Technology Choice

Chapter 8 of David Nye's book, Technology Matters: Questions to Live With, is titled "Should 'the Market' Select Technologies". The chapter, like the others discussed so far, is a fairly easy read, referring to scores of items from the literature on technology with references to their sources. As such it can serve as an introduction to the subject.

The chapter mentions American experience with patents and the history of the Office of Technology Assessment. It may have focused a bit too much on poor technology choices by government (suggesting that Congressional support for the Federal Highway system was badly planned and contributed to energy overuse, and suggesting that Swedish and Danish legislative decisions on nuclear energy were better than those of the U.S. Congress.) The Congress funded the first telegraph lines and subsidized the first railroads in the United States, and government bodies supported the development of canals, potable water supplies and sewerage -- all of which seem to have been good decisions.

It might have been useful to point out that decisions on public goods (rather than private goods) have to be made by governments. The issue for these decisions may not be whether they should be made by the public sector, but rather how they should best be made by the public sector. It makes a big difference if the decision is made by legislative bodies, by executive bodies, or by judicial bodies. (The resolution of tort cases might, I suppose, be in effect a social choice for a country, as for example strongly encouraging auto manufacturers to produce safer autos.) In all there cases, it matters whether the actual decision makers are provided with good advice rendered through a good process. I personally favor peer review at the micro level when choosing which technology development projects to subsidize.  Science and technology advisory bodies are found in all three branches of government. While these may be composed entirely of experts in technology, they may also include experts from the social sciences to help predict technology impacts, ethicists to deal with ethical advice, and members of the community to deal with cultural values.

We seem to feel that public safety issues often require government oversight. Thus we have drug licensing laws and building codes. In part this is a recognition that the people affected by the technological choice often do not have the knowledge and skill to make such decisions well, nor would it be efficient to require all members of the public to make these decisions from scratch. Think about each commuter making an individual decision as to whether a bridge was safe enough to traverse that day, or an airplane safe enough to ride. Incidentally, the Federal Aviation Administration seems to be the very model of a government agency which has helped society make technological choices to assure public safety, as the safety record of commercial airlines attests.

In the area of medicine, American culture holds that individual choices of drugs and procedures be informed by consultation with physicians. Physicians are licensed, and bodies such as The Cochrane Collaboration (in Civil Society) and the FDA seek to assure that physicians have adequate information to provide good advice. The profession is self regulating, with certification involving proof of continuing education, as well as regulated by government. I belong to an HMO, and the HMO also has bodies which review developments in medical technology, defining norms and standards informing the physician members of the organization. Of course, pharmaceutical manufacturing company executives are making technological choices that affect future health care decisions, as are officials in government agencies such as NIH and officials in foundations funding biomedical research. In short, the choice of technology in the health care field is quite complex, and a dichotomy between Market and Government does not do justice to how choices are made. Still, Nye's discussion raises further questions as to how society should make longer range decisions such as how much to spend subsidizing health care or whether to seek drugs to enhance mental performance. The Bush administration's decision process with respect to stem cell research might have been adduced as an example of what not to do in such decision making.

I was surprised that Nye did not address the literature on diffusion of innovations. It focuses on how decisions are made by large numbers of people who are potential users of a technology. The prototypical study in this field is how the spread of new cultivars spreads in farming communities. Each farmer decides which seed he/she will use, but studies indicate that the decision is made communally through a system in which early adopters try out a new variety, and if it is successful, the use spreads to other farmers in the community.

Note, however, that the new varieties once developed through traditional practice, later were developed by governmental agricultural research stations, and more recently are increasingly developed by the private sector. The switch from public to private agricultural research was in part due to the development of hybrid varieties that did not breed true, allowing private sector seed companies to protect their investments in new varieties.

Technological advice to farmers can be provided by government, as in the case of agriculture extension services. It can also be provided by the private sector, as in the case of seed stores and retailers of fertilizers, pesticides and farm machinery. The private sector providers may not only provide advice related directly to the products they sell, but may provide more general information as a sales promotion vehicle.

In India, there are networks of community Internet providers which allow for farmers to ask technical questions of farmers in other connected communities. As I mentioned in a previous posting on this book, decisions on building new irrigation facilities, on the allocation of irrigation water, and even on irrigation schedules are made in the rice fields of Bali by water temple priests.

Again, the ways in which technological decisions are made in agriculture are very complicated. Another example comes to mind. The dust bowl phenomenon in the United States was caused by millions of farmers making individual decisions which left large areas of soil poorly protected. Government intervened with a number of programs, from providing soil conservation advice via agricultural extension to developing a soil bank program.

Nye perhaps did not do justice to technology decision making in industry. In a previous chapter he mentioned the mistakes made by manufactures in failing to respond early and strongly to technological change, as when IBM failed to recognize the shift from main frame to mine and then micro computers. When IBM was making those decisions it held a dominant position in the computer market. Even more to the case were the decisions made by AT&T when it held a monopoly position if telecoms as to handset design. In such cases the dominant technological decision maker is a large bureaucratic organization. As Henry Ford famously said, "let them buy any color car they want, as long as it is black".

I would note that today Intel, Cisco, Boeing and other firms seem to be making very good technological decisions, holding large market shares and advancing the technologies in which they hold major positions. The U.S. military system seems to be making good enough technological decisions that U.S. forces have held a technological advantage in recent engagements. Bureaucratic technological decision making, like that in other sectors, can be effective or ineffective.

This one of a series of postings on Technology Matters: Questions to Live With:

• A thought on reading Technology Matters
• How does an organization learn
• Technology Prognostication
• A Technology and Culture Case Study
• More on "Technology Matters"
• Thoughts on Reading Nye on Technology and Cultural Diversity
• Sustainable Abundance, or Ecological Crisis
• "Work: More, or Less, Better, or Worse"

"Work: More, or Less, Better, or Worse"

The title of the posting is also the title of Chapter 6 of David Nye's book, Technology Matters: Questions to Live With. 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.

