I am always suspicious of predictions about how the world will be in the future. The economy and the shape of societies are evolutionary, and evolution is impossible to predict, as old Malthus, in his Heaven retirement, surely knows well. Up to now, since the dawn of mechanization and the use of inanimate energies in the middle ages, new technologies have been absorbed providing more, not less, opportunities for jobs. At first urban industry replaced the jobs lost in farming and rural domestic industries; more recently, services replaced the jobs lost due to scaling up and automatization of industry. The wide variety of new solutions invented in the industry and services sector through innovation processes, which came to represent as many opportunities for employment, would have been very difficult to predict for observers, even when situated not so early before the succesive inventions.

Moreover, it has been the gains in productivity that "job-killing technology" has brought about, especially after the second industrial revolution, that made possible to gather the resources for the development of the kind of innovative industries and services that provided the new jobs.

On the other side, political responses to economic and social issues are also evolutionary, and definitely they have been so since the industrial societies began to organize, not because governments are a gift of the gods for our enjoyment and benefit, but because they are formed by professional politicians who have their own political business to live off and protect. The welfare state can be good for societies, but it is undoubtedly good for the practice of political marketing and for the development of a state that devotes much of its energy to suck resources from the economy to feed not only sound social programs (which is very well) but also many unjustified or poorly justified expenditures, including self-benefits and benefits for the supporters of the governing party.

Governments have a huge power today, because the new technologies of information have put in their hands some awfully potent instruments of control and coercion, and this power, combined with their capacity of siphoning out resources from all of us, and the economic and information needs of the political business, are something that many a citizen are thinking as at least one of the causes of the present paradox, in which an unprecedented knowledge and innovation wave goes parallel with a certain economic discomfort and perplexity. Maybe that is because we are making machines work instead of humans, or maybe the centers are having too much saying on the use of resources, and directing them to ends short-term politically useful, instead of long-term socially useful (political cycles are 4-or 5- years long, and this for evolutionary timeframes is very short).

So, in conclusion, I cannot take the prophecy of job-killing-technology-causing-chaos-unless-enlightened-politicians-come-to-the-rescue at face value, because history does not lend proof to it, and it does not seem to me well founded from an economic and social evolutionary point of view; and I cannot conclude that, even if that prophecy comes to be true, the present concept of state, that is, a state with the same kind of political incentives that our societies have institutionalized so far, will be apt to manage the even greater resources needed for a project like Mr. Rodrick's in the benefit of all, instead of smuggling a significant part in the benefit of its members and their friends and supporters.



