More on The Nature of Technology

Chapter 8 of Brian Arthur's book, The Nature of Technology: What it is and How it Evolves, is titled "Revolutions and Redomaining". Recall that Arthur uses the term "domain" to refer to technological fields such as chemical technology, electronics technology or railroad technology. He makes the important point that once there is a breakthrough in the development of a useful and important technology in a domain, the domain tends to see other related technologies introduced. Indeed he provides valuable insights on the process of evolution within a technological domain.

I have written in the past about surgery, which I think would qualify as a domain in Arthur's definition. There are many related surgical procedures, each with its specific objectives. The surgeon uses a variety of devices such as surgical implements and diagnostic imaging devices in order to perform surgery. I would add that the surgeon has learned a great deal in order to use those devices well in achieving his surgical objectives. Thus surgery seems to qualify as a technological domain. (Indeed, surgery as a technological domain may have co-evolved with the health service industry and an number of social institutions modified by the impact of a more and more useful surgical practice,)

Surgery has been performed for a very long time. Included in the classical surgical casebook are amputations, caesarian sections and trepanning. These interventions, however were quite rare in the distant past as compared with the frequency of modern surgery, largely because they were so painful and so often deadly. Before surgery could become an important economic domain several things had to occur:

• Anaesthesia had to be developed to eliminate the pain experienced by the patient during a surgical operation.
• The nature of infections had to be discovered and antiseptic technology developed to prevent infections resulting from the open wounds created by surgery.
• Anatomy and physiology had to be developed to the point that the surgeon could identify useful interventions and could perform them with a reasonable chance of success.

When these factors were in place, the field of surgery could evolve as surgeons learned more, as new devices were invented and proven, and as surgical innovators developed new operations and surgical techniques.

I suggest that perhaps other domains also require specific conditions to exist before they can evolve successfully. Electronics technology could only evolve after electrification, and computer technology could only evolve after both electrification and electronics had developed. Railroads required the Bessemer process to produce steel efficiently, the steam engine, and eventually the use of coal as a fuel to flower as a domain.

In the chapter, Arthur (although surely aware of them) does not emphasize Thomas Hughes insights relevant to technological systems. In the case of electricity, it makes no sense to generate and distribute electrical power unless there are uses for that power. Edison created the generation and distribution system, but also the first "killer app", the electric light. Other killer apps followed -- electrical motor driven trolleys, electrical motor powered machines in factories, phonographs, radios, refrigerators, electric stoves, etc. The term "killer app" itself comes from the personal computer sub-domain of the computer domain, and refers to the sequence of killer apps -- word processing, spread sheets, data base software, email, and the Internet and World Wide Web -- that have led to the commodification of the personal computer and the sale of billions of the devices.

Arthur addresses the important feature that there is a history of geographical clustering in the development of technological domains -- cotton cloth in England in the Industrial Revolution, chemical manufacturing in Germany in the 19th and early 20th century, computers in Silicon Valley in the last half century. He uses different terms, but refers to the knowledge spill overs that occur among enterprises, schools and scientific centers in such a cluster. He might have focused more on the knowledge that has to be embodied in supporting institutions for such a center of innovation, such as knowledge of how to finance technological firms in the financial institutions serving the area, knowledge of how to foster development in the governance institutions, and knowledge of how to deal with intellectual property, norms and standards in there relevant institutions.

Arthur talks about "deep craft", the body of understanding held by people in a technology cluster which is used to make innovation and quality production possible and even easy. I suspect that in part we fail often to recognize the importance of craft knowledge due to social stratification. I recall as a young engineer how much I didn't know and how much I depended on good technicians who worked with me and provided some of that craft knowledge and understanding. The certainly contributed greatly to any success we had together. Yet much of the credit seemed to go to the engineering and scientific staff.

I might have suggested that Arthur focus more on the distinction between explicit and tacit information. To some degree the difficulty in replicating a center of innovation in a domain is the difficulty in duplicating the implicit information. This is perhaps especially true in replicating in another geographical location the tacit information that is embodied in facilities and institutions, and in the linkages among institutions. Explicit information is easier to spread, although industrial clusters often protect explicit information as trade secrets (or in the past as secrets of a trade guild).

I liked Arthur's insight that domains have a lifetime. Some, such as the horse drawn buggy disappear replaced by a newer domain (the automobile), while others recede into an unremarked staple of our society, as has happened with potable water systems introduced in the 19th century or central air conditioning and heating.

Revolutions

One of the most important contributions that Arthur makes in this book is the discussion of technological revolutions. The technological revolution occurs as the technology domain and industry interact and co-evolve. Railroads evolved as people moved to locations newly served by the railroads, as markets grew geographically as railroads opened transportation options and reduced transportation costs, manufacturing enterprises grew adopting new technologies to realize economies of scale possible due to increased market size, etc. Computer networking has not only made it possible to re-engineer organizations to accomplish information processing tasks more efficiently using the information technology, but has allowed firms to outsource functions and concentrate on core functions due to the improved markets utilizing the evolving information infrastructure, and comparably to modify their relations with customers. I recall some 45 years ago helping a firm in Chile to improve its relationship with the banks financing its line of credit by introducing computer processing to improve the projection of financial needs over the course of the year.

Incidentally, I would recommend Alfred Chandler's book, The Visible Hand, for those interested in the way a technological revolution influences business organizations.

Arthur describes the decades long process of the technological revolution and explains why the institutional changes and co-evolution of the technology domain and its users takes so long. Indeed, he points out that it is this change that defines "time" in an industrial revolution. I wonder what factors influence the time frame for different technological revolutions. It seems to me that the revolution of communications introduced by the telegraph was much quicker than that of the revolution of transportation introduced by the railroad, but why? There seems to be a perception that technology is disseminating more rapidly in the modern world than in the past; is that a factor? I would guess that the more extensive the revolution, the longer it will take.

This is another in a sequence of postings occasioned by Arthur's book:

• Technology Deepening
• HIV/AIDS and the links between science and technology
• Thoughts on invention on reading Brian Arthur's book
• Classification and Technology
• A Thought About Engineering and Technology
• More on Arthur's Nature of Technology
• The Nature of Technology

A thought about thinking

I suspect that Homo sapiens has evolved to attribute order to agency. If a pattern appears then it must be that some thinking entity created that order. Thinking that way seems instinctive. When we argue from ignorance, we attribute things to the intervention of others, even spirits. The language of philosophers distinguish teleological systems (which are goal directed) from teleonomic systems (in which order appears without planning). Scientists have spent a great deal of effort to develop models that explain the appearance of order without planning:

• Statistics explains how many random samples from a distribution are likely to show properties like that of the original distribution.
• Feedback systems can maintain homeostasis without the intervention of a planner.
• Evolutionary processes can present order without planning.
• Indeed, our perceptual apparatus can make us believe we perceive order when it does not exist. Think of the visual illusion of the old woman-young woman when we perceive one or the other images in the same field; the mind imposes one of two ordered patterns in the perception of something which is in fact neither.

