atw: Re: The decreasingly meaningful authoring experience
- From: "Brian Clarke" <brianclarke01@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 9 Jun 2005 20:36:37 +1000
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.
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