Since Berkeley was kind enough to let me start hanging on as a visiting scholar, I’ve been accumulating an intense amount of library books. It’s almost embarassing actually.

Right now, I’m interested in three key categories: nuclear power, electric vehicles, and theories of technological change. All three areas now have their own spot in the Reading List: nuclear, EVs, technological change.

If you have additions, I’d love to hear them, particularly in the technological change section. There are so many different ways of approaching the topic and I want to at least be familiar with as many as possible. One thing I’ll say early: the public debate on any technology does not come close to approaching the complexity and sophistication of most models of technological change. We are too simplistic about technology and often ignore the social circumstances that allowed it to grow and prosper.

Case in point, I was talking with Arnold Goldman, the groundbreaking solar pioneer who is now chairman of BrightSource International, about Moore’s Law. Often, people describe Moore’s Law in very technical terms as if it was something inherent in the silicon or something.

But Goldman notes that it was the vision of Moore’s Law that allowed it to happen. The belief preceded and sustained the technological change.

“There was no reason that Moore’s Law should have been able to happen, but people believed it,” Goldman said. “The growth in the learning to be able to double the transistors every two years, if you were dealing with that as some bureaucrat, you’d never be able to take it seriously. It was an outgrowth of people believing.”