This one of a series of postings on Technology Matters: Questions to Live With:

• A thought on reading Technology Matters
• How does an organization learn
• Technology Prognostication
• A Technology and Culture Case Study
• More on "Technology Matters"
• Thoughts on Reading Nye on Technology and Cultural Diversity
• Sustainable Abundance, or Ecological Crisis

A thought about economic policy in the early United States

My history book club met last night to discuss John Steele Gordon's book, Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power. We all agreed it was a good read, the result of great skill by the author in presenting economic ideas accessibly. The book traces the history of the United States through the lens of an economist. It makes the point that technological innovations have been extremely important in American growth. I also found it to provide a very good explanation of how the differences in agricultural resources between the southern and northern colonies of what became the United States led to social and economic patterns in their societies (which later led to the Civil War and the postbellum differences between northern and southern states).

One thing that came out in the discussion was the difficulty faced by Washington and his Treasury Secretary in economic policy in the first government after the Constitution went into effect. We think of economic policy as being balanced between fiscal policy managed collaboratively by the executive and legislative branches of government, and monetary policy involving the central bank (or in our case, the Federal Reserve system).

The impact of government fiscal policy on the economy is a function of the size of the government relative to the overall size of the economy. Two hundred years ago, the federal government was tiny, limited by the conceptions of its founders and managers, by the willingness of the individual states to be governed by the central government, and by the limited taxing ability of the time. Thus there was little that could be done to improve the economy using fiscal policy, even if the leaders of the time had understood macro economic policy as we do.

The federal government did not print money at the time (not until the Civil War, when it started printing "greenbacks"). Rather, individual banks printed their own forms of money. Alexander Hamilton argued successfully that there should be a national bank which had the ability among other things to regulate the state and local banks. This gave the national bank the ability to influence the money supply, and thus to begin monetary policy.

The national bank was privately owned, and thus like the Federal Reserve insulated from the direct control of the government. Andrew Jackson, much later when he was president, hated the first national bank and managed to put it out of existence. Jon Meachem in his book American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House argues that Jackson's antagonism to the bank was due to the fact that its owners, who opposed his pro-poor policies, used the power of the bank politically, especially to support opponent politicians through favorable financing.


We noted however, that there was likely to be considerable inflationary pressure as many independent and unregulated banks issued currency, and that the regulation of the national bank could reduce this inflationary pressure by limiting the amount of money printed by the banks it was regulating. The wealthy owners of the national bank would have been likely to favor less inflationary policies than would the populist president, Jackson.

Gordon describes well in his book the similar issue later in history. The United States after the Civil War issued both gold and silver currency. In both cases the coins actually contained metals with the value the coin represented. Gold discoveries lagged silver discoveries, and consequently a lot more silver coinage could be and was minted later in the century than gold currency. The gold standard used by the government thus limited the growth of the money supply. Going off the gold standard would have been more inflationary. Thus William Jennings Bryan in his famous Cross of Gold speech led democratic forces seeking that the government abandon the gold standard, while the more conservative forces in the country successfully defended that standard until well into the 20th century.

Alexander Hamilton is credited with both the creation of the national bank and with the decision to have the federal government assume state debts from the Revolutionary War and pay them through revenue raised by taxing power independent from the states. These policies were raised in two crucially important policy papers, both discussed by Gordon in his book.

Hamilton, also wrote a third major policy paper recommending a federal government policy to promote manufactures. Gordon does not discuss that paper, nor did Richard Brookhiser in his book Alexander Hamilton, American (another good book enjoyed by our book club). I found that paper to be equally remarkable, recommending many policies that were later implemented, and indeed are still relevant today.

Hamilton of course was from New York, and the split between the southern states emphasis on plantation agriculture versus the northern states emphasis on manufacturing was already evident in the late 18th century. Still, it is manufacturing that made the American economy great in the late 19th and the 20th centuries, and Hamilton deserves great credit for his efforts to get the federal government to help create the conditions that supported that industrialization.

"Sustainable Abundance, or Ecological Crisis"

So has David Nye titled chapter 6 of his book, Technology Matters: Questions to Live With. He looks at optimistic and pessimistic views in the literature on the question of whether technological progress is sustainable, noting also those who would achieve sustainability by focusing human aspirations on attainable affluence (ofter via recourse to the benefits of the "simple life").

I will make only a few comments on the subject.

Clearly improving technology is an important approach to improving economic productivity, and there are many examples of ways in which improved economic productivity has resulted in improved human wellbeing.

Hunter-gatherers apparently lived quite well until their population exceeded the carrying capacity of the environment using hunting and gathering techniques and strategies alone. Agricultural technology can support a denser population than hunting and gathering, and many more people now live in societies based on agricultural food production than by hunting and gathering. So too, it seems that more people can be and are supported well in societies that have gone through an industrial transformation, utilizing machines, fossil fuels, and other "modern technologies" than can be supported by simpler technology such as that embraced by the Amish and Mennonites.

Sometimes a technological advance by one group can result in a major crisis for another group. There are many such examples. The American "rust belt" is suffering from the technological progress made by other nations that are more successfully competing in manufacturing. The most radical example that comes to mind is the development of marine technology in Europe that enabled Europeans to discover the Americas and the military technology that enabled Europeans to conquer and dominate the new world. The Europeans gained not only huge wealth in silver and gold, but many new crops such as potatoes and beans that contributed greatly to European productivity. On the other hand, they brought with them a variety of new diseases and viscous institutions such that the population of Mexico dropped from 25 million in 1520 to just over one million in 1605.

Illustration from Sahagún, ''Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España'', c. 1575-1580; ed., tr., James Lockhart, ''We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest Mexico'' (Univ. of California Press, 1993)

Jared Diamond, in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, describes how a number of societies advanced through the use of social organization and technological innovation while depleting the resources on which they depended; when a climate shift occurred these societies found that their environment no longer could sustain their civilizations.

Western civilization has used technological innovations to drive economic progress for centuries, leading to an explosion of global population and huge numbers of people achieving unprecedented economic wellbeing. We are now wondering whether petroleum resources will run out, or rather whether they can be replaced successfully when they run out. Many fisheries are being depleted, Some foresee major problems with water supplies as aquifers are depleted and as more irrigation water is required to feed a growing population, We are also seeing environmental degradation on a global scale -- loss of soil, desertification, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, global warming, pollution of air, water and soils.

