Technical Progress and Production Functions:Reply

Warren Pat Hogan, 1929–2009*

“…The PhD research focused on growth theory, with particular reference to capital depreciation and replacement. This led quickly to articles in the very best international academic journals, the Review of Economics and Statistics (Hogan, 1958) and the American Economic Review (Hogan, 1959), the former exposing errors, and importantly pointing to deeper methodological limitations, in work on technical progress by the future Nobel Laureate in Economics, Robert Solow (1957) (see Solow, 1958 for his response). A sense of the deeper problems is conveyed in the concluding sentence: 'The plain fact is that we could insert any set of random numbers in the capital stock series and still get a production function, net of technical progress, with the same close fit' (Hogan, 1958: 411).…”