With the advance of progress and technological innovations, the Luddite temptation promptly returns, widespread especially among those who, despite fully benefiting from the advantages that such innovations bring to the lives of citizens of the most developed countries, are accustomed to criticizing precisely the market economic systems that that development generated.
They demonstrate against the capitalismfilming the demonstration with the most modern and innovative tools that market capitalism first created and then made available, at accessible prices, even to the most hardened anti-capitalists specialized in spitting on the plate they eat from.
Ned Ludd destroys the loom and inaugurates the resistance against technological change. Today he would certainly be amazed to see how much progress has been made from the end of the 18th century to the present day, also thanks to the fact that not all those looms were destroyed.
In economics there are no certainties, except one: things change, the change is certain. Economic development is characterized by uncertainty and change is often frightening, generating the conditioned reflex of opposing, of trying to stop those technological evolutions that bring progress but also crisis in some sectors, unemployment and a change in positions that had until then been consolidated for those who find themselves directly involved. Sergio Ricossa wrote in Let's learn economics (BUR – 1994): “The economy perpetuates itself because it renews itself, and stopping the economy is stop the renewal. Which, however, is never entirely peaceful, precisely because it harms pre-existing interests and destroys the value of old wealth.”
In Ludd's time it was the looms that were frightening, today it is theartificial intelligence: “Technological unemployment then results not from the existence of too many machines, as Marx believed, but from the existence of too new machines, which make the professions of the past obsolete, while we learn the professions of the future. It is an unemployment similar to the commodity one, which results from the offer of consumption that is too new, which makes the tastes of the past obsolete, while we learn the tastes of the future. And both types of unemployment, technological and commodity-related, embarrass Keynesians, as well as Marxists, making the remedy of substituting any public expenditure for the deficient private expenditure simplistic or even harmful.”
Times are changing, even for economic policy and the science of finance: “It is no longer a question of adding, as was enough for Keynes, a quantity of demand, but rather a question of correcting its quality: a more complex and less rapid task, a task in part beyond the scope of economic policy measures. A government can slow down technological change and commodity, taking on serious responsibilities, risking voting their country into backwardness; or it can lubricate the change, trying to reduce friction, but without deluding itself into making it completely painless”. (Ibid).
One of the favorite phrases of Phil Knight, the founder of NIKE, is this: to live is to grow. Either grow up or die.
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