Rosenberg earned his PhD from the
University of Wisconsin in 1955, and taught at
Indiana University (1955–1957), the
University of Pennsylvania (1957–1961),
Purdue University (1961–1964),
Harvard University (1967–1969), the University of Wisconsin (1969–1974) and
Stanford University (1974–), where he was 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 1996 he was awarded the
Leonardo da Vinci Medal, the highest award of the Society for the History of Technology. 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. This is why, the book states, most of the population was to some extent involved in agriculture and its related occupations of transporting produce from place to place. The importance of these ideas have since been more fully recognized by the discipline of international economic history. The Rosenberg-Birdzell hypothesis is that innovation is produced by economic competition among politically independent entities. This hypothesis is tested and supported by
Joel Mokyr in his contribution to the
Festschrift-issue of
Research Policy, which was published in honor of Nathan Rosenberg in 1994. Rosenberg died in 2015 and was buried at the
Los Gatos Memorial Park, San Jose. ==Publications==