The languages I know are quite good in providing words like "planned" and "organized" to reflect teleological explanations for order, but are less useful in providing words to reflect teleonomic explanations. Indeed, many Americans believe that "evolution" requires planning.

It is increasingly believed by scientists that Homo sapiens has evolved to perceive others to be like us, and to attribute thought to others. We can not only guess what someone else is thinking, but what that person thinks another person is thinking, and so on. Of course, many of us will as a result attribute screw ups to deliberate action by others rather than to Murphy's law (that anything that can go wrong will go wrong). I have found it useful often to buck the trend and to assume that incompetence is more often the explanation of screw ups than ill will.

I suspect that our inherent tendency to attribute thoughts to others is linked to our tendency to assume teleology rather than teleonomy, and these are also linked to our lack of facilities in language to describe order appearing by natural rather processes rather than by the organization of an agent.

I suggest that it might be useful to have individual words for the following forms of real order:

• accidental order
• natural order (that arises from evolutionary, feedback and similar unplanned processes)
• planned order

and reflecting the possibility of perceiving order where none exists

• perceptually imposed order.

Any suggestions!

The Persistance Of Technological Gaps

My son just brought this comment from The Atlantic to my attention:

1500 AD technology is a particularly powerful predictor of per capita income today. 78 percent of the difference in income today between sub-Saharan Africa and Western Europe is explained by technology differences that already existed in 1500 AD – even BEFORE the slave trade and colonialism.

I have not read the original article, but I don't doubt the conclusion. That of course does not mean that countries that were best placed to exploit the "economic opportunities" of slavery and other conditions over the centuries did not profit from that exploitation.

There are also famous comparisons -- South Korea versus Ghana, South Korea versus Egypt in the last have century -- suggesting that countries starting in comparable technological conditions can progress very differently both technologically and economically. Indeed, the experience of all the "Tigers" suggests that rapid technological and economic progress is possible even while most countries retain their traditional places in the rankings.

Technology Deepening

Brian Arthur in his book, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves, has a chapter on technology deepening. I usually think of the term "technology deepening" as related to the capacity of a country or an industry with respect to a technology. Thus as newly industrializing countries began to learn how to manufacture computers and electronic devices they began with relatively simple tasks for which they had a relative advantage due to their low labor costs. With time their industries improved the efficiency of production and the quality of their products, while they developed the capacity to produce more complex products, to innovate technologically and eventually to make independent improvements in product and production technology.

Arthur uses the term in a more restrictive sense, focusing especially on what he perceives to be a tendency for the technology for a specific class of devices to become more complex over time. Thus combat aircraft and commercial jet aircraft have become more and more complex over many decades, as have many if not all of their subsystems.

It occurs to me that although this is true of his examples, I can also think of examples in which related technologies have become simpler. While combat fighters have become more complex we have also seen the development of ultra light airplanes, unmanned areal vehicles, hang gliders, and even human powered aircraft capable of crossing the English channel and kite-like devices capable of carrying a person when towed by a boat or car. Indeed, Brazil and Indonesia stand out in my mind as having airplane manufacturing industries that developed by producing aircraft for civil aviation that focused on market niches for simpler craft to meet the needs of the commercial airlines of developing nations. All these devices are all less complex than the high performance military airplanes or the planes intended for long-range commercial airline flights.

What seems to me to have happened is that over decades the market for aircraft has expanded and diversified, with many different devices becoming available for different niche markets, each satisfying a different set of purposes.

In this respect, the theorists who have advanced concepts of the social construction of technology seem to provide a useful perspective. Perhaps the most famous example provided by this school is the evolution of the bicycle. It was originally construed as a device for use by athletic young men, and thus one saw bicycles that were difficult to ride, such as the one pictured above. Bicycles construed as suitable for a wider population were different in form, as were bicycles construed as toys or locomotion devices for children again were built differently. The latest edition of bicycles for the racers in the Tour de France, which are made of extremely high tech materials and extremely precise standards, are construed for the very extreme needs of a very small set of users.

Extending this approach, society has constructed a large number of different purposes for aircraft devices, and industry has responded by developing and commercializing products satisfying the social demands. The technology has improved in the sense that designers know much more about wing design, power plant design, control design, etc. The technology has also improved in that much more is known about how to manufacture aircraft (e.g. robots are available now for some functions, which was unthinkable in the early days of airplane manufacture). Some of the aircraft are simpler than those of the past, some more complex.

This is one of a series of postings occasioned by Arthur's book.

• HIV/AIDS and the links between science and technology
• Thoughts on invention on reading Brian Arthur's book
• Classification and Technology
• A Thought About Engineering and Technology
• More on Arthur's Nature of Technology
• The Nature of Technology

HIV/AIDS and the links between science and technology

Soon after the AIDS epidemic was recognized it became apparent that the world was faced with a major public health crisis. Millions of people, perhaps many millions were going to die and there were no known ways to deal with the disease. As it became apparent that HIV was a retro-virus that attacked the immune system, that it was silent for some time even after the victims could infect others, and that it was quite contagious the problems became more evident and of greater concern.

Scientific research not only identified the nature of the virus and the way that it functioned, but epidemiological research soon identified that the disease was concentrated in homosexual males, in intravenous drug users, in those who had sexual contacts with these first groups and in certain geographical areas. It became obvious that public health measures should include campaigns to promote safe sex, case finding, campaigns to reduce transmission by shared needles among intravenous drug users, prevention of HIV transmission via blood transfusions, and that these measures were of greatest urgency in places in Africa and Haiti were the epidemic was most advanced. Epidemiological techniques were quickly applied to measuring the effectiveness of these approaches.

At the time of the discovery of the epidemic, there were no pharmaceuticals available to cure viral infections, much less infections of RNA retro-viruses. Indeed, decades later there are still none. A major research program was undertaken to develop anti-retroviral drugs which was successful first in development of AZT in the early 1990s, then other agents, and later the antiviral combinations that are now in use. The development of these drugs was greatly enhanced by scientific research illuminating the nature of the virus, the cells and organs it attacked, the natural history of the disease progression in patients, and the infective mechanisms.

It was thought that it might be possible to develop a vaccine to prevent infection at least in a large percentage of those who received the vaccine. Epidemiological evidence that some people seemed to be in high risk groups and engaged in behavior that created risk who did not exhibit HIV infection added to the hope that a vaccine could be found. Of course, decades have passed in which billions of dollars have been spent to develop such a vaccine, and we still do not have one; the problem is that the traditional approaches which worked with so many viral diseases did not work in developing an effective HIV vaccine. Still the effort continues, but it continues based on a vastly increased understanding of the HIV virus, the immune system, the population dynamics of the virus in the infected individual, and the processes of immunization; all this understanding was developed by biomedical science, much of it by research specifically intended to support HIV vaccine development.

