Technology critics have always been with us, and they have sometimes helped temper society’s occasional irrational exuberance about certain innovations. Since the time when Plato cautioned of how the written word could undermine our ability to memorize and recite stories, tech critics have been warning us about the need to strike a sensible balance with the tools we create and use.
But just as Plato failed to appreciate the full benefits of the written word, today’s technology critics sometimes go much too far and overlook the importance of finding new and better ways of satisfying both basic and complex human needs and wants. In fact, today’s tech critics are fueled by a “technopanic” mentality and are growing increasingly more radical. They peddle a revisionist history of Ludditism and push for an innovation-limiting “techlash” that would shackle entrepreneurs with layers of red tape before any progress is permitted.
If not countered, this swelling anti-tech movement could curtail the creation and diffusion of technologies that could boost economic growth, raise our standard of living, improve our health, and extend our lives.
Are Innovation’s Benefits Just an Illusion?
In a recent white paper, my Mercatus Center colleague James Broughel and I cataloged the voluminous literature that documents the symbiotic connection between technological innovation, economic growth, and human flourishing. Decades of research by historians, political scientists, and economists reveals that technological innovation is a fundamental driver of long-term improvements in well-being.
However, today’s tech critics would have us believe those empirical findings are largely hogwash. Scanning lists of top-selling tech policy books and the most assigned texts on innovation in college classrooms, one is struck by the lugubrious lamentations of the critics. Increasingly, academics are calling into question technology’s very worth to civilization.
Anti-tech complaints used to be focused primarily on how innovation creates a supposed “cult of convenience” or a supposed “paradox of choice” because of the cornucopia of options it offered to us. Today’s critics build on these critiques but have also upped the ante. Borrowing the old neo-Marxist clichés about how industrialization is “de-humanizing” and “alienates” the masses while force-feeding us stuff we do not need, modern tech critics go further and claim that innovators are “reengineering humanity.” These critics suggest that innovation’s benefits are dubious at best and that technology is not a helpful servant to humanity but instead a “dangerous master” that is “slipping beyond our control.” Consequently, “it’s OK to be a Luddite,” writes David Auerback in Slate, because modern tech “will eliminate what it means to be human.”
The book titles or subtitles from leading tech critics include frightening phrases like “Techno Creep,” “Future Crimes,” “Against the Machine,” “Digital Barbarism,” and, “Click Here to Kill Everybody.” In this dour worldview, technology is destroying both our culture and economy. Critics warn of a coming digital dystopia, where truth and authority vanish, high culture crumbles, and political polarization breeds closed-mindedness and even the very death of democracy.
Meanwhile, robotics, machine-learning, and automation pose an “existential threat” to the very future of civilization not only because they will lead to a “jobless future,” but because they will brainwash us into becoming a “world without mind,” in which we cannot think for ourselves.
Blueprint for Reconstructing Civilization
Is there any hope of surviving the impending techno-apocalypse? Perhaps, the critics say, but only with a heavy dose of precautionary principle-based policymaking and a return to a “simpler time” or some wiser form of living.
Best-selling tech critic Evgeny Morozov advocates a “radical project of social transformation,” “data distributism,” and a full-blown “degrowth movement” to halt the pace of innovation. Morozov’s distaste for private digital platforms like Facebook and Google runs so deep that he recently applauded China for “reasserted sovereignty in the digital domain” with its “social credit system,” which is a centralized method of online reputation scoring of citizens. (Apparently, he is not too worried about how China already uses its massive digital surveillance infrastructure to oppress dissenting views.)
Morozov and other critics like Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger regularly play up the benefits of “adding friction” to the technological design and diffusion process. They are not always clear about what that entails, but they rail against the idea of efficiency as a societal benefit. They instead suggest we should slow things down and gum up the works a bit to be more thoughtful about the tools we are creating. Although they will never admit it, “adding friction” likely means fewer choice, higher prices, and longer delays in the technological improvements most of us desire.
Luddites Living in an Amish Paradise?
Critics like Frischmann often argue that “there’s nothing wrong with being a Luddite,” because if nothing else it, “enables critical reflection and evaluation of the technological world we’re building.” In their revisionist accounts, the Luddites have been recast as the original “humanists” and defenders of Amish-esque values, who understood how to temper the role of modern technology in our lives.
But the Luddites were not Amish. The Amish lifestyle is completely voluntary and, in many ways, there is much we can learn from it. But we are also free to reject it and the Amish will not impose their anti-modernist values upon us through threats of force.
