May 2015 (UTC)

I proposed that it be merged with Technology and am waiting for more comments. That would require me to completely rewrite Technology. While WP:SUMMARY may work for some of this information, many of main articles are sub standard. Remaining unsourced material will be referenced- I have 200 pages of notes.Phmoreno (talk) 23:05, 28 May 2015 (UTC)

@Phmoreno: That's a good idea. You can add {{mergeto}} on this article and {{mergefrom}} on the technology article, so that discussions can take place. - Cwobeel (talk) 23:10, 28 May 2015 (UTC)

Original research and additional citations

@Cwobeel: Instead of putting up blanket weasel tags calling for more citations and possible OR if you give me specific instances I will be happy to show references. The topics in this article come from encyclopedias of the history of technology, economic histories or engineering histories. All of this information is mentioned in one or more of the those fields.Phmoreno (talk)

Please WP:AGF. The article is missing citations for long paragraphs and many sections. The article can be improved by adding sources at which point the tags can be removed. - Cwobeel (talk) 00:42, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

Please note this article has been rated as class B in WikiProject technology. Also note that it was spun off from Productivity, hence the title and outline.Phmoreno (talk) 11:32, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

Issues in tags have been addressed and tags removed. If you have any problems with this article you need to leave tags on those sections. As for WP:AGF, there is good faith to be assumed. You have never contributed to this article and are only her because you were involved in a discussion of were there was another editor who I filed a complaint against. I recommend that if you have additional issues you work them through Wiki Project Technology where someone with the proper background can do an assessment. But I also recommend that you wait to see if the merger of this material with Technology occurs; otherwise you are wasting my time.Phmoreno (talk) 01:15, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

As for WP:AGF, there is good faith to be assumed, indeed.- Cwobeel (talk) 01:21, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

Are you interested in technology?Phmoreno (talk) 03:29, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

yes, I am. But I am not interested in OR. - Cwobeel (talk) 03:47, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

You may also be interested in learning about WP:OWN. - Cwobeel (talk) 03:48, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

You deleted information claiming OR when I asked you to leave tags and you are asking for WP:AGF. See my discussion here: Talk:Technology#Definition of technology.

You have basically two options. We either tag the article with OR and refimprove, or we delete the material. See WP:V and WP:NOR - Cwobeel (talk) 03:46, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

It is obvious that you care about the subject and have spent considerable time and effort on it and I respect that, but it seems that this article requires a massive re-write, by using WP:SUMMARY style and syncing with main articles, rather that re-invent the wheel (pun not intended) with what seems OR. - Cwobeel (talk) 03:56, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

This article addresses a vital subset of technologies that were important in economic history.Phmoreno (talk) 12:20, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

I will make a request to Wiki Project Technology regarding this article and the proposed merger.Phmoreno (talk) 19:49, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

1. You made a very poor first impression by removing material you considered OR without discussing on Talk, which was especially bad because I asked you to add the proper tags. I told you I had hundreds of pages of notes for this article (I can usually locate a reference in a minute or two) but, you decided you knew better. I also asked you to work through Wiki Project Technology, who already rated this article B class and made no claims of OR.
2. You start by citing my statements regarding the definitions of productivity and technology as OR when they are consistent several books cited in this article, plus the Talk:technology link I posted that gave some selected quotes. There is a lot further explanation of the various definitions of technology listed in these sources. So basically, if you don't understand the definition of the article, why are you are coming here criticizing the article?
3. As for the statement about the origins of chemistry, if you had read the History section you would have seen the statement with reference 7. Also, there was a link to De re metallica that discusses this fact, if you had bothered to read it. Do you have any training in chemistry?
4. Regarding references in the Contributors to Productivity section, that is a style preference. A lot of editors do not think it is good style to reference section headers. The references are in the sections.
5. Several sections lacking references use links instead, another style preference.

As a general rule I stop editing articles when someone shows up only to criticize or cause problems. My time is too valuable to waste with this nonsense. I was the majority contributor to several important technology and economic history articles and always have other projects to work on. I never have problems with editors who are are knowledgeable of the subject and gladly work with them. Hardly ever does someone like you show up with no content to contribute, just to criticize, which is amazing considering that I completely rewrote several highly viewed articles that were long and complicated.Phmoreno (talk) 01:09, 3 June 2015 (UTC)

I had no intention of raising this article to good article status; however, another citation and some clean up and I would nominate it.Phmoreno (talk) 03:38, 3 June 2015 (UTC)

Excerpt from Talk:Technology#Present a plan

Excerpt from Talk:Technology#Present a plan: ....Many of the statements at Productivity_improving_technologies_(historical) such as Economic historians generally agree that, with certain exceptions such as the steam engine, there is no strong linkage between the 17th century scientific revolution (Descartes, Newton, etc.) and the Industrial Revolution. are poorly sourced and seem like bait for arguments. People will argue and have argued that the entire article violates WP:SYNTH and is incoherent, and I've been one of those people...