In short, there has been a very serious and well financed scientific program developed in support of the effort to develop effective technology to limit the extent of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and to ameliorate the effects of the disease in those infected. Indeed, some of the scientific evidence that has been accumulated arises directly out of efforts to develop pharmaceutical agents to detect, prevent and cure the disease. Technology development and science have been so closely intertwined as to make it difficult to draw boundaries between scientific research and technology development. Indeed, investigators have told me that they write a proposal for support for their work to emphasize basic research, applied research or technology development according to the preferences of the funding agency rather than the nature of the project which they fully intend to prosecute if funded.

This is one of a series of postings occasioned by reading Brian Arthur's book, The Nature of Technology: What it is and How it Evolves:

• Thoughts on invention on reading Brian Arthur's book
• Classification and Technology
• A Thought About Engineering and Technology
• More on Arthur's Nature of Technology
• The Nature of Technology

BP

I usually refrain from posting on issues about which I know no more than the general public, but I am breaking that rule to post on BP. The news media suggest not only that the huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was from a BP well, but that BP has been the subject of many more actions due to unsafe conditions than other oil companies. There are also stories that BP has been less than forthcoming with information on the crisis.

There is also a story in the media that BP lobbied for the release of the Lockerbie bomber. Not coincidentally there is a lot of oil in Libya for which oil companies are competing. I take this quite personally as one of my friends was killed on Flight 103.

Now there is a move in Congress to remove subsidies for the production of ethanol. Note too that there are tariffs that protect American ethanol producers from the competition of Brazil's efficient ethanol industry. These moves would both promote use in the United States of a renewable fuel and save the consumer money. I have heard that BP is benefiting from a significant portion of the subsidies and protection of ethanol. I hope that BP lobbyists will be ignored if they seek to protect that transfer from the consumers and tax payers to BP coffers.

Thoughts on invention on reading Brian Arthur's book

Brian Arthur, in his book The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves has a chapter on invention. In the chapter he is focusing on major inventions rather than the innovations that accrue in the course of improvements and extensions of existing technologies. Thus he is focusing on important inventions, not the "me too" things that are given so frequent patent protection.

He suggests that these inventions can arise from thinking about new ways to approach a given problem or from a focus on a phenomenon. I suppose that the latter case might be either focusing on ways to use a newly discovered phenomenon or new ways to use an existing phenomenon.

I am not an inventor in the sense of producing transformative inventions, but some nearly 50 years ago I was asked to investigate whether a laser could be used for measuring distance. The laser was a new technology at the time. In my report saying yes, I mentioned that if you pointed a laser at a target, a missile with the right optics could navigate to that target much as a ship can navigate to a lighthouse on a dark night. I suspect this is an example of a phenomenon (the laser) leading to an application (missile guidance).

I also developed a then new algorithm for design of neural networks with a colleague that was the result of spending time on the problem of how to better develop computers to recognize patterns.

It occurs to me that sometimes new techniques can arise when two people meet, one with a problem and one with a "phenomenon" that may solve that problem. I had lunch years ago with a colleague who was interested in the design of reverse osmosis plants. He had developed a computer program to predict the throughput of a plant based on a number of parameters. I was doing my doctorate in operations research at the time, and saw immediately how hill climbing techniques could be applied to the optimization of the parameters using my friends model. I traced the method for him on a napkin and he went off happily to write the program. The result was a major publication, which I hope contributed to the development of the technology. There is a similar story of J.W. Cooley and John Tukey meeting, with Cooley concerned with better ways of doing fast fourier transforms, and Tukey having a method which he wrote out on the back of an envelope. The result was the Colley-Tukey algorithm.

As a manager of a research program I reviewed a great many project proposals that sought to find a phenomenon to solve a specific problem. Many of these focused on finding an appropriate diagnostic reagent or vaccine.

I am somewhat concerned with Arthur's differentiation of science and technology. For example, Penzias and Wilson discovered the Background Cosmic Radiation using technology developed to receive signals from a satellite. They discovered the background radiation as they were seeking to eliminate noise from their instrument to make it more effective as a detector. Where was the dividing line between the science (since the background cosmic radiation is a key discovery in cosmology) and the technology?

In my small way I discovered approaches to measure the information in pattern recognition systems leading to new statistical models and a better understanding of the errors made by people in classifications.

This is one of a series of postings occasioned by Arthur's book:

• Classification and Technology
• A Thought About Engineering and Technology
• More on Arthur's Nature of Technology
• The Nature of Technology

Per capita annual visitation rates for U.S. libraries

Source

I quote from the report.

Nationwide, per capita visitation increased every year during the study period, growing steadily from 4.13 in 1997 to 4.91 in 2007, an increase of 19 percent.

 The availability of Internet terminals in public libraries rose sharply between 2000 and 2007, increasing by 90 percent on a per capita basis. This dramatic increase is one example of the way U.S. public libraries are expanding their range of services to meet patron demand.

Jump in Fall 2008 Enrollments of First-Time, Full-Time S&E Graduate Students

The NSF reports that foreign science and engineering enrollment in the United States recovered after the Bush administration policies imposed after 9/11 and began to grow again in the second half of the last decade. Good news! The students that stay increase our scientific and technological capacity leading to economic advantages as well as strengthening our educational system, and the ones who go back abroad build scientific and technological linkages, leading in turn to economic linkages advantageous to the United States.

Where does all the computer power go?

Source: "Tracking HIV Evolution," Regina McEnery, IAVIReport, Vol. 14 (3), May-June 2010

The HIV retro-virus is notoriously variable. There are as many as 100,000 variants of the HIV virus in a single infected individual. There are data on the viruses found in at least 250,000 people. It is important to understand the viral population infecting specific human populations as scientists seek to find HIV vaccines. Moreover, the evolutionary history of HIV provides an important input to understanding the source and evolution of the epidemic.

Super computers have been used for some time to understand the population genetics of HIV. I quote from the cited article:

 Last year, through a unique arrangement that allowed a handful of scientists access to LANL’s latest supercomputer, the Roadrunner (pictured below), before it was moved to a classified computing network, Korber, computer scientist Marcus Daniels, and physicist Tanmoy Bhattacharya compared the evolutionary history of more than 10,000 genetic sequences from more than 400 HIV-infected individuals to try and identify common features of the virus that is transmitted and establishes infection. This work was done in collaboration with the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology (CHAVI), of which Korber is an investigator. CHAVI collected the samples from both acutely and chronically HIV-infected individuals from around the world. The samples were used to construct the world’s largest phylogenetic tree, with the end goal of identifying similarities in HIV sequences from samples taken during acute and chronic infection. A single HIV-infected person can have 100,000 different variants of the virus circulating throughout their body, so understanding how these variants branch off from the initially transmitted virus is important for the development of vaccine candidates. To build such a tree, LANL researchers needed Roadrunner‘s processing capability. Roadrunner does 1.042 petaflops, or a quadrillion calculations per second, using 122,400 processors. To gauge the power of Roadrunner, consider this: It took a single week to run a calculation on Roadrunner that the fastest supercomputer a decade ago needed 20 years to complete. 

