Vol 455|23 October 2008

COMMENTARY

The charge of technology

Science policies based on techno-nationalist thinking and fantasies about the past technological revolutions will get us nowhere fast, says David Edgerton.
he steam engine changed the world. So too did electricity and the internal combustion engine, atomic power, and the Internet. Such stories are told with a hopeful eye to the future. They tell us that the next great revolution will be caused by technologies X, Y or Z, and that as nations we need to promote them. Such histories are given as evidence to support rational policies for national innovation today, bolstered by the assumption that national policies matter and that there is a clear link between national innovation and national success. We need, however, a much more critical understanding of this evidence base for science, technology and innovation policy. That presents a formidable challenge. For all their seeming robustness, terms such as science, technology and innovation change meaning without warning. They come loaded with assumptions about their relation to society and the economy that dont hold under scrutiny. Moreover, the histories on which we base policies are clouded by propagandistic, romanticized accounts of single or a few (often

ill-chosen) technologies changing everything. The past, the present and the future of actual science and technology bears little relationship to what we are told it has been, is and will be. Inadequate understanding of science policy and technology among scientific and political elites is a serious problem, and a much richer and better account is needed if we are to have evidence-based policy to meet the challenges of the future. The world economy has both grown and changed radically, but assessing the contribution of science or innovation is difficult. It used to be suggested that the growth unexplained by increases in capital and labour (now dignified as total factor productivity or multifactor productivity) was a measure of technical change, but the ironic reality was that, as Moses Abramovitz, the pioneering student of economic growth, put it, this growth was, a measure of our ignorance1. To confound this ignorance by uncritically using terms such as innovation, technology, science, and research and development (R&D) is singularly inappropriate.

Yet we are remarkably confused about the relations of science, technology and the economy. The world economy now is not, and could not be, based on the same technologies as those of say 1900, or even 1950. Novelties from many sources, including R&D and academic laboratories, have been of fundamental importance, although which, when and how remains much more mysterious than most accounts allow. Inexcusably, a naive do-ityourself economics of innovation (to adapt a phrase from the economist David Henderson) conflates the world economy with particular national economies.

Nationalistic naivety
This old-fashioned techno-nationalist way of thinking makes a category error assuming that the part behaves in the same way as the whole with serious consequences. Let us assume for the moment that 70% of global economic growth comes from technical change as might be (incorrectly) deduced from the simplest forms of growth economics. It simply does not follow that national science, innovation, technology or R&D leads to 70%

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NATURE|Vol 455|23 October 2008

OPINION

of national economic growth. Yet far too often such a connection is assumed in the expectation that there is, or should be, a positive correlation between national R&D expenditures and national rates of economic growth. For many decades the most straightforward inspection of the evidence has shown this is not the case. In the 1950s, Britain spent much more on R&D than Japan, and grew far more slowly; until more recently Japan spent far more than China (or Britain), and itself grows more slowly than it used to, and much slower than China2,3. Only in techno-nationalist fantasies (and they have certainly infected policy studies in this area) does national invention drive national economic growth, and national investment in science, technology or R&D correlate positively with national economic growth. In the real world, global innovation leads to national growth, and national innovation leads to global growth.

Importing innovation
There is no mystery here. For most countries at most times, the importation of new techniques has been more important than their national development. This applies not just to China, but to, say, the United Kingdom and France too: most countries get their new technologies from abroad. France has the most nuclear-intensive electricity generation in the world, but the technology was developed in the United States; the laptop on which I write is not the product of only one countrys R&D. Nowhere in the world do doctors prescribe only pharmaceuticals of national invention. As we are constantly reminded in other contexts, science and technology are global. R&D activity, measured in dollars, euros and yen, and more often presented as a nondimensional ratio of R&D to gross domestic product (GDP), has acquired a wholly inappropriate authority and significance. Everywhere government agencies and research scientists want to see this abstract number raised. From the European Union with its Lisbon target of spending 3% of GDP on R&D, to any number of individual nation states, one finds the belief that the national ratio of R&D spend to GDP needs to be raised in order to boost the growth rate of the national economy. Raising R&D levels may be a good thing for the world economy, but not necessarily for the spending country. Of course, national R&D policies might not necessarily be good for the global economy either. There is a powerful tendency, everywhere in the world, to believe that national policies should be directed to the national development of a very small number of technologies, usually three, and usually the same three: nanotechnology, information technology and biotechnology. Replicating such

