An Urban's Rural View

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Thomas Malthus and his followers feared population would grow faster than the world's ability to grow food, leading to mass starvation. The Malthusians failed to foresee the inventions of Eli Whitney and John Deere and hundreds of other tinkerers.

Thanks to those inventions, agricultural productivity has outpaced population growth. That some go hungry is because food isn't well distributed, not because we can't grow enough.

There's a faint whiff of Malthusianism in the contentions of economists like Robert Gordon and Tyler Cowen that economic growth and living standards in the developed world are in for a long period of stagnation. I say faint because they only rest part of their case on technological pessimism. But it's an important part, and it puts them at risk of drowning in the waves of future technological advances.

In fairness, the pessimists understand innovations will continue to come. They just think all the earthshaking stuff has already been invented. Nothing the future brings will have the same effect on the way we live and our ability to be more productive as electricity, the telephone, the automobile, or the airplane. Information technology? The pessimists don't see the likes of Twitter driving economic growth the way those earlier inventions did.

As one who believes mankind has barely begun to innovate, I appreciated the essay on technological pessimism in the latest issue of the Economist, "Has the Ideas Machine Broken Down?" (http://econ.st/…). Reviewing recent economic research both pro and con, the Economist ends by noting that the greater fear may be that technology will move too rapidly for some of us. Already, computers can do basic legal research and write simple newspaper articles.

Why, some day a computer may even be able to write this blog. I wonder what it will think about technological change?

Progress can seem stalled because there's no metronome making technological change occur at a steady and predictable pace. It comes in spurts.

When it does come, it may take industry decades to put innovations to their best use. When electricity was invented, factories at first used it to replace steam to drive the shaft that ran through the factory and powered the individual machines. Many years passed before they realized the shaft was no longer necessary; each machine could be electrified.

By analogy, the big productivity improvements wrought by the invention of the microprocessor may still lie ahead of us. And just as the Malthusians probably didn't know about people like Eli Whitney or John Deere, much less foresee the impact they would have on the world, the technological pessimists are probably failing to reckon with inventors laboring in obscurity today, the impact of whose inventions lies even further ahead.

If you're at all interested in the issue, the Economist's essay is well worth reading.

Urban Lehner can be reached at urbanity@hotmail.com

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