The computer shown above is a multi-million dollar device. How many developing nations have that kind of computing power? How many of them could or would devote that kind of power to understanding the nature of the HIV virus? This is an indication of a digital divide!

Incidentally, this is one of a series of postings titled "Where does all the computer power go?" You should be able to track the  series using the search function, inputting the title.

Classification and Technology

Classification is the basis of science. There are two kinds of classification errors, classifying dissimilar things in the same category and classifying similar things in different categories. Think about mosquitoes. They are small and hard to see. Modern use of DNA analysis has demonstrated that what had been previously classed as single species by visual inspection were actually multiple, non-interbreeding species. What does this have to do with technology? Consider the possibility that only one of several sibling species is actually an important vector of malaria. What is the possibility that one would test methods for the control of the species, find that the methods reduce the population of a sibling species but fail to reduce the infection rate of the disease.

Cancer seems to be diagnosed largely on the basis of the location of a tumor, but different tumors in the same organ may be biologically and biochemically distinct. Medical researchers are now finding treatments that are very effective against sub-categories of cancers previously not distinguished one from another.

Of course, we sometimes find that the same treatment will succeed against a variety of diseases. This is the very meaning of "broad band" antibiotics -- they work against a variety of bacterial agents.

Thus in medical and public health technology it is important to have good classifications as to what remedy to apply to what class of situations. I would suggest that classifications are part of technological knowledge in these circumstances. The same would apply for soil classifications as a basis for soil amendments in agriculture, pest and disease classifications in veterinary medicine and treatment of crop diseases, and other areas.

A Thought About Engineering and Technology

Brian Arthur in his book, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves, has a chapter on engineering. The term "engineer" can refer to a member of one of the engineering professions or it can be a verb for a kind of manipulation. Arthur seems to use the term in a slightly different fashion, focusing on professional producers and users of technology rather than artisanal or journeyman producers and users of technology. I presume that he would say that the medical profession "engineers" medical technology, while others would consider engineering to apply primarily to the technology used by civil, mechanical, electrical, chemical and other engineering professions.

I am reminded of the traditional distinction between doctors of medicine (who were gentlemen educated in Latin) and surgeons (who came from the plebeian barber surgeons). Even today British surgeons are addressed as Mr. rather than Dr. reflecting that old distinction between medical practitioners who work with their hands and those who do not. There was a similar difference between French and English civil engineers in the 19th century; the French were trained through institutions of tertiary education while the English learned their profession through apprenticeship with senior civil engineers. The English were reportedly proud of their practical, hands-on approach.

It is interesting that some of my engineer colleagues are now using the term "science, technology and engineering" as if engineering is not fundamentally technology.

Arthur talks about electrical and chemical engineering as professions that emerged with the emergence of new technological domains that required a scientific background. They may be contrasted with military and civil engineering which were the earliest fields to emerge as requiring professional engineers. Of course, all engineers today are produced in colleges of engineering, have a grounding in science, and approach their work with strong analytic capabilities and a "toolkit" of engineering knowledge and technique.

It occurs to me that there is a significant difference in engineering practice according to the scale of the output. That would be typified by the range from the engineer building a road or a dam to the engineer designing a new personal computer to be sold as a commodity. I suspect that this is indeed a continuum, with intermediate stages. Thus there are engineers working to produce high performance race cars or space craft of which only a small number of units will be produced.

I think Arthur would agree that broadly defined, a road or a dam could be termed a device. In both cases the engineer would be concerned with the means of production of the desired device, albeit a construction project in the civil engineering case versus a production line in the electronics engineering project.

The civil engineer who is planning a road or a railroad is using his engineering synthesis skills to plan the construction, and is making choices for the bedding and surface of the route as well as for the cuts, tunnels, and grades to be used. Failing to recognize the importance of the technical choices to be made and the technology involved in building and maintaining civil works may be part of the reason that developing nations so often fail to develop adequate cadres of civil engineers.

Note also that there is a difference between engineers working in the public sector versus those working in the private sector. Both may have been trained in the same schools and have passed the same professional examinations, but the civil servant is doing engineering to achieve a public purpose while the the engineer in a commercial organization is of course concerned with the profits of the firms investors.

A strong engineering profession is fundamental for developing a strong infrastructure of roads, railroads, canals, airports, ports, electrical power systems, potable water and sewerage systems, and irrigation. These systems are critical to the economic productivity of the entire society. So too, in these days, a strong engineering profession is critical not only to manufacturing but also to technologically sophisticated industries such as medicine and financial services. In all these fields, professional engineers are needed both for their technological mastery but also for the professionalization that breeds responsibility and ethical conduct.

I have suggested that UNESCO strengthen its support for engineering, a support that would include emphasis on engineering education and for engineering professional societies (as well as professional certification and regulation of the professions). Such an effort would contribute to UNESCO's program supporting capacity development in less developed nations, and indeed only UNESCO among the UN agencies has a charter that would allow such a broad support of engineering capacity development. (Of course, the UN system should coordinate for such support, with FAO helping to support agricultural engineering, WHO helping to support biomedical engineering, the ITU helping to support electronics engineering, etc.)

Neil Tyson talks about UFOs and the argument from ignorance.

More on Arthur's Nature of Technology

Brian Arthur in his book, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves, recognizes the normal tendency to classify technologies into groups such as chemical, electronic, construction, etc. He notes that historical epochs can be immediately recognized by their characteristic technologies -- England in the industrial revolution by the steam engine, railroad and mill, the United States now by the internal combustion engine, the automobile and the personal computer.

It occurs to me that different cultures, even though they may be contemporaneous, may be easily recognizable by the differences in the technologies that they use. It is easy to distinguish a Japanese samurai from a European knight or a Mongolian warrior by the technology of their weapons and armor.

One of the key facts of the modern world is that different cultures use different technologies. There are still large areas of Africa that do not have electrical power lines, and consequently do not utilize electrical devices in either the diversity nor the quantity that are used in the United States. Poor people in the developing nations by their very poverty have less access to modern technological devices than the average people of wealthy countries -- fewer cars, fewer computers, fewer powered machines, fewer household appliances, fewer doctors with fewer diagnostic devices, etc.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the ability to compete for international markets in manufactured goods and in some services depends on the capacity of a region in the relevant technologies. Newly emergent economies have learned to compete in areas such as computer assembly, chip manufacture, and software services. They have begun with mastering relatively simple techniques and competing on the basis of low wages, then mastered more complex techniques allowing wages to increase until in some cases the developing nation's firms are introducing globally innovative technologies. On the other hand, the United States remains the world's largest exporter, in part due to its mastery of some technologies which are found not mastered in most nations.

A Thought About Technology and Music

Before Edison invented the phonograph in 1877 the only way to hear music was to directly hear a person making the music. (The player piano and mechanical music box being minor exceptions to this point.) When my parents were children a century ago, people still made music in the home as a major form of entertainment, but the phonograph switched people from making music in the home to listening to recorded music there. While Aubrey and Maturin may have played violin-cello duets in Patrick O'Brian's nautical novels, I suspect that most of the music played in the household was relatively simple, memorable and traditional.

