The Mismeasure of Technology

This is a decent little piece from "Big Think".
http://bigthink.com/project-syndicate/the-mismeasure-of-technology

It is just amazing to me how much WE, the human species, actually know - and how little ONE individual can actually put this stuff to use. If I go research something to death, and get it published - a tiny fraction of human kind will actually learn about it. As a species, we "know" it, but it has almost zero impact on anything.

This piece is a nice example. I use its full title here in the hope that the author might actually be interested in what people say about his work, and will search on the links to it. Because I might know something that he does not, and it would help clarify things a bit.

The article states that economists struggle with just why we have this enormous gap between rich and poor nations. Lots of people are trying to understand this, and a few are working to "fix" it, if that's possible. I have thought for some time that it would be nice if we could get professional economists to agree on anything. He thinks they do agree on the cause of this wealth disparity.

"One idea about which economists agree almost unanimously is that, beyond
mineral wealth, the bulk of the huge income difference between rich and
poor countries is attributable to neither capital nor education, but rather to
'technology.' So what is technology?"

He feels that economists really have no common understanding what "technology" is exactly. It is kind of "everything else". Some think that this "technology" is held back because the ruling class, the government, or those in charge do not want it to spread. He feels rather that a key component of "technology" is "knowhow". To him, this is simply knowing how to do something. He states that it cannot be easily acquired, and since it is a collective thing, it does not spread about easily. He has some nice examples, but I think his view is too limited. It is not about knowing how to do one or two things, or even a hundred things. It is rather about how we think about EVERYTHING.

IMHO, if he were to simply adopt the understanding that this "knowhow" is really a "worldview", our perception of how reality works, and what we can do about it, this would entirely solve his problem. As I have argued here, drawn from the research of Hoffstede and Harrison, our "culture" or how we think about reality, drives a great deal of our thinking, risk taking, ownership for problems, initiative, etc. The northern cultures, primarily because of their climate and some history of the spread of religion, have a view of the world that it is under our control. Some few even believe that we are all in this together! They have a much more cohesive view of our interdependency. Other nations, with a longer history of religious domination and political hierarchy, have a different view of how things work.

The next little piece in this blog is a decent summary of all of that, if you are interested in reading more. Would that we could somehow get all of this stuff together!