It is a great pleasure to acknowledge, as the senior author, the enormous intellectual contributions of the three coauthors of this volume, Raicho Bojilov, Hian Teck Hoon, and Gylfi Zoega. For more than three years, we held a team call over Skype every Wednesday morning—Bojilov in Paris, Hoon in Singapore, Zoega in Reykjavik, and I in New York. They brought to the task huge skills in econometrics, statistics, and mathematical modeling—skills central to the research our project required.
Some of the most scintillating conversations of my career occurred in those calls. Also, it is remarkable that we did not end with any disagreements—certainly no important ones. I am proud that they were early collaborators of mine. Bojilov worked with me on values in 2006, Zoega worked with me on innovation as early as 2008, and Hoon joined me in analyzing innovation and employment in 2011. (Both he and Zoega were coauthors of my 1994 book Structural Slumps.) I am extremely fortunate to have worked with all of them anew, beginning with the shift in my research toward innovation around 2000.
This intensive project could not have gone far without some substantial financing. The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation enabled the start of new research on innovation with repeated grants beginning in 2004. Later, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation provided a grant to fund research on the effects of robots on the path of wages and employment. The Smith Richardson Foundation provided from 2015 to 2018 the principal funding of the three-year project—now more nearly a four-year project—that has brought about this book. I am most grateful for this support.
I also want to thank Ian Malcolm for guiding this project on the road to its publication at Harvard University Press.
Finally, I would like to say that this effort has been an activity of the Center on Capitalism and Society, of which I am the director; and the huge efforts of Catherine Pikula, my executive assistant, and Lizzie Feidelson, the Center’s administrative manager, have been essential to the achievement of this project. I am also grateful to Richard Robb, a stalwart of the Center, for our many conversations on the realm of this book.