By World War II people listened to music on the radio in the United States. A few radio networks dominated the airwaves and those networks had a major impact on the music tastes of their huge audiences. The audience for the short play records of the day was based on the music made popular by network radio. That music was developed for a least-common-denominator mass audience, yet there was also a considerable pressure for novelty in the specific songs and artists.

The post war years saw market penetration of television, a shift of radio from a primary to a secondary source of entertainment but one which had large numbers of stations available in at least the urban markets, and the introduction of long play records. It has been suggested that the market for music changed as a result of these changes in technology, creating a larger number of niche markets to substitute for the mass market for "June-Moon" "popular" music. Of course, the market also opened to longer pieces of music and to compilations of numbers of pieces recorded by the same artists in a single recording session.

Today we see that digital music has replaced analog recording; music in increasingly downloaded from the Internet rather than obtained via radio or purchased from record stores. People increasingly download single pieces of music rather than compilations. Digital players have become personal, carried with the listener everywhere, rather than household devices literally wired into the household electric supply. A "long tail" has has developed in music as well as in literature with a much greater variety of music finding listeners.

My point is that the music we listen too is very much a function of the technology we use to listen to that music.

The Nature of Technology

I have just started to reading Brian Arthur's The Nature of Technology: What it is and How it Evolves. I suspect the book will trigger a number of postings on this blog.


Brian Arthur is a very well known economist, most famous for his recognition that in some areas, especially including investment in technology, there can be increasing returns to scale. While this is an extension of his previous work, it benefits from his understanding of technology and I suspect from his own experience as an innovator.

Arthur understands "technology" as "means to accomplish purposes". Some of those purposes are quite narrow, as Privacy Informationthe technology of a hammer. Some are quite broad and diffuse as the technology for a super computer.

Technology as Embodied Knowledge

Arthur notes that there are both software and hardware aspects of technology -- devices and procedures for their use. He sees this as true of even a hammer, a very simple device and what appears to be a very simple procedure for its use. I would point out, however, that there is a very great difference between the way I use a hammer and the way a professional carpenter or cabinet maker would do so. Think about another similar technology, a golf club and think about the difference in the procedure for driving a golf ball used by Tiger Woods versus that used by the average duffer. The procedure for using a simple device well may require very precise procedures achieved through considerable analysis and requiring considerable skill.

I tend to like a definition of technology as "knowledge of how to accomplish a purpose". (Arthur recognizes that the word "technology" is used in several different meanings, as do I, and I also use a definition as "the organized body of knowledge about specific technologies.) Knowledge can be embodied in hardware devices, software, materials, people, or institutions. If you want to drive a nail and you don't have a carpenter's hammer, you can use another type of hammer, a rock or some other hard and heavy object. Surely good hammers make it easier to drive nails and thus can be seen as embodying some knowledge of how to drive nails easily and effectively. One can imagine a video instruction which could be used to teach a child to use a hammer well (or a video to teach a duffer to use a driver better), and that video might be seen as embodying knowledge to be later also embodied in the learner.

I would tend to include pure technique as "technology". Thus the technique used by a chiropractor to manipulate one's back to cure back ache or the technique used by a midwife to facilitate a difficult birth has very little of the "device" but considerable knowledge embodied in the skilled practitioner.

It is possible to have two technologies to achieve the same purpose but which embody different amounts of knowledge in their materials, devices and the human operators of the devices. Think of one cook preparing a dinner from frozen foods using a microwave versus another preparing a comparable dinner from raw foods using a gas stove, noting specifically how much less knowledge the cook needs using frozen food and a microwave.

Of course, things that embody technology can also embody other information. Obviously people have knowledge other than technological knowledge. A tool or a facility may well embody aesthetic information in its design as well as the purely technological.

I would say that a device may incorporate ethical values. Thus during World War II, American fighter planes were more heavily armored than Japanese fighters. The heavier planes were less maneuverable but safer for the pilots. The designs seem likely to reflect not only accidental differences and differences imposed by the different economic strengths of the two countries and strains on their economies imposed by the war, but also differences in the value of the lives of the pilots and on the maneuverability of the weapons provided to those pilots.

Technology and Social Institutions

Steve Lansing has studied the system for the distribution of irrigation water in Bali. One of the phenomena he noted was that when "modern" irrigation managers from Java took over the management of the system from the traditional managers, the priests of the water temples, the pest problems in the irrigated rice fields increased dramatically and yields of rice dropped. None of the farmers and none of the temple priests could explain why their traditional system moderated the growth of insect populations, but it did. I would say that the technological knowledge of how to reduce insect populations and increase rice yields in Bali was embodied in the traditional ritual processes that had evolved over generations for the construction of new elements of the irrigation system and for the allocation of irrigation waters. This is true even though no individual could articulate the reason the processes worked or even give a complete description of the processes.

Arthur goes further, identifying some institutions as technologies in that they are means to accomplish purposes. Thus a college may be seen as a means for accomplishing the education of its students. While a college may have a physical aspect -- buildings, libraries, etc. -- a college without walls might equally be seen as accomplishing the educational purpose. Arthur recognizes that we usually require a device to be involved to invoke the term "technology", but holds that it may be useful to see some social institutions as technologies. (I wonder if some institutions such as the family or the small group which are rooted in human evolution and not cultural innovations would qualify.)

As a graduate of UCI's Graduate School of Administration, I rather like the idea that a formal organization such as a business can be seen as a technology. That view makes clear that organizations can be engineered, using knowledge accumulated from the study of organizations and organizational behavior, to accomplish purposes more efficiently and effectively.

Technological Systems and Recursion

Arthur points out that the word technology can be used to describe an airplane, but also to describe each of the components of the airplane, or to describe an aircraft carrier with all of its component parts as well as the fleet of airplanes it carries. He makes an important and subtle point that building technologies as combinations of other simpler technologies is both pervasive and extremely useful.

He suggests that eventually the reduction of a technology gets to elemental technologies. The hammer and nail example would be seen as composed of a nail and a hammer, with the hammer perhaps composed of a handle and a head. I would note however that a nail or a hammer head is the product of another technological system, indeed there are factories devoted to the production of nails or hammer heads. Thus the elemental technologies may not be so elemental. The hammer can be seen to embody a huge body of knowledge relating not only to the best shape and weight for a hammer, but the best materials from which to make a hammer and the manufacturing technology necessary to prepare those materials and combine them.

Other Kinds of Technological Knowledge

Changing examples, consider the antibiotic. The utility of an antibiotic depends on using it to attack bacteria and not viruses, and indeed to attack a specific bacterium or one of a class of bacteria known to be sensitive to that specific antibiotic. Thus the physician needs to embody "technological" knowledge to determine the specific purpose for which to prescribe a remedy.