That is the fundamental difference between appreciating the Amish versus calls for a reassessment of the Luddites as a model for reorganizing modern society. Today’s neo-Luddites seek to preserve whatever technological status quo they desire, and would impose that choice upon us whether we like it or not. Thus, when the critics wax nostalgic about the Luddites, it suggests that more forcible resistance to change is required, likely through sweeping bureaucratic controls on every facet of technological development.
If, therefore, modern tech critics wish to align themselves with the Luddites, they should at least own up to the fact that what they desire is something quite radical. A reembrace of Ludditism and the creation of a “degrowth movement” would necessitate highly repressive and destructive steps to end technological progress as we know it and, in the process, deny society choices that most of us believe better our lives in countless ways.
The Unabomber Bounces Back
We already see the potential dangers of these ideas with the growing anti-technological militancy of some environmental activists. New York magazine recently documented how many of them are experiencing their “Kaczynski Moment,” when they discover the extremist teachings of Ted Kaczynski (aka, “the Unabomber”) and come to “understand progress as industrial slavery.”
Ironically, several versions of Kaczynski’s Unabomber Manifesto as well as his Anti-Tech Revolution are available on Amazon and sell for $10-$20. The average review for the books are around four out of five stars and include customer reviews about how he is a “misguided genius” whose books are “brilliant, riveting and useful” and are full of “well-articulated thoughts” and “fascinating ideas.”
Kaczynski’s critique of industrial society apparently doesn’t extend to his own ability to sell books on the world’s biggest online retailing site. And it appears buyers aren’t too concerned about spending money in support of a man who killed and maimed over two dozen people during a twenty-year nationwide mail-bomb reign of terror.
Regardless, ideas have consequences, and we shouldn’t be surprised to see more people casually embracing such dangerous, anti-human thinking with academics blithely claiming that “there’s nothing wrong with being a Luddite” and encouraging them to embrace a “degrowth movement.”
Tool-Making is in Our Nature & the Key to Human Flourishing
Properly understood, “technology” simply represents the practical application of knowledge to a task or need at hand. As Benjamin Franklin once noted, “man is a tool-making animal” because, by our very nature, tool-building it is the key to our survival and prosperity as a species. Through ongoing trial-and-error tool building, we discover new and better ways of satisfying human needs and wants to better our lives and the lives of those around us. Human flourishing is dependent upon our collective willingness to embrace and defend the creativity, risk-taking, and experimentation that produces the wisdom and growth that propel us forward.
By contrast, today’s neo-Luddite tech critics suggest that we should just be content with the tools of the past and slow down the pace of technological innovation to supposedly save us from any number of dystopian futures they predict. If they succeed, it will leave us in a true dystopia that will foreclose the entrepreneurialism and innovation opportunities that are paramount to raising the standard of living for billions of people across the world.
Gas and Apparel Pull Everyday Prices Down in November


AIER’s Everyday Price Index fell 0.1 percent in November after posting a 0.4 percent increase in October. The Everyday Price index has fallen in four of the last six months. The Everyday Price Index measures price changes people see in everyday purchases such as groceries, restaurant meals, gasoline, and utilities. It excludes prices of infrequently purchased, big-ticket items (such as cars, appliances, and furniture) and prices contractually fixed for prolonged periods (such as housing).
The Everyday Price Index including apparel, a broader measure that includes clothing and shoes, decreased 0.3 percent in November after a 0.3 percent rise in October. The Everyday Price Index including Apparel has fallen in three of the past six months. Apparel prices fell 2.5 percent on a not-seasonally-adjusted basis in November and are down 1.6 percent over the past year. Apparel prices tend to be volatile, registering sporadic large gains or declines in between stretches of relatively steady prices.
The Consumer Price Index, which includes everyday purchases as well as infrequently purchased, big-ticket items and contractually fixed items, fell 0.1 percent in November, matching the decline in the Everyday Price Index. The Everyday Price Index is not seasonally adjusted, so we compare it with the unadjusted Consumer Price Index.
Over the past year, the Consumer Price Index is up 2.1 percent. Over the same period, the Everyday Price Index has risen 1.2 percent while the Everyday Price Index including apparel is up 0.9 percent. The modest increases in both indexes over the past year are largely due to weak energy and grocery store prices.
Motor-fuel prices fell 1.1 percent for the month on a not-seasonally-adjusted basis. Over the past year, motor-fuel prices are off 1.3 percent. Motor fuel prices are largely a function of crude oil prices. West Texas Intermediate crude oil prices fluctuated dramatically from mid-2017 through mid-2019, rising to a peak above $75 per barrel in October 2018 before plunging to less than $45 by December 2018. Crude prices have been relatively stable since May, bouncing around in a range of $50 to $60.