...Regarding your quote above about the un-importance of science to the Industrial Revolution being WP:SYN, I will point you to the passage at the bottom page 19 of Joel Mokyr (2004):

As economic historians have known for many years, it is very difficult to argue that the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century we associate with Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and the like had a direct impact on the Industrial Revolution.

.

The part about the steam engine is mentioned by multiple sources. And calling Joel Mokyr a "questionable" source is incomprehensible. He is a former editor of the Journal of Economic History and President of the Economic History Association, he served as the editor in chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History. (Dr. Mokyr was also kind enough to give me permission to use one of his tables for another article, so I hope he doesn't hear about this.) David Landes and Vaclav Smil have discussed the fact that the Industrial Revolution wasn't science based, but the Second Industrial Revolution was.Phmoreno (talk) 01:14, 5 June 2015 (UTC)Phmoreno (talk) 02:40, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

References

Incoherent tag

The theme is consistent but the subject is wide ranging. I will be happy to better organize it if there are some obvious changes that can be made, but you need to point them out. Leaving a tag without any specific suggestions does not help.Phmoreno (talk) 23:57, 3 June 2015 (UTC)

The lack of a single coherent subject in this seems to be related to WP:Scope issues that have arisen in multiple articles related to productivity and technology. It's a result of logical textual analysis of the title in the context of article scope.

1. It looks like years ago, the section Productivity#Productivity_articles_with_a_special_focus was created which states The purpose of this main article is to describe the theory of productivity and to make the concept of productivity a measureable [sic] quantity, and that statement is followed by a list of articles with a "special focus." No. The only purpose of the Productivity article should have been as an encyclopedia article on the topic of Productivity and nothing else. Creating a micro-culture at Wikipedia where people with a strong background in technology or productivity felt entitled to create specialized articles, all with an ill-defined WP:Scope, was an awful mistake, and it's a shame that you may have been swept up into that bad trend.
2. If this were a different article then a good idea about organization would be to find a general-purpose encyclopedia (not a specific encyclopedias about the history of technology, economic histories or engineering histories) and see how that encyclopedia's Productivity improving technologies (historical) article is organized. This is what's meant at WP:Scope by Looking at what scopes other encyclopedias have chosen can often be useful. However, I don't think you'll find anything resembling an article with this title in other encyclopedias. How Britannica or other encyclopedias organize their Productivity and Technology articles might help improve the scope of those articles.
3. The lack of a coherent single subject seems to be an intrinsic feature of the article based on logical analysis. If many technologies hindered productivity then it might make sense to have one Productivity improving technologies article and a separate Productivity hindering technologies article. But it's difficult to think of a single implemented technology that has harmed productivity. Technology and productivity improvement are so intimately linked that establishing a rational and coherent article WP:Scope for this article doesn't seem possible. The situation would be similar in an article on Heat making ovens. There is a scope to the Heat article and a scope to the Oven article. The lack of ovens that don't make heat and the close semantic ties between ovens and heat indicates that a Heat making ovens article can't have a coherent single subject, and the goal of having a Heat making ovens article would not be a reader-focused goal for an encyclopedia. Flying Jazz (talk) 16:16, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

This article should not be compared with a topic in Britannica. A better comparison would be an encyclopedia of the history of technology, which few people would take the time to read. As for being specific, there are lots of articles on Wikipedia that are more specific and less important. There are also lots of long and complex articles (I rewrote two such article and one is rated as a good article.) This article is about the most important technologies of today and why they are important. I consider it knowledge that any well read person should know, and it is presented here in a non-technical manner. In the last few years I have heard the topics in this article frequently mentioned in the media for the first time. One day I was looking at articles Fonancial Sense Online and saw a copy of a graph from this article. I also sent this article to people in the financial industry who have used it. Wikipedia is filled with articles of low importance and there are lots of articles with very low viewership. This is not one of them. Besides, it's reference material for other articles.Phmoreno (talk) 17:31, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

Also, look at Technology and History of technology and see how this compares for educational purposes (bear in mind that those would be total garbage had it not been for a little work I did on them). The content in this article is much higher quality I don't see either of those other articles being more coherent. I was thinking of reworking them along the lines of what I did for Industrial Revolution, however, I'm not going to take on another project like that if all I get is criticism and no one who is willing or able to help. I haven't seen any other editors with the background or willingness to rework articles like these. One change I would like to make is to move the History section here to History of technology with appropriate rewriting there.Phmoreno (talk) 17:50, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

As for your oven article analogy, not all technologies impact productivity. A prime example is medical technology. Other examples are technologies used in scientific research. And there are lots of technologies that have a minimal impact on productivity. But the examples used here are widely mentioned and fairly well known by anyone who has exposure to economic history.Phmoreno (talk) 18:10, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

Suggested reading: The Unbound Prometheus One of the best books on the topic and widely cited.Phmoreno (talk) 18:16, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