Epidemiological research, similarly, determines the public health problems which public health officials can address with specific technological remedies. Thus a recognition of the areas that may become endemic for malaria with climate change will lead public health officials to choose a variety of techniques for vector control, case finding, health education, and treatment of infected, each with its own devices and procedures.

Arthur points out that technology is used to transform inputs to outputs. He uses the example of the radio which takes as its input an electromagnetic signal transmitted through the atmosphere and produces sound recreating the original program.

If one returns to the example of the manufacture of a hammer, the input might be wood for the handle and the metal for the head. I note however that not all woods are equally good for efficiently making good handles nor all minerals equally good for making the metal used in a hammer head. There is knowledge involved in "raw materials", including the knowledge of what the material can be used for, where it is to be found, and how it is to be obtained efficiently. In some sense this too is technological knowledge.

Why technological innovation shows positive returns to scale

Brian Arthur is credited with making the economics profession focus not only on situations with decreasing returns to scale, but also to increasing returns. He does so again in the context of this book. Arthur suggests that new technologies are generally assemblies of existing technologies. Thus the more technology exists in a society, the more pieces there are with which to build new technologies. I can think of examples in which that is true. Having silicon factories which can manufacture chips together with computers and software to help design chips and expert chip designers means that it is relatively easy to develop an new electronic device that is built around chips, as has happened with many innovations in consumer electronics.

One of the conundrums of international development is the difference between the rapid reconstruction of Europe and Japan after World War II had decimated its manufacturing plant versus the new nations of Africa through decolonization which had little manufacturing capacity then and still have little capacity today.

I suggest that a while both societies were lacking in devices in the past, there was a great deal of technological knowledge in the European population 65 years ago and very little technological knowledge in the populations of Africa. Of course there was a similar difference in the knowledge of how to construct and operate "modern" institutions in the two continents. Still if you know how to put together modern technological systems you ought to have an advantage building or rebuilding a productive economy.

Thinking About Invention

Either Arthur does not treat invention well, or I have not gotten to that part of the book yet. It seems to me that while many technological innovations are simply incremental improvements ot existing technologies but a few are game changers. I think of the radical innovations as those with the possibility of changing a technological paradigm.

Think about the effort to create an HIV vaccine. Arthur stresses that technologies are built around properties. HIV vaccine technology, if one can be developed, will be built around a material with the property that it safely induces HIV immunity in an immunized person. Since some few people appear to not become infected with HIV in spite of repeated exposure, it seems likely that there must exist one or more substances with the property of inducing immunity, snf therefore other such substances could be developed. Unfortunately, no one knows the identity of such a substance. A number of people have been working hard for decades to find such a substance. When an appropriate substance is identified and proven both safe and efficacious other technologies can and probably will be applied to the production of large amounts of the vaccine and mass immunization campaigns.

The point is that the invention of a vaccine against HIV/AIDS is not like the development of a new model automobile or a new model television, even the move from analog to digital television. Rather it involves the discovery of non-obvious properties that must be found for the technology to exist, properties which indeed may not be achievable.

Increasingly such inventions arise from basic research for the discovery of new properties.

Transforming Development Through Science, Technology and Innovation

July 14, 2010
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivers remarks at a dinner for participants in the USAID Conference on Transforming Development through Science, Technology and Innovation, at the Department of State.

• USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah's blog posting announcing the meeting
• USAID Kicks-off Conference on Science, Technology, and Innovation in Development

1959

My book club met this evening to discuss 1959: The Year Everything Changed by Fred Kaplan. 1959 was clearly a year in which everything changed for me as that was the year I graduated from UCLA and began grad school at UC Berkeley. The book was also one of the few in which I found people that I had met, history that I had lived, and organizations that I knew.

Although Kaplan does not stress the point, the 1950s were very different than the 1960s. The 50s were the years of the "silent generation", of considerable social conservatism. The 60s were years of social protest and change. Thus I regard 1959 as a hinge year when American (and indeed international culture) changed significantly.

Kaplan seems to focus on small groups of people who were seriously involved in innovation. In the arts, it was a year when beat writers were seeking to develop a new literature, when some influential jazz musicians were seeking new directions in modern jazz, when Motown records was found, when stand-up comedians were testing the limits of topical humor, and when the efforts of a school of artists seeking to move beyond abstract expressionism was beginning to be recognized. It was the year of the invention of the microchip, the introduction of the first computer aimed as a business market, the introduction of the oral contraceptive, and the beginning of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. John Kennedy was preparing his run for the presidency and the introduction of the New Frontier, and there was even an effort to normalize relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.

All these innovators were successful. They differ in the magnitude of their success. Thomas Kuhn in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, differentiated from normal science done within a scientific paradigm and revolutionary science which changes a scientific paradigm. He was focusing on scientific innovation, but differentiating between two kinds of innovation. By analogy, Kaplan has noted that 1959 seems to have been a year in which people in quite a large number of distinct fields were seeking to change the paradigms in their fields.

In the cases of the arts, new paradigms were later invented replacing those in which artists were working in the 1950s; these in turn have been displaced by still newer paradigms in literature, painting and music in the last half century. The microchip created a new electronics paradigm that is still with us, albeit in an evolved form that the 59 inventors would not recognize; the pill created a new paradigm in reproductive biology, a paradigm that has transformed both sexual behavior and the American family.

The book served as the basis for a stimulating discussion, and I enjoyed the read.

Worrying About Haiti

Six months after the earthquake that killed hundreds of thousands of people in Haiti there are still something like one to one and a half million people there living in tents. Haiti has experienced many hurricanes and tropical storms in the past, including four major ones in 2008. This year storm forecasts indicate a bad year. The season is from June 1 to November 30. There is probably not enough time to provide safe housing for those living in tents. There is also a problem of protecting people from landslides and flooding that accompany tropical storms in Haiti (in part as a result of deforestation). The rainy season is also typically the time of increased incidence of communicable diseases. Given the institutional weakness of Haitian society, I would guess there is little likelihood that there will be effective and massive action to protect the people at risk.

The flooded city of Gonaives after Hurricane Hanna, September 3, 2008.

Image credit: Lambi Fund of Haiti.

False Belief is Dangerous for Development

The movie Invictus tells an interesting story. In the days of apartheid not only did the whites of South Africa prefer rugby and the blacks football (soccer), but rugby was seen as linked to the apartheid regime and the black population actively wished ill for the South African rugby teams. Indeed, the team name, the Springboks, chose an Africaans word. Mandela when he assumed the presidency overruled the ANC supporting both the team and its name. The 1995 Rugby World Cup, held in South Africa, helped unite South Africans as a "rainbow nation". The South African enthusiasm for the recent Football World Cup brings back the emotion of the earlier event.

I find it unintuitive that a sports team and a sporting event would have a major political impact, as indeed did some of Mandela's supporters in the movie. Intuitive or not, that seems to have been a fact.