Mankind has unprecedented means to appreciate these problems. There is also unprecedented technological capacity to innovate to increase productivity of existing resources, substitute for resources being depleted, and reduce population pressure on our resources. The question remains open of whether mankind can muster the political will to achieve sustainability before crisis occurs on a global scale.

This one of a series of postings on Technology Matters: Questions to Live With:

• A thought on reading Technology Matters
• How does an organization learn
• Technology Prognostication
• A Technology and Culture Case Study
• More on "Technology Matters"
• Thoughts on Reading Nye on Technology and Cultural Diversity

A new diagnostic for Alzheimer's?

There is a report of research suggesting that a test of spinal fluid can identify many (perhaps all) Alzheimer's patients. That is a very positive research result, deservedly getting a lot of publicity.

Note that this is a preliminary result, and it will have to be replicated (ideally in larger samples of patients) for scientific credibility. Even it it is replicated, there would be have to be more work to figure out the probability that someone testing poverty would not have Alzheimer's and that someone testing negative would indeed have Alzheimer's, and to determine the risk to the patients involved in obtaining the sample.

The first rule of medical screening is not to screen if there is nothing that medicine can do based on the information. Without Alzheimer's specific treatment to cure or at least ameliorate the disease, a screening test for the disease would not be medically useful.

Perhaps the most important meaning of this result is further evidence that Alzheimer's is a disease. Only a few decades ago Dementia was thought to be a senility that was a normal part of aging. The increasing recognition that it is in fact an abnormal condition encourages research and development that may eventually lead to medical interventions to cure or ameliorate the disease.

Of course the discovery that proteins implicated in Alzheimer's are to be found in spinal fluid itself provides information on the evolution of the disease and contributes to the stock of knowledge of the disease.

I would say this is a result that should be exciting for those doing research and development on Alzheimer's disease, interesting for medical professionals treating patients with the disease, and of little immediate meaning for those suffering from the disease and their families.

If we broke it, do we have to fix it?

Supposedly Secretary of State Powell invoked the "pottery store rule" for President Bush with respect to the proposed invasion of Iraq, "If you break it, you buy it". That has gotten morphed into "If you broke it, you have to fix it" for both Iraq and Afghanistan.

I don't think foreign policy should be based on simplistic slogans. What exactly is the moral obligation of the United States in these countries?

I suspect that it is different in Iraq than in Afghanistan. In both of course the United States was a principal member of a coalition that forced regime change. In Afghanistan the coalition was primarily composed of Iraqi forces that opposed the Taliban and the Taliban regime had actively supported the Al Qaeda network that was responsible for the 9/11 bombing. In Iraq the coalition was primarily foreign forces and there seems to have been no connection of the Saddam Husein regime with either Al Qaeda or 9/11. The different circumstances would seem to imply different responsibilities.

What does it mean "to fix" the situation left by the invasion? What is the range of feasible possibilities? What are the preferences of the people of these nations among feasible possibilities, and is there even a way to judge feasibility? How much of the responsibility for fixing things lies with the governments and peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan, how much with the coalition, and how much with the United States? What does the United States do if the partners in rebuilding are not pulling their weight.

I suspect that political leadership will be required to mold public opinion to do the right thing. I hope that our political leaders are debating the issues put forward in the paragraphs above in order to see the morality of our responsibility as well as the economic imperatives, the foreign policy objectives and the political opportunities.

Thoughts on reading Nye on Technology and Cultural Diversity

Chapter 5 of David Nye's book Technology Matters: Questions to Live With is titled "Cultural Uniformity, or Diversity?" Again he summarizes a lot of different information, including a lot from the literature.

It seems to me that it is important to differentiate cultural diversity within nations versus between nations.

Within Nations

Centripetal Forces: As Nye points out, 19th century political theory of the "nation state" was related to an effort to unify culture within nations, as in the invention of mythical cultural histories. It also seems clear that mass media contributed to cultural centripetal forces of homogenization within national markets when there were relatively few networks; so too the economies of scale realized by early mass production of uniform products, the Model T Ford being the prototypical example. One could suggest that the development of railroads, telegraph and similar technology based infrastructure, by making larger nation states possible, led to gathering of groups such as those speaking the Italian dialects or the German dialects into single nations, tending to lead to cultural unity among previously diverging groups.

Centrifugal Forces: It would seem that the media have exploded, with more stations or channels available per person. Perhaps more importantly, the Internet makes point to point communication as affordable as one-to many communication. These forces have resulted in audiences with many niches, each satisfying a different subgroup within the nation. Similarly, it has become possible, largely through technological advances, to produce consumer goods in a large variety of styles.

Among Nations

There are many signs that globalization is homogenizing cultures among nations. Many more people are speaking the global languages while many languages are dying out. I have visited some 50 countries and in all of them have seen similar buildings and similar styles of clothing, not to mention similar infrastructures of roads, electricity, radio, television, and telephones.

If one thinks of culture as composed of many memes, then it seems obvious that people within a nation will have much more opportunity to be exposed to foreign memes when they see movies or television programs from foreign countries, when they access information from foreign countries via the Internet, when international travel has become cheap and easy with airlines, and as goods and even services are traded more and more among nations.

Of course, powerful technology allows people who can appropriate it for their purposes to act powerfully. We see some countries with powerful governing bodies which seek to protect aspects of their culture using powerful technologies to assert control and reduce influences promoting cultural diversity. Think about Ireland broadcasting Gaelic League sports, or Japan broadcasting Sumo wrestling as ways of using 20th century technology to help keep national cultures live and divided from the cultures of other nations.

A Counter Intuitive Situation

Nye points out that there are now more ethnic restaurants in America than there once were. I suppose one reason that this is true is that it is now easier to immigrate due to the technological advances that underly globalization, and the new immigrants are opening (Vietnamese, Salvadoran, and other restaurants). So too, the increasing immigration is causing more cultural diversity within European nations (e.g. Polish immigration to Ireland, Muslim immigration to France, Turkish immigration to Germany, immigration from the subcontinent to the United Kingdom), leading to significant minority ethnic populations.

