When measured by decades, the economy is always in upheaval. For the past few hundred years, every generation has found more efficient ways of getting work done, and the cumulative benefits have been enormous. The average person today enjoys a much better life than the nobility did a few centuries ago. It would be great to have a king’s land, but what about his lice? Medical advances alone have greatly increased life spans and improved standards of living.
Henry Ford, in the first part of the twentieth century, was the automotive industry, but your car is superior to anything he ever drove. It’s safer, more reliable, and surely has a better sound system. This pattern of improvement isn’t going to change. Advancing productivity propels societies forward, and it is only a matter of time before the average person in a developed country will be “richer” in many ways than anyone is today.
Just because I’m optimistic doesn’t mean I don’t have concerns about what is going to happen to all of us. As with all major changes, the benefits of the information society will carry costs. There will be dislocations in some business sectors that will create a need for worker retraining. The availability of virtually free communications and computing will alter the relationships of nations, and of socioeconomic groups within nations. The power and versatility of digital technology will raise new concerns about individual privacy, commercial confidentiality, and national security. There are, moreover, equity issues that will have to be addressed. The information society should serve all of its citizens, not only the technically sophisticated and economically privileged. In short, a range of important issues confronts us. I don’t necessarily have the solutions, but, as I started off the book saying, now is a good time for a broad discussion. Technological progress will force all of society to confront tough new problems, only some of which we can foresee. The pace of technological change is so fast that sometimes it seems the world will be completely different from one day to the next. It won’t. But we should be prepared for change. Societies are going to be asked to make hard choices in such areas as universal availability, investment in education, regulation, and the balance between individual privacy and community security.
While it is important that we start thinking about the future, we should guard against the impulse to take hasty action. We can ask only the most general kinds of questions today, so it doesn’t make sense to come up with detailed, specific regulations. We’ve got a good number of years to observe the course of the coming revolution, and we should use that time to make intelligent rather than reflexive decisions.
Perhaps the most widespread and personal anxiety is, “How will I fit into the evolving economy?” Men and women are worried that their own jobs will become obsolete, that they won’t be able to adapt to new ways of working, that their children will get into industries that will cease to exist, or that economic upheaval will create wholesale unemployment, especially among older workers. These are legitimate concerns. Entire professions and industries will fade. But new ones will flourish. This will be happening over the next two or three decades, which is fast by historical standards, but may turn out to be no more disruptive than the pace at which the microprocessor revolution brought about its changes in the workplace, or the upheavals in the airline, trucking, and banking industries over the last decade.
Although the microprocessor and the personal computer that it enabled have altered and even eliminated some jobs and companies, it is hard to find any large sector of the economy that has been negatively affected. Mainframe, mini-computer, and typewriter companies have downsized, but the computer industry as a whole has grown, with a substantial net increase in employment. As big computer companies such as IBM or DEC have laid people off, many of those workers have found employment within the industry—usually at companies doing something related to PCs.
Outside the computer industry it is also hard to find a complete business sector hurt by the PC. There are some typesetters who were displaced by desktop-publishing programs—but for every worker in that situation there are several whose jobs desktop publishing created. All the change hasn’t always been good for all the people, but as revolutions go, the one set in motion by the personal computer has been remarkably benign.
Some people worry that there are only a finite number of jobs in the world, and that each time a job goes away someone is left stranded with no further purpose. Fortunately, this is not how the economy works. The economy is a vast interconnected system in which any resource that is freed up becomes available to another area of the economy that finds it most valuable. Each time a job is made unnecessary, the person who was filling that job is freed to do something else. The net result is that more gets done, raising the overall standard of living in the long run. If there is a general downturn across the economy—a recession or a depression—there is a cyclical loss of jobs, but the shifts that have come about as a result of technology have tended, if anything, to create jobs.
Job categories change constantly in an evolving economy. Once all telephone calls were made through an operator. When I was a child, long-distance calls from our home were made by dialing “0” and giving an operator the number, and when I was a teenager, many companies still employed in-house telephone operators who routed calls by plugging cables into receptacles. Today there are comparatively few telephone operators, even though the volume of calls is greater than ever. Automation has taken over.
Before the Industrial Revolution, most people lived or worked on farms. Growing food was mankind’s main preoccupation. If someone had predicted back then that within a couple of centuries only a tiny percentage of the population would be needed to produce food, all those farmers would have worried about what everyone would do for a living. The great majority of the 501 job categories recognized in 1990 by the U.S. Census Bureau didn’t even exist fifty years earlier. Although we can’t predict new job categories, most will relate to unmet needs in education, social services, and leisure opportunities.
We know that when the highway connects buyers and sellers directly, it will put pressure on people who are currently acting as middlemen. This is the same sort of pressure that mass merchants such as WalMart, Price-Costco, and other companies with particularly efficient consumer-merchandising approaches have already put on more traditional stores. When Wal-Mart moves into a rural area, the merchants in the local towns feel the pinch. Some survive, some do not, but the net economic effect on the region is modest. We may regret the cultural ramifications, but warehouse stores and fast-food chains are thriving because consumers, who vote with their dollars, tend to support outlets that pass their productivity savings along in the form of lower prices.
Reducing the number of middlemen is another way of lowering costs. It will also cause economic shifts, but no faster than the changes happened in retailing in the last decade. It will take many years for the highway to be utilized so widely for shopping that there will be significantly fewer middlemen. There is plenty of time to prepare. The jobs those displaced middlemen change to might not even have been thought of yet. We’ll have to wait and see what kinds of creative work the new economy devises. But as long as society needs help, there will definitely be plenty for everyone to do.