Fantastic post Brian! love the gonads... -----Original Message----- From: austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Brian Clarke Sent: Thursday, 9 June 2005 20:37 To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: atw: Re: The decreasingly meaningful authoring experience Hi All, Steve has thrown down the gauntlet - for someone to show that technological advance does not reduce costs or increase benefits. Adam Smith noticed the economic effect of increasing technological input back in the late 18th century. Frederick Winslow Taylor made a world-wide habit out of pushing for better use of technology - before WWI! The first Russian 5-year plan was generated on a Gantt chart - Gantt was one of Taylor's disciples. While I can see that what Steve and a few other economically savvy interlocutors have said, shows that upping the technological input seems to reduce production costs, that this will benefit the rest of society is not so clear. Where the entity that increases its uptake of technology is monopolist or oligopolist, the only people who win are on the production side; the consumers are not protected and can expect increased costs. And in Australia, our market size generally is too small to sustain perfect competition. Those who push for more population by rapid increases in immigration fail to take account of the fragile environment and its inability to sustain a larger population. At last the Ord River scheme and similar ventures are being laid open for inspection. However, there is at least one work area where technology uptake has been quite rapid and increasingly so, but where the consumers are held to ransom more and more. Prior to about 1900, medicine had to compete with religion to offer health care. Around 1900, a number of significant medicines emerged in several countries - eg, the salicylates and quinine nostrums - that reduced pain and fever. And at last there was an even chance that doctors actually knew what was happening in a few cases. Over the next 100 years, the uptake of technology has been quite phenomenal. We have more diagnostics and pathology testing, more diagnoses possible, more treatments [medicines and invasives] available, more over-the-counter stuff and more junk for the medical-knowledge-challenged, eg, cosmetics that promise everlasting skin smoothness, as well as more quacks who promise a more fulfilling sex life by offering to increase the size of your gonads. And to support all this new technology we have MORE health care delivers and hangers-on per head of population. Who wins? The medicos - even though they are taking up increasing amounts of technology. The only countervailing force is insurance premiums. I suspect that defence falls into a similar economic niche to health care delivery. But it has no countervailing force. Therefore, I suspect that our defence bill will just keep on increasing in line with the increasing use of technology - against threats from whom? Sure, we have fewer defence personnel - probably a purely political decision - but I think you'll find that the cost of defence per head of population has been increasing for decades. Now, there's a nice little undergraduate project for someone. So, let's be very careful about proclaiming that technology uptake is always beneficial - or at least, always reduces head count. Brian. Steve said: Please, for those opponents of the argument, provide a case study that clearly shows the reverse of the above. Its all very easy to say "But its not true", now go ahead and prove it. ************************************************** To post a message to austechwriter, send the message to austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx To subscribe to austechwriter, send a message to austechwriter-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "subscribe" in the Subject field. To unsubscribe, send a message to austechwriter-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe" in the Subject field. To search the austechwriter archives, go to www.freelists.org/archives/austechwriter To contact the list administrator, send a message to austechwriter-admins@xxxxxxxxxxxxx ************************************************** ************************************************** To post a message to austechwriter, send the message to austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx To subscribe to austechwriter, send a message to austechwriter-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "subscribe" in the Subject field. To unsubscribe, send a message to austechwriter-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe" in the Subject field. To search the austechwriter archives, go to www.freelists.org/archives/austechwriter To contact the list administrator, send a message to austechwriter-admins@xxxxxxxxxxxxx **************************************************