It seems that some cultures value diversity at least in some respects, while others oppose diversity at least in some respects. Two American women might be embarrassed showing up at the same function in the same outfit; two Saudi women might find comfort appearing in public in identical burkas. Advanced technology and the wealth generated by the appropriation and utilization of advanced technology should allow people to better achieve the homogeneity or heterogeneity that the desire in their clothing, housing, transportation and food. Indeed, technology might help the cultural trait of preference for diversity in such goods to be more widely spread within the nation state!

Nye introduces this discussion having already argued that technological change is combined with other factors as a "soft determinant" of cultural change, and he refrains from any value judgment as to whether cultural homogenization is better or worse than cultural diversification. However, there is so common a feeling that the loss of cultural diversity is a unfortunate that I want to address that issue.

Cultures change. I would bet that even the most conservative cultures, such as that of the Amish, change. Some of those changes are good! I am glad that the Aztec custom of cutting out the hearts of warriors as an offering to their gods is gone. I am glad that slavery has been abolished from most cultures on the earth. Technology itself is a part of culture, and almost everyone agrees that some technological innovations are desirable, such as those which reduce sickness and death rates, those which allow people to avoid hunger and choose a more rather than less comfortable life, and those which help people avoid the dangers of natural catastrophes, even if those innovations are the same in different ethnic groups. The issue of cultural change is, I believe, whether people feel empowered to control the nature of the changes of their culture. That feeling of empowerment is in part a function of political institutions and in part a function of people's understanding of the technologies influencing their culture and their implications.

This one of a series of postings on Technology Matters: Questions to Live With:

• A thought on reading Technology Matters
• How does an organization learn
• Technology Prognostication
• A Technology and Culture Case Study
• More on "Technology Matters"

More on "Technology Matters"

The 4th chapter of David Nye's book Technology Matters: Questions to Live With, is titled "How do Historians Deal With Technology". My thought it that few historians deal with technology at all, and most of those who do deal with technology seem to do so superficially. Fortunately there are some who are more serious about the theme.

Nye in fact seems to be more interested in historiography. He continues to illustrate his thesis with lots of well chosen examples.

He introduces a number of important concepts:

• "Technological momentum" is an idea promoted by Thomas Hughes. The momentum is not exhibited by a new technology in its early days as bugs are being sorted out and efficiency of use is low, but for some technologies in their maturity as major investments are made in devices embodying the technology, in facilities for the production of such devices, and in networks of support for the devices. Think about automobiles, auto factories, roads, service stations, etc.
• "Soft (technological) determinism" is an idea that technology the impact of technology on socio economic institutions is not fixed and inherent in the technology per se, but rather that technology influences these institutions along with other factors in ways contingent of the history of the introduction of the technology.
• "Internalist (technological) histories" which focus on inventors and developers of specific technologies or technological devices. He identifies The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder (a very good book) as an example of internalist history since it tells the story of the effort within a corporation to develop a new computer.
• "Externalist (technological) histories" which focus on the way in which economic, political, and cultural processes influence the development and diffusion of a technology. An externalist history of the Internet might focus on the military reasons behind the funding of packet switching technology, the reasons for the transfer of responsibility for the Internet from DARPA to NSF, the reasons that the World Wide Web developed at CERN was offered gratis to the world, and the political debate over Internet governance. I believe that all of these things influenced the way the Internet developed.

As I read Nye I find it important to deal better with the issue of planned (teleological) evolution versus evolution through natural, unplanned (teleonomic) processes. I suggest that even though a lot of people may be planning on how to achieve a final objective, the system in which they are involved may be teleonomic with order as an emergent property. Since Adam Smith we have understood that although the participants in a market may all be planning to maximize their individual profits, the market achieves clearing prices through natural, unplanned processes. Extending this metaphor, in the early days of the automotive industry there were many manufactures, each of which was planning ways to maximize profits. The market resulted in some of the products of some of the makers being more or less successful. Eventually unplanned market forces combined with the planning of the makers resulted in numbers of closely related products competing in niche markets. Ultimately I think technological evolution is best understood as involving both teleologic and teleonomic processes.

This one of a series of postings on Technology Matters: Questions to Live With:

• A thought on reading Technology Matters
• How does an organization learn
• Technology Prognostication
• A Technology and Culture Case Study

A comment on "Mexico: A History"

I have been reading Mexico: A History by Robert Ryal Miller. I have read several chapters that deal with the pre-Columbian indigenous society, the conquest by the Spanish, and the colonial period. I have been enjoying the book as it is full of interesting detail. I have spent a total of several months in Mexico, having visited it many times over many decades, and the book helps to both bring back a lot of experiences and to put them into a larger context.


However, it seems to miss the most important point. The Mexican population was estimated to be more than 25 million in 1520, and had been cut to just over one million in 1605. The Spanish had brought with them not only European crops and livestock, but also European diseases which ravaged the indigenous (and immigrant) population. As the population plummeted and the Spanish imposed their institutions on the indigenous population, all sorts of systems and institutions must have failed adding to the crisis.


Think about what it would mean to have a 96 percent cut in population. Think of the U.S. population cut from 300 million to 12 million in less than a century. I live in the Washington DC metropolitan area, which currently has a population of some 8.2 million people. Were that cut by 96 percent, there would be some 330 thousand people left in the region. They would be living amidst the ruins of cities built for far larger populations. I bet the remaining population could not or would not support the infrastructure of roads, aqueducts, sewerage, and electrical supply, and people would be living in a far more primitive state. So too the economy would be far less complex and far less able to provide a high standard of living for the remaining people.


Think of Rome in the depth of the Middle Ages or Constantinople when it fell to the Turks, ruined remains of great civilizations in which a few survivors sought to survive.


Now think of an American remnant population trying to deal with a Chinese speaking government, under the influence of a foreign religion, and subjected to a system of peonage.


I suspect that we tend to think of Mexican history from the point of view of the European invaders, who are after all the ones who left most of the records (although there are some from Europeanized Aztecs or mestizos who were of the upper class). The point of view of the peasant survivors of a once great civilization would have been more desperate, angry and depressed.

A technology and culture case study:

Image source

According to Wikipedia, district heating is a system for distributing heat generated in a centralized location for residential and commercial heating requirements such as space heating and water heating. Countries differ greatly in the degree to which district heating is used versus individual building or household heating.

