I am old enough to remember when the American ethos idealized progress through technology. Virtually everyone believed that invention and innovation were what made life better. Those days are gone. The result is bad.
But what about climate change? Privacy? Inequality? Corporate profits? Patriarchal society? Creative destruction? Job loss? Loss of our humanity? The list goes on and on and on.
But what about them? What about new cancer treatments based on immunotherapy? What about making a free video call anywhere in the world? What about robots boosting productivity and lowering prices? What about much safer cars? What about the vast convenience of e-commerce?
My list can go on longer than the opponents’ list. But my side—the Schumpeterian supporters of innovation—is losing the war to the pessimists and detractors, or as Spiro Agnew put it, to the “nattering nabobs of negativism.”
To be sure, opposition to, or at least lack of faith in, technological innovation is not new. Innovation economist Joseph Schumpeter writes, “The resistance which comes from interests threatened by an innovation in the productive process is not likely to die out as long as the capitalist order persists.”
Historian of technology Joel Mokyr agreed:
In every society, there are stabilizing forces that protect the status quo. Some of these forces protect entrenched vested interests that might incur losses if innovations were introduced, others are simply don’t-rock-the-boat kinds of forces. Technological creativity needs to overcome these forces.
Yet for virtually all of American history, technological creativity was like a German panzer attack against stationary French and British forces: It easily overcame the don’t-rock-the-boat forces. Not because creativity was stronger or better then, but because the opposition was small and weak.
Before the 1970s, there was a sense of the inevitability of technological advancement, as reflected in the sentiment, “Well, I guess that’s just progress.”
Moreover, most of the opposition was from affected interests. Musicians opposed soundtracks in movies. The butter industry opposed colored margarine.
But what is new is the disdain in which technological innovation and the very notion of progress are held by elites, pundits, and charitable foundations in the United States. Whereas a generation ago there would have been near-universal agreement with the statement “change is good,” today a host of interests from across the political spectrum would disagree or at least have severe doubts. Who are we to say that the technologically advanced West is better than technologically underdeveloped societies? What an oppressive concept.
For example, it is virtually impossible to read about AI without being warned of job destruction, loss of privacy, the destruction of democracy, and, of course, the demise of humanity itself. This would be funny if it weren’t so harmful.
These aren’t just interesting social developments. Rather, they go to a central challenge of our time: the need for the West to dramatically boost the rate of technological innovation, not only to solve pressing domestic problems like slow wage growth, but also to avoid losing global power to the CCP.
As a result, the central task of our time is to once again embrace technological progress wholeheartedly and mount a robust intellectual attack on the forces of stasis and anti-Western values. The alternative is the decline of the West.
For more on these issues, I encourage you to attend ITIF’s National Economic Power Conference on November 17.