Social scientists will recognize that a culture contains a multitude of institutions and that those institutions are linked in complex networks. It is clear that professional sports have an economic impact, and indeed the World Cup events draw global television audiences in the billions, with comparable advertising incomes. As Invictus suggests, they can also have political impacts. Indeed the Iglasia Maradoniana suggests that sport may have a religious impact.

A corollary of the complexity and interconnectedness of cultural institutions is that development interventions often don't work if they don't fit the cultural matrix into which they are applied. Often interventions have unexpected repercussions. (See "Stone Axes for Stone Age Australians.")

Efforts to democratize developing nations may not result in democratic institutions similar to those in the donor nation, even when they are not imposed by conquest. Economic liberalization efforts may get bogged down in corruption, rent seeking or other unexpected dysfunctional outcomes.

This is an argument for knowledge for development. The more one understands of a culture the more one is likely to avoid predictable failures. Yet Americans often assume cultural homogeneity in geographic regions. Some Americans not only assume that Latin America is culturally homogeneous, but that Mexico is a prototype replicated in Argentina, Chile and Ecuador, or even Brazil.

The myths that are believed by the citizens of donor nations about their own countries' histories also interfere with effective donor programs. Americans tend to assume that the United States always was democratic, when in fact the founding fathers were patricians who were disturbed by the introduction of political parties. Jefferson overcame his belief in a weak central government to make the Louisiana Purchase, and Lincoln and FDR took huge almost dictatorial power to prosecute the Civil War and World War II. Similarly, the history of the United States is filled with disgraceful oppression of minority groups. Recognizing the complexity of American history might help U.S. development policy makers take a more humble and more realistic posture in foreign policy and especially international development efforts. Indeed, a knowledge of his/her nation's own history may be an important basis for a professional in international development.

It seems likely that the most effective intervention to improve the lives of people in a poor nation may depend on the specific cultural matrix of that country. It may be that the most effective development assistance expert is one who has a tool kit that contains a large number of alternative approaches as well as analytic capabilities to select that which best fits the needs and aspirations of the specific group he/she is seeking to help. In that respect, it seems likely that it is better to understand the development instruments and their successes and failures of many countries and societies. Governments based on profoundly unacceptable political philosophies have had significant development successes -- China's economic success, Cuba's successes in health and educational services, the Soviet Union's early successes in industrialization. It would seem important to understand these successes and their cultural contexts, rather than to reject them on ideological bases.

Certainly African nations are willing to explore China's successes in economic growth, and that serves as a challenge to America's influence. U.S. international development officers and those of multinational organizations should similarly understand Chinese successes, if only to deal effectively with those African leaders seeking to compare development approaches.

At least that is a conclusion from my more than 40 years of development experience, including working in more than 35 countries, studying a significant number of countries, an increasing interest in American history, and experience in a number of development agencies.

U.S. Businesses Report 2008 Worldwide R&D Expense of $330 Billion

Companies located in the United States that have research and development activities—both U.S.-owned businesses and U.S. affiliates of foreign parents—reported worldwide sales of $11 trillion in calendar year 2008 and worldwide R&D expenses of $330 billion (table 1). Most ($234 billion) of that R&D expense was for R&D conducted in companies' own facilities in the United States.

U.S. National Science Foundation report NSF 10-322 | May 2010.

The Congress Should Change Laws

A recent article in The New York Times states:

As the American government seeks to end the four-decade Jewish settlement enterprise and foster a Palestinian state in the West Bank, the American Treasury helps sustain the settlements through tax breaks on donations to support them.

A New York Times examination of public records in the United States and Israel identified at least 40 American groups that have collected more than $200 million in tax-deductible gifts for Jewish settlement in the West Bank and East Jerusalem over the last decade. The money goes mostly to schools, synagogues, recreation centers and the like, legitimate expenditures under the tax law. But it has also paid for more legally questionable commodities: housing as well as guard dogs, bulletproof vests, rifle scopes and vehicles to secure outposts deep in occupied areas.

Currently U.S. law bars the provision of any aid, service, expert advice, or personnel to an organization designated by the US government as a terror group. According to The Christian Science Monitor:

The law – part of the USA Patriot Act – makes it a federal crime to provide any help or support to a terror group – even support designed to teach a violent group how to use legal and peaceful means to achieve political change.

Recently the Supreme Court decided that this law did not violate the constitutional protection of free speech.

It has been suggested that the prohibition of funding of the Hamas government of the Gaza strip has serious humanitarian impact on the Palestinian people.

I think of the tax breaks for donations to foreign aid organizations as "tax financing". If you are pay 35 percent taxes on the highest portion of your income, and make a donation of $10,000 to a tax exempt organization, your taxes are reduced by $3,500 as a result. In effect, you are giving $6,500 to the organization and the government is giving $3,500.

In general this is a great policy. It encourages people to donate to worthy causes. It also assures that the government is aiding organizations that the citizens wish to support, indeed often funding very worthy and cost-effective programs.

The volume of that tax financing is quite large, amounting to billions of dollars.

The problem of course is that sometimes a portion of the citizens want to give their money to support efforts which are directly contrary to government policy. It is hard to see why tax breaks should be given for such donations, especially seeing those tax breaks as government contributions to the selected activiites.

Perhaps the Congress should reexamine the law. On the one hand, it seems foolish to prevent programs to promote peace education and non-violent means of conflict resolution. On the other hand, it seems foolish to give tax breaks to people donating money supporting Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory or other activities that directly counter U.S. policy.

"Don't Mess with the DSMB"

I quote the opening of an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine.

If the lyrics of the popular Jim Croce song from the early 1970s were adapted for a clinical trialist anthem, the refrain would likely be

You don't tug on Superman's cape

You don't spit into the wind

You don't pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger

And you don't mess around with the DSMB.

Since the DSMB (data and safety monitoring board) is charged with ensuring that clinical equipoise is maintained as trial data are accrued, it is considered very bad, even self-destructive, behavior for people who are involved with the study to interact with DSMB members on trial-related issues. Traditionally, there has been a wall between investigators, sponsors, and the DSMB.This wall prevents preliminary findings from leaking out in ways that would prejudice the trial. For example, if it was known that the DSMB was examining a marginal increase in cardiovascular risk in a trial, then trial investigators might bias future recruitment by excluding patients at risk for such events. In the proper performance of clinical trials, you "don't mess around with the DSMB."

Recently, a new type of problem has emerged that puts the integrity of the whole clinical-trial enterprise at risk. Two examples of this problem have appeared in the Journal in the past few years. In these cases, the integrity of the DSMB has been thwarted or violated.

Intelligence Correlates Negatively with Infectious Disease Burden

"In a correlational study lower average regional intelligence was found to be linked with higher infectious disease rates. Perhaps because the metabolic demands of the brain are great and resources are diverted to fight disease. Karen Hopkin reports."

Scientific American, July 1, 2010

The article website also provides a podcast and link to the original scientific report.