District heating has a long history. It is especially efficient where there is an appropriate, low cost source of concentrated energy such as waste heat from an electric power plant or a geothermal energy source. Even without such sources, however, district heating can ofter provide area and water heating at lower cost that individual heating.

There is a ratchet effect in the choice between individual or district heating. If a community initially makes the investment in one or the other form, then it is hard to justify a new investment to replace the existing system.

Sweden is known for wide spread use of district heating, while the United State tends to use individual heating, even in the urban areas with cold winters. It has been suggested that the difference is related to the cultural preference of Americans for individual control and of Scandinavians for community based solutions (Think of Swedish socialism versus U.S. rejection of socialism).

Russia installed district heating systems widely during the Communist period, but is thought to be moving away from them. Apparently with the fall of Communism it became socially difficult to maintain the communal systems, and their users are finding shortfalls of service. One might see the difference between sustainability in the Communist era and failures of maintenance and service in the post-Communist era as a result of the cultural changes that occurred with the fall of Communism.

Technology Prognostication

I recently posted some reflections on the first two chapters of David Nye's book, Technology Matters: Questions to Live With. In his third chapter, he asks "is technology predictable", answering his own question that he believes technology is inherently unpredictable.

Nye differentiates among three varieties of prognostication:

• predicting (the unknown)
• forecasting (possibilities) and
• projecting (probabilities)

I am not sure his subdivision of prognostication is widely accepted, and I suspect that there is something circular in saying the prediction relates to the unknown, and deciding that one can not predict technology. On the other hand, the chapter includes a number of examples of technology prognostication, beautifully but briefly described. He clearly makes the case that many business leaders fail to prognosticate technological developments that came to critically impact on their businesses.

I was somewhat disappointed with his treatment of the diffusion of personal computer and Internet technologies. In both cases there was a virtuous cycle. As more and more killer applications appeared for PCs and the Internet, more and more people found the investment worthwhile. As the volume increased and economies of scale were realized, it became less and less expensive to acquire and utilize the technology. As the market expanded, more and more people worked on developing killer apps. Moreover, there were "network economies", such as the increasing value of the Internet to each user as it connected that user to more and more people and information.

Nye is certainly right in his view that experts in technology often provide poor predictions of how their technologies will be used. Nye does not use the example, but consider the people in developing countries who used the early personal computers as status symbols (or doorstops), but did not utilize any of their application software packages.

Nye does not address the prognostication of needs, but that has important technological implications. Thus the prediction of global warming is driving research in energy conservation technology, in renewable energy technologies, in technologies to capture greenhouse gases, and in technologies to ameliorate the negative impacts of global warming when they occur.

Similarly, Nye does not address the prognostication of availability of resources. I suppose that people started to develop coal technologies historically as it the prediction of depletion of forest resources became more obvious. Now, as it seems that oil reserves will eventually be used up, research and development is focusing on alternatives to petroleum.

One might also consider prognostication of the discovery and harnessing of properties. Bell Labs began research on solid state physics based on the prognostication that properties would be found in that research that would allow for the development of good alternatives for vacuum tubes in the communications field. Lee Howard, then Director of the Office of Health at USAID, supported research toward a malaria vaccine on the belief that eventually properties of the human immune system and/or the Plasmodium would be found that would allow immunization against the disease (even though immunization had only been applied successfully to viral and bacterial diseases and malaria is a parasitic disease causedby a more complex organism).  So too IAVI began supporting research on an HIV vaccine based on the prognostication that properties would be found allowing HIV immunization (even though HIV is a highly variable retrovirus that attacks cells in the immune system itself). We don't hear of the prognostications of this type that fail, but those that succeed are very important.

For several decades a part of my job was getting scientific advice for USAID. I think an important part of that function related to prognostications from the S&T community for the bureaucracy. Some successes:

• In the 1970s I chartered an NAS workshop on tropical deforestation helping to draw attention to the rapid rate of environmental degradation that was occurring (and would continue) and the problems that would create for development in the affected areas.
• In 1981 I chartered an NAS workshop on the implications of biotechnology for development, focusing on biomedical, agricultural, and energy technology implications of the field.
• In 1981 I chartered a series of NAS workshops and monographs on the personal computer and the implications of PC technology and its diffusion for developing nations.
• In the mid 1980s I helped organize a seminar at the AAAS Annual Meeting on the AIDS epidemic and its likely impact on social and economic development.
• In 1991 I chartered a workshop on computer networking and the implications of the Internet for developing nations.

In all of these cases, it was not possible to predict in detailed accuracy the future developments under study, but in all of these cases it was possible to identify issues that should have been addressed by policy makers. Unfortunately, those issues were seldom adequately addressed.

The problem may not be with prognostication, but with getting people in leadership positions to attend to those prognostications. We might call this the Casandra principle, after the Greek myth of Casandra, a woman granted with the gift of prophecy, but inflicted with the curse that no one would ever believe those predictions.

Casandra, attacked by Ajax in the Temple of Athena

From a house in Italy (Source)

A couple of oldies but goodies

The American Association for the Advancement of Science is concerned with improving literacy in science, technology and mathematics in the American public. This is a long term concern, and one of the key instruments for such improvement is the school system. Thus the AAAS seeks to improve teaching and learning of these subjects. A couple of old but still valuable resources it has put on the Internet are:

• Science for All Americans Online
  
• Atlas of Science Literacy, Volumes 1 and 2.

How does an organization learn

I want to extend the previous posting which focused on technology to discuss how an organization learns. I defined technology as a body of knowledge about how to accomplish useful purposes embodied in devices, materials (such as pharmaceuticals and seeds), facilities and infrastructure, people and institutions. I will focus on the corporation, and indeed the formally organized business corporation.

Organizational learning is then a change in the knowledge embodied in an organization, and indeed I would suggest that "learning" implies either a change that directly improves performance or has the potential to improve future performance. We would not suggest that acquisition of new knowledge that is unrelated to any useful task would be organizational learning. (An employee picks up a piece of gossip about a movie star. Is that organizational learning? I define it not to be.)