Grocery prices fell 0.3 percent in November and are up just 1.0 percent from a year ago. Over the last five years, grocery prices are essentially unchanged.
The components with the largest weights in the Everyday Price Index are food at home (weighted 20.8 percent and declining 0.3 percent in November), food away from home (17.6 percent and a 0.2 percent rise), household fuels and utilities (13.3 percent and a 0.3 percent drop), and motor fuel (11.8 percent with a 1.1 percent decrease). Together, these four categories account for 63.5 percent of the Everyday Price Index.
Overall, net changes in the Everyday Price Index remain modest. Energy prices are the most volatile component and have been, on balance, a negative contributor in recent months. Grocery prices (food at home) have also been rising at a slow pace and stand in sharp contrast to restaurant prices (food away from home) which have been rising more quickly and persistently. Apparel prices also remain volatile but in general have been a negative contributor. Other smaller components have had significant but largely offsetting trends. Notably, gardening and lawncare services prices are up 8.4 percent from a year ago, while tobacco products have risen 5.5 percent, postage and delivery services are up 5.4 percent, recreational reading materials are up 4.9 percent, and pet and pet products are up 3.3 percent. Partially offsetting these were audio discs and tapes, down 2.6 percent and video discs, down 2.5 percent. Several other smaller components have increases close to zero.


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Manual Labor Will Be Revived


In a previous column, I looked at the way automation and AI are likely to transform the world of work and employment. There is a lot of discussion about this, most of which focuses on the likely impact in terms of the kinds of paid work that will disappear. What there is much less of is discussion of the new kinds of paid work that will come into being.
If the result of automation is to create jobs more than to destroy them, then what kinds of work are likely to expand in the future? This is related to but distinct from the first question. In one way, this is a very hard question to answer. Many of the new kinds of employment that will appear are literally unimaginable — if we could imagine them, they would already exist.
Back in the 1980s, nobody could have told people worrying about the decline of jobs in the steel industry that there would be work designing apps for mobile phones, for example. So we can be confident that new kinds of work will appear but have no idea about what it will be — it’s for entrepreneurs to invent and discover that.
However, we can do some thinking about it because while the details may not be clear, there are cases where we can have a strong notion as to what will appear. In the 1900s, for example, there were a large number of jobs associated with horses, at that time still the main power for transport. Almost all of them were gone by 1930, but people could guess that a lot of new work would be created servicing and supporting (as well as producing) the motor vehicles that were replacing horses. Thinking like this about the present situation should lead us to a number of conclusions and to one in particular that many will find both surprising and heartening.
At-Risk Jobs
If you read the various studies that have been done over the last five years, there is widespread agreement about the kinds of jobs that are “at risk.” A recent study by the Brookings Institution estimated that 25 percent of current US jobs are at greater than 50 percent risk of automation. Some are not surprising. Any job that is both boring and repetitive is likely to be at risk. You might suppose that this would mean low-paid manual occupations would be at high risk, and indeed many are — shelf stacking, waitressing, and data entry are all at high risk.
On the other hand, many better-paying jobs are at considerable risk of disappearing. A range of jobs in the transport industry, from truck and taxi drivers to train and bus drivers, are likely to go in the medium term because of the rise of autonomous vehicles (most new metros around the world already have driverless trains). A wide range of clerical and administrative tasks are also likely to be handed over to algorithms, from financial services to company administration and financial advice.
The last example brings up another point. A recent study by the OECD argued that jobs involving face-to-face contact were more likely to survive — which suggests a rosier future for financial advisors. However, experience suggests this is actually not true. When the ATM was introduced, some argued that it would not catch on because customers preferred the human interaction with a teller. Experience suggests that actually the opposite was the case. The same is likely to be true in a range of occupations and not just financial advice and wealth management.
The common factor is that these are activities that can be readily reduced to a tick list of standard questions and hence an algorithm. Routine medical care and diagnosis is one; another is most standard legal work. This suggests that the risk of automation is actually high for many professional occupations such as medical general practice and routine attorney work. In the future, we will probably consult an algorithm rather than a human doctor or lawyer or accountant. However, surgery and nursing are still almost certain to be done by flesh and blood humans.
That particular example can lead us to the surprising and heartening conclusion mentioned earlier. Much of the commentary argues that we are moving into a world where the labor market will be dominated by two kinds of employment. There will be creative jobs that are open to highly educated people and which pay very well, and there will be unskilled and low-productivity jobs (hence low paying), but there will not be a range of middle-skill jobs that pay a decent or even high wage. The view is captured in the title of Tyler Cowen’s work Average Is Over. This has a number of alarming implications, most notably that access to high-paying work is going to become even more dependent than it already is on higher-education qualifications. We should be more sanguine, however.
