"James Bessen’s book Learning By Doing: The Real Connection between Innovation, Wages and Wealth is excellent. It strikes a balance between meaty analysis and description of historical episodes of technical change, and is at the same time very accessible.

The book argues that it is important to distinguish between ideas, which can be codified and transmitted and know-how attached to workers, which takes experience to accumulate. This is familiar – Paul Romer recently blogged about the role played by this distinction in his famous model. But Bessen adds that the distinction makes it important to consider the incentives for workers to invest in new skills so that new technologies can be implemented – and the part played by these incentives is usually overlooked and yet crucial for forming views about the “future of work” when there are ubiquitous robots." Read more.