Knowledge in an organization can be embodied in devices, materials, facilities and infrastructure, people, and institutional knowledge within the organization. Such knowledge may be technological, but it may also be of other kinds related to the organization's operation, such as knowledge of the market in which it sells its products, or the markets from which it obtains goods and services, or knowledge of government regulations, the general evolution of the economy, or many other topics. By "institutional knowledge" within the organization I mean knowledge embodied in its structure and procedures, formal or informal.

Given the previous discussion of technology, let us start with that kind of knowledge. Clearly it is important for organizations to gain technological knowledge. A common means of doing so is to acquire new facilities that allow for improved production. Even when such acquisitions are "turn key", they involve people in the organization learning to operate the new facilities, and changes in the organization's processes and structures to deal with the new facilities.

A process of critical importance to technology intensive firms is learning by acquiring new employees whose technological knowledge adds to that of current staff, and bringing that new knowledge to bear on issues where it benefits the firm. However, technology intensive organizations often improve performance by reorganizations which move people around to bring people with critical technological knowledge to work where they are most needed; this kind of reorganization too can be a form of organizational learning.

This brings up the problem of what is meant by "within an organization". I would suggest that bringing in a consultant to advise for a limited time on a specific issue may be seen as organizational learning. The consultant brings knowledge which he/she has gained to bear on the problems of the firm while being paid by the firm. Of course, the organization may "forget" that information when the consultant goes on to other corporations, unless he/she teaches the information to staff members who stay behind.

Incidentally, forgetting can be valuable. Think of "unlearning" things which prove counterproductive or which were once useful but are outdated.

Note that a number of pharmaceutical firms have chosen to buy biotechnology from small research and development organizations rather than try to develop strong biotechnology capacities within the firm. We would see the purchase of such a biotechnology as technological learning by the pharmaceutical firm. So too would be purchase of a small biotech firm by a large pharmaceutical firm to acquire its technology and technological capacity.

 I would suggest, however, that there is something like a market for such new biotechnologies, with a number of firms seeking to develop and sell biotechnology, and a number of other firms seeking to purchase the technology. In any market or market-like institution there is learning both by those who would sell and those who would buy. In some cases the lessons are simple; in others they are complex, difficult and sometimes very expensive to learn. Thus even the decision to outsource, with the obvious element of losing knowledge that once was incorporated within an organization, normally will involve acquisition of other new knowledge.

Here is a metaphor. Someone has been preparing full meals at home from raw materials. The person discovers that it is possible to prepare better meals less expensively by purchasing per-prepared ingredients from several sources. Over time, the person loses some of the skills that once were used in preparing meals fully from raw materials, but has learned how to prepare better meals more efficiently. This kind of learning goes on all the time in McDonalds.

Banks have long been inventing software for different purposes. The "dusty deck" software remains even when the people who developed it have gone on to other jobs in other firms. Some of the knowledge involved in carrying out those purposes is embodied in the software (and in the people who use it, and the organizational procedures and structures utilized by those using the software.) Now some banks are consolidating there many data bases into a common software platform, and in so doing either buying the platform from outside or employing outside consultants -- both forms of organizational learning, as is the introduction of a new platform with greater technological capacity.

What shall we say about the voluminous data held by such banks? If the bank does not have the capacity to mine the data it is hard to say that it has knowledge. If, however, the new software allows the bank to now mine and utilize that data better, in some sense the data has been better internalized as "knowledge" and we can say learning has taken place.

I suggest that the border distinguishing an organization from the rest of the world is a fuzzy concept, and perhaps the border is best seen as somewhat amorphous. As mentioned above, consultants and contractors can be seen as within an organization sometimes, and other times as outside its border.

Consider an organization's website. Since the website will provide information about the organization to its visitors, clearly the servers and software in some sense embody knowledge of the organization. Most organizations also utilize their websites for automated transactions, and one may conceive as the knowledge of how to conduct such transactions for the organization to be embodied in the hardware and software providing the website. However, the users of the organization's website also must learn in order to more effectively find the information that they seek or to perform the transactions from their side. Some of that learning is transferable to other websites, but some of it is specific to one organization. Is it appropriate to attribute part of the user learning as "organizational learning" and part as more general learning of the user?

Some organizations will create technological knowledge by internal invention, deepening of craft skills and understanding, and research. This is especially true for large, high technology firms. Any firm or organization will be likely to create only a small part of the technological knowledge it comes to embody. Thus in technology, as in other forms of knowledge, a key issue is how the firm comes to obtain technological knowledge from outside itself.

I would suggest that as organizations grow larger, they need to duplicate embodiments of the same or similar knowledge. A firm will need more workers with similar skills and knowledge as it increases production. Each of the office workers in a firm may need his/her own personal computer and software, embodying copies of some of the firms knowledge, and as the office workforce increases more copies of that embodied knowledge will be employed. I suppose these too are forms of knowledge acquisition or learning.

We should be long past the idea that organizational decision making in large organizations is centered in one person or a small group of people. So the control of organizational learning should be considered a distributed function. On the other hand, organizations and especially formal organization, do have structures of authority, and some decisions related to organizational learning are more centralized than others. The board of directors with the advice of the leading operational officers may make decisions as to whether to buy a new plant or merge with another firm, while each employee will make some decisions independently on what job related skills or information to seek to acquire in what time frame.

It is a truism that the world is changing ever more rapidly and that as a consequence organizational success depends on learning to learn better and more rapidly. Figuring out how an organization will respond to this challenge is of course a hugely complicated task, but one facilitated by recognizing the complexity of organizational knowledge systems, the complexity of the embodiments of organizational knowledge, and the processes of organizational change.

A thought on reading Technology Matters

I am reading Technology Matters: Questions to Live With by David Nye. In his first chapter he defines "technology", providing a useful brief history of such definitions.

I continue to prefer to think of technology as a body of knowledge about how to accomplish useful purposes. I can then think of this knowledge as embodied in devices, materials (such as pharmaceuticals and seeds), facilities and infrastructure, people and institutions. We can impose categories on this knowledge, such as the technologies in a given system (e.g. the Internet and Internet based applications, roads, vehicles and their support) or in a given domain (e.g. chemical technology, electrical technology). There are also networks of related forms of technological knowledge:

• Some devices are in fact built out of other devices, as a car includes an engine, a drive chain, wheels and steering. These in turn are built of other devices, as an internal combustion engine requires fuel pump, carburetor, etc.
• Steel is made in mills, using furnaces, etc. The mills in turn are furnished with devices, each of which is produced by another process, and these factories are in turn equipped with devices made is still other factories.

