. I fear he has tried to take on too big a subject in too limited a space. He uses the chapter to add evidence to his demonstration that culture strongly affects the way we use technology.The chapter focuses on the disruptions in the workplace that occur as production is reorganized to utilize new technologies. (As Nye recognizes, it was not so long ago in history that most people worked in agriculture and the word "job" would not have even been understood as we in the United States today take to be the normal; still in many developing countries there is not a culture in which most people expect to work in "jobs".)
Technological change has resulted at times and places in lots of repetitive work (e.g. factories in the industrial revolution, jobs in McDonnalds today) but also jobs with enormous intellectual challenge (e.g clinical medicine today, systems analysis). The continuing change in the United States over the past couple of centuries from an agricultural workforce to an industrial workforce to a service sector workforce illustrates just how fast the changes in the workplace have been.
Nye points out that American culture tends to emphasize using technology based improvements in productivity to increase profits for investors and to increase savings for customers. My Irish ancestors would have seen the greed of American investors as less avaricious that that of the absentee land owners, and the Mexican peons would have willingly traded their patrones for our owners. The way in which society evolves a distribution of wealth and income is too complex for Nye's chapter and for this posting. It is interesting however to note that the French seem to use productivity increases more to promote leisure than do Americans, and Scandinavians do more to assure the wellbeing of those who are for some reason unemployed. Culture counts.
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