Rants & Rambles
5 - Invention and Consequences
When I was in grade school, I loved to read biography and dramatized history - "You are There" type of stories, in which a couple of kids live through an important event. Among the heroes and happenings considered important enough for such books were inventors and the act of invention. Thomas Edison, Robert Fulton, Henry Ford, the Wright Brothers, Eli Whitney, George Washington Carver - folks like these made for great reading. They were people with a dream, who rose from obscure beginnings and overcame technical, financial, and social challenges to win out in the end. They and their inventions changed the course of history.
The books always ended shortly after the moment of the Great Invention. In some cases, there was a final wrap-up chapter, in which we learned a little of the inventor's later successes in life and esteemed old age (or, in Fulton's case, the tragedy of an early death in the midst of great success). Nowhere was there a description of the long-term effects of the invention, particularly not the long-term detrimental effects. These books were based firmly in the belief that innovation and invention are the acme of human endeavor. They had no concern for unintended consequences.
"Men of Vision" are Sometimes Blind to Reality
This is not surprising, given the historical context. These men lived at the height of the Industrial Revolution and the westward expansion of the U.S., a time when most heroes were portrayed as idealistic yet pragmatic individuals. The inventor/entrepreneur was, after all, a combination of pioneer, technologist, and industrialist. A crackpot and loner, perhaps, but also a genius, with great determination and courage of conviction. It's a myth that has stayed with us, even into the 21st Century.
I think it's fair to say that none of these inventive heroes had anything in their minds other than using technology to improve the lot of humanity, while building fame and fortune at the same time. For some of them, the fame or the fortune may have been the most important goal, but none of them would have suffered the tribulations reported in those books merely for compliments or a quick buck. The process was never quick, seldom glorious, and always difficult; it was the intellectual quest that kept them going.
Like most "men of vision," their dreams obscured their vision of reality. They may have foreseen some of the side effects of their creations, but they were able to rationalize the losses as being minor compared to the benefits, or as easy to fix once the Grand Invention was up and running.
Take the Automobile...
Take the automobile: it was an idea whose time had come. Many people other than Ford had been working on self-propelled individual transportation devices for quite some time. He just happened to be at the right juncture of technology and economy. He not only invented a horseless carriage, he developed new ways to finance, manufacture, and market it. And the public was ready for it, from him and several dozen other entrepreneurs. They put their horses out to pasture, set aside their bicycles, and lined up to buy Tin Lizzies.
...and Suffer the Consequences
The results were rapid and amazing. Car dealerships sprang up across the country, and with them came gas stations. The oil industry blossomed. People began to spread out. The suburb became a viable concept, then an inevitability. Roads grew into highways, then freeways, then interstates. Grocery stores became supermarkets. Merchants moved to shopping centers in the suburbs, to be near the people. Then they moved to malls outside the suburbs, because the people could drive to them. Small retailers merged, or were gobbled up, because malls required high rents. Village centers became retail ghost towns. Big box retailers siphoned money from local economies, forced independent competitors out of business, and - with no viable competition to force the managers into fairness - shortchanged their employees' wages and benefits, dumped their U.S. suppliers in favor of cheap foreign goods produced by underpaid foreign workers, and pocketed the savings.
The oil industry continued to blossom. All those cars drank gasoline like water, and farted polluted exhaust in similar quantities. Storm runoff carried spilled gas and oil into the watershed. SMOG became an everyday word. "Pure" bottled water became a hot commodity. Health costs spiraled.
High speed overpowered autos became the number one cause of death among 17- to 35-year-old males. In 2002, 38,000 people died and 2.9 million were injured in auto accidents. Again, health costs spiraled.
The oil industry continued to blossom, but oil began to run out. Finding it took more time, more effort, more money, and reached into regions that the public didn't want to see reached. Politicians got involved. The U.S. and its allies were forced into untenable political situations by OPEC. We backed despots because we thought they would leave our oil companies alone; then declared war on them when they threatened to nationalize, or turn off the pump, or sell their oil for Euros instead of greenbacks. Pundits argued over how much we had left: a few decades' worth, or just a few years? Oil costs spiraled.
Sales of gas-guzzlers plummeted. The auto industry reeled. General Motors announced it was getting rid of 26,000 workers (though how many of those were in top management was left unsaid). The national economy cringed as it prepared to absorb that many unemployment claims.
Who Could Have Guessed?
Surely Henry Ford could not have foreseen most of this. Just as Thomas Edison couldn't have foreseen that overhead high-tension power lines would generate electromagnetic fields that could cause childhood leukemia. Nor could George Washington Carver have foreseen that peanut farmers would pour tons of pesticides and herbicides into the southern ecosystem, and into our stomachs.
Every innovation has its unintended consequences. All of them could be
avoided with sufficient foresight, but we are not gods. Lacking omniscience, we must fix problems with new innovation. Unfortunately, the era of the independent, individual inventor is over. Except in a few remarkable cases (aviation genius Burt Rutan is one), all modern invention is funded and controlled by big business. Even government think tanks are controlled by businessmen who control the politicians who fund the think tanks. And big business has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo until the last minute, so they can wring every last penny of profit from the current technology. Innovation means retooling, retooling is expensive: put it off.
Big business does not have a dream. It is not driven by intellectual curiosity. It does not desire fame. It is concerned only with profit, and short-term profit at that. The Dow-Jones Average is more important to CEOs and share-holders than accident statistics, and spiraling health costs are simply another excuse to raise prices. (CEOs do not have to pay health care premiums. It's one of their perks.)
The solution is not to reject all innovation, of course. The automobile has done a great deal of good, as has electricity, the steamboat, the cotton gin, and all the rest. The solution is to plan for the unintended consequences by putting aside funds to deal with them, even before we know exactly what they will be; by encouraging innovation (and retooling) to fix them; by admitting they exist in the first place. This will mean changing the world view of CEOs and investors, and perhaps the very structure of our economy, so that so much power and wealth are no longer concentrated in the hands of too few men whose only vision is to be rich and powerful.
Now, that would be real innovation, with amazing consequences, and well worth dramatizing in a book for young readers.
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"Every innovation has its unintended consequences. All of them could be
avoided with sufficient foresight, but we are not gods."
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