A Heartening Conclusion
Economic theory, confirmed by empirical research, tells us that people will in general only adopt a new technology when the expected gain from doing so is greater than the cost (technically, when the marginal gain exceeds the marginal cost). This means there are many things that are technologically feasible that do not happen because they do not pass the test of their benefit being greater than their cost.
One example is supersonic passenger flight. This is certainly technically feasible — we know this because two such aircraft were in commercial service for some time. However, there are none now and no prospects for any. The reason, as Boeing discovered while trying to develop a supersonic transport, is that the benefit (getting from London to New York in three hours rather than seven, for example) is not valuable enough to consumers to exceed the costs of such an aircraft, which are due to the technology available and the unavoidable challenges of traveling at such a speed in the Earth’s atmosphere in a way that will meet standards of comfort and safety for passengers. (Military personnel have a different set of criteria, which is why supersonic combat aircraft are commonplace; plus, the buyers of such aircraft, namely governments, are not as price sensitive as airlines.)
One classic example of this is the artificial reproduction of manual dexterity or, to put it another way, of the combination of the human hand with the human brain and the complex feedback and control system (touch and sight) that connects the two. Despite much effort and research, this has proven incredibly difficult to reproduce artificially. Consequently, for most tasks involving manual dexterity and manipulation, it is still cheaper to use a human rather than a robot, and this seems likely to be the case for a long time. This explains why nursing and surgery are both at very low risk of being automated by everyone’s estimation, despite the fact that most surgical procedures and nursing tasks are standard and routine in many ways.
Manual Trades and Personal Services
So, there is a wide range of tasks and work that will not be automated because of this. However, the response might be that the kinds of jobs this applies to are precisely the low-productivity and low-skill jobs mentioned earlier, such as cleaning. Certainly, this is true, but it is not the whole truth. There is also a wide range of work involving manual dexterity that is skilled and highly paid, and the likely impact of AI will actually be to make that kind of work more productive and hence higher paid. Meanwhile, other foreseeable changes will increase the demand for these kinds of work and hence the number of employment opportunities, even allowing for the increase in productivity of individual workers.
This kind of work is that of skilled manual trades such as plumbing, painting and decorating, electricians, and construction work of all kinds. Another is personal-service work such as personal trainers or coaches. Teaching and researching are other examples (at the moment, these are thought of as jobs that require a degree, but that is more about rationing access than reality). Manual trades, for example, are very difficult because of the need for close-up manipulation — a robot that could do an electrician’s or plumber’s job would be seriously expensive.
At this point, another feature of innovation comes into play. What much innovation does is not so much replace human labor as enhance it and make it more productive. AI and associated control systems are a classic example of this. You will still need the manual dexterity of the surgeon or plumber, but the AI and associated technology will increase the range of things that they can do and make them much more effective. In other words, it will increase the value of the service they provide as well as the quantity per unit of time worked — which is the real definition of increased productivity. This translates into higher incomes for people delivering this kind of service.
Moreover, the demand for this kind of labor and service (as well as the others mentioned) is almost certain to increase. For one thing, the people earning very high incomes doing creative knowledge work will want to employ those providing these services in very large numbers (not least because the principle of comparative advantage means it makes sense for them to do this so they can concentrate on their own work). Another feature of AI is that it will make it much cheaper to personalize skilled work and services and so make it more valuable to the end consumer.
What we are likely to see, in fact, as well as the disappearance of a range of familiar jobs, is a revival in the value (and maybe the status?) of manual trades and personal services of all kinds. These will also become higher paying than many are at present (some, of course, already pay well). To give just one example, nursing and personal care are going to have their productivity significantly increased, while the demand for such services is going to rise organically because of the rise in the average age.
This will also mean an increase in the kind of work that requires a trade education and a relative decline in the need and demand for academic higher education. That sector will have to find another market to replace or supplement people looking for certification to have a shot at knowledge or creative work — the business of providing education and tutoring as a leisure and consumption good is one possibility.
In fact, one outcome of AI and automation may well be a revival of manual labor and of the traditional working class — maybe becoming more like an artisan class again. It is actually the credentialed and salaried white collar middle class that is more at risk in the years to come.
The overall effect will be massively positive, as economics leads us to expect. Thus a recent study by Price Waterhouse predicts that automation and AI will contribute an additional $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030, with a boost to local GDP of up to 26 percent by the same date. We should be sanguine about the impact of this latest wave of innovation, not just in terms of its overall impact on the wealth of the world but also in terms of its likely sociological impact.