Professor Boskin's topic is of interest, but I wonder first why the title implies debate about technology being something to come. Surely we have all been debating (in a free-market sense) technology for millennia. Fire, the wheel, moving from caves to built homes. Stone, bronze, iron: the changing technologies of war and tools. The three-field system of crop rotation, which dates from medieval times. Gunpowder. Roads for horses, canals, railways, roads for the internal combustion engine. Merchant sail; then steam; then beyond both. Navigation and clocks. Wind power, water power, steam power, piped gas, 'piped' electricity. Semaphore, naval flag signals, the pony express, the telegraph, facsimile communications, telephone, radio: bits/day, bits/hour, bits/second, then kilo-bits/sec, on through mega- and giga-. Can we do peta-?



Next I question the need for organised debate. Look at how much civilisation has achieved to date. Government has been involved in war particularly, and standardisation. The free market in innovation has contributed much more beyond these than has actual government innovation outside the previously mentioned war and standardisation. Governments' contribution to health and safety, though important, has not been without reverses: the very recent 'dieselgate' scandal is more awful for its government encouragement of diesel for cars (and then reversing) than any 'cheating' by car manufacturers. An example before that is the worldwide blanket ban on DDT holding back the fight against malaria. The doubtful labelling and treatment of the 'catastrophe' of global warming looks to many of us to have a promulgated cure far worse than the illness itself - slugging economic development with undue fear.



Referencing the Luddites is one thing. But there have been successions of industrial (and other) changes based on technology and changing circumstances. The UK coal business failed - it failed primarily through a lack of coal that was economical to mine. How did government and organised react to this? They reacted by denying the necessary changes in employment in and around the coal-fields; they did not react by enhancing a gradual move of employment away from coal mining. Likewise reduced ship-building and steel working - largely from cheaper labour abroad and consequent (and general) reduction in demand. These are instances where government and organised opinion has failed, and where less subsidies and freer markets would have led to less pain, by allowing smoother and more natural operation of the essential transitions in labour patterns.



Professor Boskin is right on so much that he writes about the contribution of technology. But there is a simpler truth: technology just provides ongoing better tools; people provide both the good and bad uses of those tools. It is most unlikely that any government-led talking shop on technology will stop those motivated to bad use, at least without severely constraining the good uses - which the article recognises. What the article does not recognise is that it is government that takes the lead in constraint - from its own motivation for increased state/bureaucratic control, from regulatory capture by those looking to consolidate monopoly advantage - as well as government pandering to short-term public concerns.



Why should we believe that central planning and other 'inspired' forms of organised economic policy will do better for future technological changes than has happened in the past? In almost every circumstance, a free market in innovation is far more 'knowledgeable' and sensible than any government policy can be.



Best regards