Comment: Correlation does not mean causality. While it seems reasonable that kids who get sick often may not develop their intelligence as much as do healthier kids, there are other possible relations. It could be, unpleasant as it is to contemplate, that less intelligent families are less able to protect themselves from disease. It may be that there is some underlying factor for both ill health and poor performance on intelligence tests; both might be symptoms of poverty. Indeed, there might be complex viscous cycles among ill health, intellectual ability and poverty.

World Population Growth

I found this graph on the website Population Growth Over Human History. I went looking for it because Nell Irvin Painter said in the session I mentioned in the previous posting that human population had doubled five times per century for the past three centuries. Of course there were no global census takers over the past millennia so that we are talking about estimates, but experts agree that there has been an exponential growth in global population over recent centuries.

It is hard to imagine a sparsely populated world that was known to our ancestors, even in most of the last millennium. It is equally hard to imagine the heavily populated world that our descendants are likely to live in in future centuries.

Strobe Talbot recently likened prudent environmental policy to prudent purchase of insurance. In both cases there are risks of adverse events in the future, and in each case appropriate action now can ameliorate the impact of those events if and when they occur.

A Thought About Taxonomy

Quotations

There have been many authorities who have asserted that the basis of science lies in counting or measuring, i.e. in the use of mathematics. Neither counting nor measuring can however be the most fundamental processes in our study of the material universe—before you can do either to any purpose you must first select what you propose to count or measure, which presupposes a classification.
Roy Albert Crowson

The first step in wisdom is to know the things themselves; this notion consists in having a true idea of the objects; objects are distinguished and known by classifying them methodically and giving them appropriate names. Therefore, classification and name-giving will be the foundation of our science.
Carolus Linnaeus

The ends of scientific classification are best answered, when the objects are formed into groups respecting which a greater number of general propositions can be made, and those propositions more important, than could be made respecting any other groups into which the same things could be distributed. ... A classification thus formed is properly scientific or philosophical, and is commonly called a Natural, in contradistinction to a Technical or Artificial, classification or arrangement.
John Stuart Mill

Taxonomy (the science of classification) is often undervalued as a glorified form of filing—with each species in its folder, like a stamp in its prescribed place in an album; but taxonomy is a fundamental and dynamic science, dedicated to exploring the causes of relationships and similarities among organisms. Classifications are theories about the basis of natural order, not dull catalogues compiled only to avoid chaos.
Stephen Jay Gould

So What?

I heard Nell Irvin Painter on Book TV talking about her book, The History of White People. She makes the important point that American racial taxonomy has been the subject of controversy and changed radically in the 20th century. She noted that William Z. Ripley's book, The Races of Europe: A Sociological Study, was very influential in the first quarter of the 20th century, advancing a thesis that there were several distinct European races, a thesis we now see as nonsensical.

The taxonomy we use to classify people clearly influences the way we think. If, as in the pre-Columbian past, we did not classify people by race, the history of the United States would presumably have been quite different. Our ancestors could not have justified slavery on the basis of their theories of racial differences, nor could they have justified the treatment of native Americans on that basis, nor the exclusion, exploitation and ultimately incarceration of groups of Asians on racial grounds. Indeed, we forget that prejudice against immigrants -- be they from Italy, Ireland, eastern Europe or of the Jewish religion -- was justified on the basis that they were of different races than the dominant north European ethnic groups that had earlier colonized the continent.

The Role of Government

Painter read from the chapter of her book that deals with the Census Bureau's system for the classification of races and ethnic groups, pointing out that it has changed from decade to decade. The Bureau publishes the data obtained from its forms, informing the public and those in government that the nation is composed of so many blacks, whites, Asians, and Latinos. More that that, the information is available to all the corporation analysts in the country and is widely used in planning the services provided to communities.

I heard one of the people interviewed on Michael Wood's comment that the British census classified people in colonial India according to religion, and that classification was thought to have created or exacerbated the religious divisions on the subcontinent which eventually led to the separation of Pakistan and Bangladesh from India, which in turn led to a million deaths at partition and half a century of military tensions.

Does the Ottoman division of what is now Iraq into three administrative territories result now in ethnic tensions which threaten the peace of the modern country? Once taxonomies are embedded in a culture I suspect that they last a very long time.

Of course, the government will tend to embody categories already present within the culture of the people governed in its legislation, its reporting, and its implementation of policies. However, the processes are circular, with governmental taxonomies influencing (and usually reinforcing) popular taxonomies as those popular taxonomies influence government. It behooves us to be very careful in the way our government classifies people.

A thought about government corruption and regulation of the private sector

John Steele Gordon in his economic history of the United States, Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power, describes the pervasive political corruption in the nation in the second half of the 19th century. One commentator noted that the country was unique in that Americans on preparing a legal case employed not only a lawyer but also a judge. Gordon points out that giants of industry such as Carnegie, Rockefeller and Vanderbilt whose views of the world were formed during this period of rampant governmental corruption would have thought the idea of government regulation of industry to be absurd.

The lessons of the origins of the Great Depression and the recent economic crisis include the need for effective regulation of financial services. History also teaches that it is necessary to regulate other industries (ENRON, BP, etc.)

One of the key problems of corruption of government then is that one can not trust a corrupt government to fairly and effectively regulate the private sector! I wonder how many people focusing on developing nations recognize that problem?

Incidentally, I wonder if the conservatives who distrust governmental regulation of the private sector are not slaves to the ideas formed in the distant past when in fact government was much more corrupt and could not be depended upon to regulate fairly or well. Cultural systems can conserve attitudes for long periods, even when the conditions which led to the formulation of those attitudes have changed and the attitudes are counterproductive.

Gordon's book is well worth reading. It is relatively easy to read as might be expected from a man who has extensive experience writing for magazines. His narrative illustrates the importance of the frontier in American economic history and the economic bases of the Civil War (a plantation economy based on slavery in the south versus a diversified economy based on small farms and manufacturing in the north). It also illuminates the importance of technological and institutional innovations in the growth of the American economy.

A Historical Note on U.S. Industrial Policy

Alexander Hamilton

The history of industrial policy in the United States is almost as old as the nation itself. Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, presented .the Congress with his Report on Manufactures in 1791. That report directly confronts the argument that the nation should depend on agriculture, and proposes a number of policies to the Congress that would promote the development of manufacturing industries in the new nation. The report includes a section on technological innovation and one on what we would now call standards and regulation.

According to Wikipedia:

Much of Hamilton's third report was eventually adopted by the United States Congress after its issuance despite strong opposition to the support of industry through subsidy. Both sides agreed that manufacturing independence was desirable and necessary but disagreed on how to obtain it. The Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican Party's main objection to subsidy was their fear that subsidy would lead to corruption and favoritism of certain sections of the new nation over others; namely the north over the agrarian south. This divide (north vs. south) would come up again and again in issues of economic policy until the outbreak of the American Civil War.

In response Congress adopted the report's entire recommendation with the exception of subsidy to industry; favoring increasing tariff rates and import restrictions to encourage manufacturing (which incidentally led many manufacturers to switch party allegiance from Federalist to Republican, being upset at Hamilton's moderate tariff policy).