Not one of these activities has altered qualitatively over the past century, while in the previous hundred years they altered beyond recognition. We do not live in the age of technological revolution. We live in the age of technological stasis, but do not realise it. We watch the future and have stopped watching the present.

When I finish reading most books, they hang around on shelves, prop up tables or go to friends. David Edgerton's The Shock of the Old is a book I can use. I can take it in two hands and bash it over the heads of every techno-nerd, computer geek and neophiliac futurologist I meet. Edgerton is a historian of science at Imperial College in London and must be a brave man. He has taken each one of his colleagues' vested interests and stamped on it with hobnailed boots.

No, research and development do not equate with economic progress. No, the computer is not a stunning technological advance, just an extension of electronic communication as known for over a century. No, the internet has not transformed most people's lives, just helped them do faster what they did before. No, weapons technology has not transformed warfare, merely wasted stupefying sums of money while soldiers win or lose by firing rifles.

Technological innovation is always hyped by those lobbying for money, usually from government. But, says Edgerton, if we only attended to ends rather than means we would waste less and get more right. Scientists never feed into their equations the opportunity cost of their successes, let alone the cost of their failures. Where now are such "life-changing revolutions" as supersonic travel, manned moon flight, coal hydrogenation, system-built housing, brain lobotomy, drip-dry shirts and electric knives? How come more goods travel by ship than ever? How come the fastest-growing domestic industry is housework and do-it-yourself?

To Edgerton the thesis that civilisation must innovate or die is rubbish. Nations are not sharks that must move to breathe. Yet we are so dazzled by newness as to lose the power of scepticism, indeed of reason itself. The result is a grotesque overselling of the new and neglect of what is tried and tested.

There is nothing recent in this phenomenon. Steam power was hugely expensive in resources and manpower and for most of its life probably less efficient than horse power. At sea it wiped out sail long before it could economically and safely replace it. On land it required even more horses (to supply coal and service its terminals) than before. Even today there would probably be less traffic on roads if outrageously uneconomic trains did not exist - and so did not divert car journeys to stations - though nobody will believe it.

What Edgerton calls "techno- nationalism" is regularly proclaimed by politicians as vital to domestic economies as they pour money into government research. There is no evidence of any need for this. Global technology transfer is virtually free. What impedes its growth is not lack of invention but government restriction on free trade. Shrewd countries "borrow" technology, as did Japan after the war and the tiger economies from America in the 1990s.

The most remarkable feature of Edgerton's book is his emphasis on the durability of past innovations. Today the fastest-selling cooker in Britain is the Aga. The fastest-selling home investment is the flatpack, made with cheap foreign labour and transport and assembled by the user.

Most attics and garages are stuffed with kit for which there was no sensible use, from exercise bicycles to fondue machines. Middle-class women probably do more manual labour than in the 19th century, assisted by such old technology as the washing machine and vacuum cleaner. Small wonder they still consume those ancient standbys, alcohol, nicotine, cannabis and opium.

Of course, the computer has radically speeded communication. But for the overwhelming bulk of users (still only half of Britons and a tiny fraction of the globe) it merely supplements the post and the telephone. Most people send emails back and forth twice a day, roughly the same exchange as the Victorian letter post achieved. Amazon and eBay have replicated but not replaced the retail market. Television, 80 years old, and radio have improved but not changed over time. Both were essentially Victorian innovations.

The greatest techno-dazzle involves flying. The glamour of defying gravity created a global Icarus complex. Air forces have won over every generation of 20th-century politician, yet have never delivered. They have killed civilians and wrecked property but not won wars. More serious, the cost of new planes so overwhelms budgets as to leave land troops underequipped - as is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Ministers are putty in the hands of airborne weapons suppliers. Yet any analysis of the past half-century will show the rifle, the mortar and (in Africa) the machete are the tools of success. The technology of war, supposed galvaniser of innovation, has barely changed in a hundred years. Indeed by replacing battlefront bravery with stand-off cowardice, air innovation could be said to contribute to defeat.

The fastest-rising aid to mobility is another Victorian invention, the car, dependent on internal carbon combustion. Flights are trivial, a minuscule percentage in any sense necessary. Planes are used overwhelmingly for holidays, business and perks. Yet lobbyists sell planes (and airports) as "economically vital" to the nation.

This neophilia at least has its piquant moments. HG Wells wrote in The Shape of Things to Come (in 1937) that "airmen will bring peace and civilisation to a war-devastated world". He forecast that within 30 years the world would agree a new global order based on the hub of intercontinental aviation. And where was that hub? His answer was Basra.

There is still a hotel in Basra decorated with murals of glorious pilots ushering in this brave new world. It is (or was on my last visit) a British officers' club. Every night mortars try to wipe it off the face of the earth in a nasty Victorian-style war.



simon.jenkins@theguardian.com