Nathan Rosenberg

Who is Nathan Rosenberg?

Nathan Rosenberg is an American economist specializing in the history of technology. He earned his PhD from the University of Wisconsin in 1955, and has taught at Indiana University, the University of Pennsylvania, Purdue University, Harvard University, the University of Wisconsin and Stanford University, where he is the Fairleigh S. Dickinson, Jr. Professor Emeritus of Public Policy in the Department of Economics. In 1989 he was visiting Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at the University of Cambridge.

Rosenberg's contribution to understanding technological change was acknowledged by Douglass C. North in his Nobel Prize lecture entitled "Economic Performance through Time".

In 1986's How the West Grew Rich, Rosenberg and co-author L.E. Birdzell, Jr. argued that Western Europe's economic success grew out of a loosening of political and religious controls, and that Western medieval life was not actually organized in castles, cathedrals, and cities; but that it was organized more in the rural areas in huts and in places with reliable access to food.