Thus the body of technological knowledge is highly structured, and this structure in part determines the growth of the body of technology. So too does the real world and the needs it imposes on mankind, as well as the properties of nature that are available to mankind with which to build devices.

In Nye's second chapter he considers technological determinism -- the idea that technology determines social and economic relations and that technological change drives social and economic change. Again, he provides a brief but useful history of the evolution of the concept of technological determinism.

Considering technology as a global body of information (exhibiting different patterns of embodiment in different geographic regions and different cultures), it seems clear that there is no institution capable of controlling the changes in technology. Indeed, as Brian Arthur points out in The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves, the body of techological knowledge evolves under its own imperatives, beyond control. Of course, many governments seek to stimulate invention and technology deepening, especially within their borders and to promote economic growth within their own economies. There is some controversy over their success in such efforts, but even the most powerful states control only a portion of global technological invention and deepening.

Nye gives a couple of famous examples of rejections of the use of technology -- the Japanese Giving Up the Gun: Japan's Reversion to the Sword, 1543-1879 and Mennonite rejection of the use of many modern technologies. Note that the Japanese did not give up knowledge of guns, nor of how to make guns, and indeed guns were stockpiled in armories, but simply not used. So too, the Mennonite community rejection of automobiles and telephones is done on the basis of knowledge of those devices, and with the possibility of reversing the decision at any time and purchasing devices and learning to use them.

Thus these two examples are of institutions involving a single culture in limited geographical areas choosing collectively to give up the use of specific devices. Of course there are many examples of cultural differences in the way technological knowledge is embodied. Europeans, Americans and Indians use quite different kinds of motor vehicles; French, Chinese and American kitchens use quite different devices for the preparation of food.

It seems clear that any reading of history would suggest that social and economic organization have been different in different ages, and that the technology available during an age limits the forms of organization possible in that age. One could not have large nation states without transportation and communications technology, embodied in transportation and communications infrastructures, capable of sustaining government authority over a large region. Similarly, one could not have markets covering large geographic areas without technologies and their embodying technologies capable of sustaining such large markets. It seems quite reasonable to believe that where technologies make large scale infrastructures capable of increasingly efficient governance and economic institutions possible, they will tend to evolve, even over the objections and in spite of counter efforts of existing power elites.

In short, it would seem that technology, culture and socio-economic institutions co-evolve. Each influences the other. All are evolving influenced by the planning of many individuals in many organizations, and each evolving beyond the deterministic control of any individual or group. It is only in the relatively constrained geographic and cultural contexts can decisions be made effectively to limit the use of specific technologies. Even in these cases, power is constrained. The choice of Mennonites to limit agricultural technologies will affect the ability of their communities to export agricultural products into larger markets; the choice of the Japanese to give up the gun proved not to survive the opening of Japan by foreign military forces.

The U.S. leadership in high technology may be threatened

Source: Main Science and Technology Indicators (MSTI): 2010/1 edition, OECD

Note that the United States ranks quite low among OECD nations in terms of the portion of GDP devoted to research and development in the private sector. While the United States ranks high in military R&D, that may well not yield as much benefit in terms of quality of life, economic growth, and international competitiveness.

The United States Did Not Support "Water as a Human Right" UN Resolution

Source: "Why The United States Did Not Support "Water as a Human Right" Resolution," Mark Leon Goldberg, UN Dispatch, July 28, 2010

The United Nations General Assembly recently voted for a resolution that declares that access to water and clean sanitation to be a human right. From the UN News Center:

Safe and clean drinking water and sanitation is a human right essential to the full enjoyment of life and all other human rights, the General Assembly declared today, voicing deep concern that almost 900 million people worldwide do not have access to clean water.

The 192-member Assembly also called on United Nations Member States and international organizations to offer funding, technology and other resources to help poorer countries scale up their efforts to provide clean, accessible and affordable drinking water and sanitation for everyone.

The Assembly resolution received 122 votes in favour and zero votes against, while 41 countries abstained from voting.

One of those 41 abstentions was the United States. In an explanation of the United States vote, John F. Sammis, U.S. Minister Counselor to the Economic and Social Council, argued that "This resolution describes a right to water and sanitation in a way that is not reflective of existing international law; as there is no "right to water and sanitation" in an international legal sense as described by this resolution."

Here is the full explanation of vote by Sammis.

Explanation of Vote by John F. Sammis, U.S. Minister Counselor to the Economic and Social Council, on Resolution A/64/L.63/Rev.1, the Human Right to Water, July 28, 2010

Mr. President,

The United States is deeply committed to finding solutions to our world's water challenges. We support the goal of universal access to safe drinking water. Water and sanitation issues will be an important focus at this September's Millennium Development Goal Summit. The United States is committed to working with our development partners to build on the progress they have already made in these areas as part of their national development strategies.

Water is essential for all life on earth. Accordingly, safe and accessible water supplies further the realization of certain human rights, and there are human rights obligations related to access to safe drinking water and sanitation.

The United States supports the work of the UN Human Rights Council's Independent Expert on the issue of human rights obligations related to access to safe drinking water and sanitation. In fact, we co-sponsored the resolution on Human Rights and Access to Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation last September at the Human Rights Council in Geneva. We look forward to receiving the next report of the Independent Expert. We also look forward to a more inclusive, considered, and deliberative approach to these vital issues in Geneva than we have unfortunately experienced on this resolution in New York.

And I would just add to my prepared remarks that these concerns are not alleviated by the fact that just this morning, we have seen an amendment made to what the lead sponsor viewed as the core operative paragraph of the resolution from the floor. This again is an imposition on all of us. We haven't had sufficient time to really consider the implications of this, and I think that it would have been far better, under the circumstances, not to bring this resolution forward for action today.

The United States had hoped to negotiate and ultimately join consensus on this text, on a text, that would uphold and support the international process underway at the Human Rights Council.

