Title: Technology, Progress, and Freedom - Foundation for Economic Education
Headings: Technology, Progress, and Freedom
Technology, Progress, and Freedom
Freedom Promotes Technological Progress
Friends and Enemies of Progress
Privatizing Federal Research and Development
Reducing Federal Technology Transfer Activities

Content: The electric motor, internal combustion engine, fluorescent and incandescent lighting, and the Internet have had enormous effects on the way we live and work. Emerging technologies such as cryogenics, photovoltaics, aerogels, fuel cells, and radio-wave lighting may do the same in the future. When legislators pass laws that restrict or forbid the use of technology, they grant a privilege to stagnant firms and their workers at the expense of the firms that would have used the new technology and the workers who would have had different, often better jobs. Resources remain in inefficient protected technological processes, creating waste and impeding progress. Calls for protectionism come from firms that have not modernized their production processes and thus are unable to compete with more efficient, lower-cost companies. Both mandated compensation to displaced laborers and restrictions on the use of technology will reduce the profits of the firms affected, thereby reducing capital accumulation and its re-investment that would have led to an eventual increase in the level of employment. Friends and Enemies of Progress
Virginia Postrel’s 1998 book, The Future and Its Enemies, defies conventional political boundaries of left and right and liberal and conservative to divide the world into dynamists and stasists. The book’s thesis is that the most useful and pertinent intellectual concept is about those who welcome the future and those who want to stop, turn back, or regulate change. According to Postrel, dynamists prefer an open-ended society where creativity and enterprise, operating under general and predictable rules, generate progress in unpredictable ways. Dynamists appreciate evolutionary processes such as market competition, playful experimentation, scientific inquiry, and technological innovation.