The Imperative of Technological Progress: Why Stagnation Will Necessarily Lead to Disaster & how...

Wave Chronicle ^ | August 18, 2015 | G. Stolyarov II

[Mellonkronos]

[Another pro-technology piece. Of course, we need free markets so entrepreneurs can do great things!]

The Imperative of Technological Progress: Why Stagnation Will Necessarily Lead to Disaster and How Techno-Optimism Can Overcome It

“He who moves not forward, goes backward.” -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

If the approximate technological and economic status quo persists, massive societal disintegration looms on the horizon. A Greece-style crisis of national-government expenditures may occur as some have predicted, but would only be a symptom of a greater problem. The fundamental driver of crisis since at least September 11, 2001, and more acutely since the Great Recession and the national-government bailouts of legacy financial and manufacturing institutions, is an increasing disconnect between the powerful and everybody else. The powerful – i.e., the politically connected, including the special interests of the “private sector” – seek to protect their positions through political barriers, at the expense of individual rights, upward social mobility, and economic/technological progress. Individuals from a relatively tiny politically connected elite caused the 2008 financial crisis, lobbied for and received unprecedented bailouts and lifelines for the firms whose misbehavior exacerbated the crisis, and then have attempted to rig the political “rules of the game” to prevent themselves from being unseated from positions of wealth and influence by the dynamics of market competition. The system created by these elites has been characterized by various observers as crony capitalism, corporatism, corporate fascism, neo-mercantilism, and a neo-Medieval guild system.

The deleterious influence of the politically connected today is reflected in the still-massive rates of unemployment and underemployment for the millennial generation, while many established industries fail to make openings for young people to ascend and fail to accommodate the emerging technologies with which young people thrive. While the millennial generation had nothing to do with the Great Recession, it has...

[reed13k]

While I get the gist of the article - I also believe that there are periods of time required to allow integration and adoption of technologies into the mainstream without further disruption. Successive waves - as with ocean waves - of disruption can build to become a large wave of postive change, but can also build to become a large trough that sucks everything down into the depths.