Instead, we have here a resolution that falls far short of enjoying the unanimous support of member States and may even undermine the work underway in Geneva. This resolution describes a right to water and sanitation in a way that is not reflective of existing international law; as there is no "right to water and sanitation" in an international legal sense as described by this resolution.

The United States regrets that this resolution diverts us from the serious international efforts underway to promote greater coordination and cooperation on water and sanitation issues. This resolution attempts to take a short-cut around the serious work of formulating, articulating and upholding universal rights. It was not drafted in a transparent, inclusive manner, and the legal implications of a declared right to water have not yet been carefully and fully considered in this body or in Geneva.

For these reasons, the United States has called for a vote and will abstain on this resolution.

Comment: Clearly adequate amounts of drinking water are essential to life, and thus access to drinking water must be considered a fundamental human right. Safe drinking water and sanitation are fundamental elements of public health. Indeed, water born and water washed diseases remain major causes of illness and death in developing nations. Drawing water remains a huge burden on the time and strength of millions in developing nations. Clearly potable water supply and sanitation should be a focus of major efforts of developing nation governments and foreign aid. Lets hope the diplomats can figure a way to support such efforts in the United Nations.

Two Graphs from the July 31 issue of The Economist

Source

Globally, the recession is over, due I suppose to the concerted action of the governments of the world to save their countries' financial institutions and their economic stimulus policies. Of course not all countries are doing equally well. Let us hope that there is no double dip as has happened in the past.

Source

This is really very impressive, reflecting both the economic success of Brazil in the last two decades and pro-poor policies. There may be some things disguised in the data, such as inflation and changes in exchange rates, but the trend is so large, and continued over various governments that there has probably been a real major reduction in poverty. Of course, there is a huge variance in poverty rates among the geographic regions of Brazil.

Why is the United States not a member of the BIE?

The convention creating the International Bureau of Expositions (BIE from the title in French) was created in 1928.

What is the role of the BIE?
The role of the BIE is to regulate the frequency of exhibitions under its jurisdiction, to ensure their quality and to guarantee that they are organised in compliance with international law. These exhibitions include all international exhibitions of a duration superior to three weeks (excluding fine arts exhibitions) and of non-commercial nature, organised by a state and for which the invitations are sent to other states by the diplomatic channel. Fairs are thus not included, and commercial activities are seriously regulated in the Expos organised under the auspices of the BIE.

There are 157 nations that have ratified the convention and are now member states of the BIE. The United States, however, is not among them. After several decades of participation, the United States' membership lapsed in 2002 after two consecutive years of non-allocation of funds by the American congress. It is unclear why the congress chose not to fund the United States' membership in the BIE, particularly since it is only $25,000 per year.

Of course, the reason most countries participate is that membership facilitates holding a world expo in the country, an event that not only draws tourists but contributes to exports and industry. So too, membership makes it possible for our diplomats to work to see than U.S. interests are promoted in all world expos.

If you agree that the United States should rejoin, I suggest that you contact your representatives in the congress and you senators and send a short message. You can do so by visiting the following sites:


http://www.house.gov/writerep/

and

http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

Brain Gain through wise immigration policy

I quote from the Brookings Institution website on "Brain Gain":

Many of America’s greatest artists, scientists, inventors, educators, and entrepreneurs have come from abroad. Rather than suffering from the “brain drain” of talented and educated individuals emigrating, the United States has benefited greatly over the years from the “brain gain” of immigration. These gifted immigrants have engineered advances in energy, information technology, international commerce, sports, arts, and culture. To stay competitive, the United States must institute more of an open-door policy to attract unique talents from other nations. Yet Americans resist such a policy despite their own immigrant histories and the substantial social, economic, intellectual, and cultural benefits of welcoming newcomers. Why?

U.S. Mood Throughout the Day inferred from Twitter

This website is a good illustration of the way one can illuminate a complicated phenomenon using inventive graphics.

Mining Twitter posts for indications of a social condition is a great example of an investigation that is unlikely to influence what is being studies nor inconvenience the people providing the information.

Incidentally, it is interesting to observe that the sunny parts of the United States seem happier than the North East, and that the country is less happy during business hours and happier in the evening.

A thought about risk

Andrew Lo has an interesting talk posted by MIT in which he sets forth a taxonomy of uncertainty and risk, crossed with levels of action. He suggests that physics is a field in which 3 laws are enough to predict 97 percent of what is of interest to physicists, while economics is a field where 97 laws are enough to predict 3 percent of what interests economists.

I got lost in the discussion thinking about whether it is the same to bet $5,000 on the flip of a coin, or to give someone $5,000 and get either nothing or $10,000 back according to the flip of a coin. Of course, from a formal point of view the bet is the same, but somehow it doesn't seem the same. In discussing the bet, Lo doesn't focus on the fact that people are risk adverse, and that they hate to give up what they already have.

Lo's fundamental point is that economic models that were originally postulated for academic (and didactic) purposes are used in the real world. Indeed, it has been charged that the quants who developed models for making bets in the financial world assumed too often that those models were good predictors of behavior, and we all got into trouble when investors got into behaviors at the bursting of the real estate bubble that was not accurately predicted by the equations.

Now I was trained as an engineer, and engineers can be seen as our means of reducing uncertainty. Think about auto transportation. A century ago, auto transportation was a risky business. Now automotive engineers have produced auto drive trains that companies can guarantee for five years or 50000 miles. Automobile tires last reliably for tens of thousands of miles. The engineers have developed seat belts and air bags that make survival of crashes more likely even in the increasingly rare events of auto crashes. Civil engineers have developed roads that not only reduce the likelihood of breakdowns and punctures, but which reduce the probability of accidents. The improved reliability of aircraft is even more notable.

Some of the techniques to reduce uncertainty are brute force. When designing a structure, engineers will figure out how much steel to use to carry the heaviest expected loads, and then they will multiply the strength in the design to achieve a safety factor.

It seems to me that we need "financial engineers" to design financial instruments and systems to reduce uncertainty. Lo pointed out that actuarial analysis seems able to do this for life insurance. Perhaps we could apply the same approach to other financial matters.