I'm confused and concerned. I'm confused because the tag indicates that this article lacks a single coherent topic, this talk page section is about the tag, and suddenly you want to discuss a lot of other things. I'm concerned because this article (like all Wikipedia articles) should not be "reference material for other articles" at Wikipedia. If there are particular instances of "knowledge that any well read person should know" in this article then I hope you incorporate that knowledge into the specific articles at Wikipedia dealing with the particular technologies involved, if that knowledge isn't in those articles already. I attempted to address the tag directly with point #3 above. Do you have a reply to point #3 above? If not, then we have little more to discuss here, and it's time for me to leave this talk page. Flying Jazz (talk) 18:25, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

Oops. Due to an editing conflict and a rush to make an appointment, I didn't notice before that you did address point #3 by writing about my analogy to a Heat making ovens article. Whether medical technologies improve productivity or not is debatable. From a macroeconomic perspective, perhaps not. On the other hand, a dead individual produces nothing, so medical technologies have an immeasurably large impact on microeconomic productivity for that individual. It's also true that not all ovens make heat. A solar oven is arguably not a heat making oven. Perhaps the heat is not really made in a solar oven; it's focused from an external source. If a group of editors were interested in having a Heat making ovens article, they would argue about such things. My main point is that arguing about such things would be a silly thing to do in the context of encyclopedia making in either case. A synthesis of economic history with technology in the context of productivity (or of productivity with technology in the context of economic history) isn't "a thing." There's no "there" there. It's not an encyclopedic entity. Where others cite policy like WP:SYNTH or plop tags onto articles, I prefer analogies, but we're all basically saying the same thing. Flying Jazz (talk) 03:39, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

Economic history is basically a history of the technologies that increased productivity. The extraordinary wealth we enjoy today is not due to new products as much as new processes. In the last 200 years transportation costs fell 99%, the efficiency of generating power increased 40 fold, the capability to produce interchangeable parts was perfected, the percentage of the workforce working in agriculture decreased from 75% to less than 2%, the work week fell by half, etc. Phmoreno (talk) 13:46, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

If you're making an argument about how to serve readers interested in economic history, head over to the Economic history article and make that argument there. You might or might not find editors there who agree with you. Economic history is "a thing." It's a coherent encyclopedic entity. Productivity improving technologies (historical) and Heat making ovens aren't. Flying Jazz (talk) 14:34, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

Whether technologies are "things" as you call them or processes, methods, techniques or equipment as economists call them is irrelevant. As you suggested I looked at Economic history and found the Notable economic historians and found Joel Mokyr's name, who I discussed in the section below. If you read line 25 on page 4 (Ch. 3 Technology and Economic Growth) you will see his words:

Whatever the case may be, technology is central to the dynamic of the economy in the past two centuries.

If you read Mokyr's Long Term Economic Growth and the History of Technology (highly recommended) you will see that this article is very consistent with his paper, as the titles of both suggest.Phmoreno (talk) 17:07, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

It's unfortunate that you haven't been able to maintain focus on the "Incoherent tag" which was the title of this talk page section. Many articles that are unencyclopedic due to lacking a single coherent topic can be created that are consistent with a given paper. Pointing out that fact is not a poor reflection on the paper or the author of the paper. My reply about your poor sourcing of a good source was at Talk:Technology#Present_a_plan. Our conversation seems to be at an end. Flying Jazz (talk) 18:19, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

Agree. Lets refocus. I am still undecided on how to reorganize everything, especially since there are so many options. It will take a while to sort out. I don't see anyone else proposing a constructive plan, much less volunteering to do any work. That will likely fall on me, but I have not decided to take that project on, at least not yet. I can't even think about doing anything until I finish a work project. I can't remember how long it took to do the two major rewrites, but I had it all thought out before hand. I worked intensely on each of them for many days or weeks.Phmoreno (talk) 18:25, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

References

Shorten

I am planning to shorten this article by condensing certain sections, such as the automation section. Won't be able to work on if for a few weeks though.Phmoreno (talk) 04:11, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

"Technical change" is the proper name of this article

Technical change is an important concept in production theory meaning technical development as a source of productivity growth. This can be checked by writing "technical change" in the google.

"Technical change" is a single coherent topic.

The most famous description of technical change as a source of productivity growth is that of Nobelist Solow’s (1957): ”I am using the phrase ’technical change’ as a shorthand expression for any kind of shift in the production function (productivity growth). Thus slowdowns, speed ups, improvements in the education of the labor force and all sorts of things will appear as ’technical change’ ”

Solow, R.N. (August 1957). "Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function" (PDF). The Review of Economics and Statistics (NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH) 39 (3): 312–320. doi:10.2307/1926047.

The article should be merged with the articles "Technical change" and "technological change" under the heading TECHNICAL CHANGE. Sepsaar (talk) 08:25, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

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