a limited portfolio around the world is not a tank. We think of steam power as important sensible policy for global progress. There are, around 1800, but the steam engine had a more ironically and unfortunately, few things less radical impact in 1900 than in 1800; and today, innovative than innovation policies. its arguably the steam turbines of coal-fired Current claims for the future effects of the power stations that drive the Chinese econthree typical development fields are supported omy and carbon emissions. The internal comby analyses of past trinities of technologies bustion engine drives the worlds expanding that created the modern world. Sometimes in fleet of ships. The HaberBosch process for an echo of the prehistoric stone, bronze and creating synthetic ammonia was first used iron ages, we are told that we have lived though commercially in about 1913, but the massive eras characterized by one or a handful of tech- application of synthetic nitrogen to the land nologies. The British prime minister Gordon came after 1945. The more one thinks about it, Brown, who has a PhD in history, told us in a the more absurd the standard story becomes. speech on the environment that he now looks Understanding the material constitution of forward to no less than a fourth technological our world is an increasingly important task revolution, after the steam engine, the internal given the threat of climate change. Sensible combustion engine and the microprocessor, policy needs to engage with a world in which which transformed not just technology, but production and consumption go up and up, the way our society has been organized and an index of which is the increasing output of the way people live4. carbon dioxide, even in developed countries. Such analyses have a superficial plausibility We need to address the world as it is. To base that comes largely from repetition rather than policies on the fashionable idea that we live serious analysis. To reduce whole historical only in a networked, dematerialized informaperiods, and extraordinary historical changes tion society, is to fail before starting. There is to one technology, or even three, is clearly a great danger too that calling for new techabsurd. And it encourages the kind of thinking nologies to be developed, in the old-fashioned that told us in the 1940s with supreme confi- futuristic way, is a cover for inaction now. dence that the future would be one of rockets, New technologies are necessary, but far from atomic power and automation. This was already sufficient, to deal with the problem. called a fourth revolution back then. The mateThere are more than enough lessons from rial basis of human life has been much more history to show us that we should reject the ignorant certainties of complex than, and very futuristic guru-talk. But different to, that implied Calling for new technologies we in these accounts. For should take a positive to be developed, in the oldexample, until relatively message from debunking recently, most humans fashioned futuristic way, is a the standard arguments. have lived on the land, New evidence and new cover for inaction now. a place of extraordinary thinking about science change, driven in part by and technology could pay increased animal power, mechanical power off handsomely. There are many unexplored and chemical fertilisers. By any account, one of possibilities left out of consideration because the most important changes in human history of our over-commitment to narrow, crude, has been the increase in agricultural produc- old-fashioned techno-nationalist thinking tivity after 1945. We might wonder too why, about where change is happening and what its like agriculture, ships feature so marginally effects are. There is plenty of evidence, necesin histories of technology and science, when sarily from the past, that will help us think and they carry massively more trade (in terms act as experienced adults and not as children of value) than the information superhigh- gawping at a future we cannot know. way. And have not changes in machine tools David Edgerton is at the Centre for the History transformed our capacity to make things of Science, Technology and Medicine at Imperial from steam engines to microprocessors? College London, London SW7 2AZ, UK. He is the One hugely important problem in our author of The Shock of the Old: Technology and thinking about science, technology and soci- Global History since 1900. ety, is that we take selected innovations and e-mail: d.edgerton@imperial.ac.uk assume that their main effect comes soon after 1. Abramovitz, M. Am. Econ. Rev. 46, 523 (1956). innovation. But the Wehrmacht had more 2. Edgerton, D. Science, Technology and the British Industrial Decline, 1870-1970 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996). horses per soldier for its march to Moscow 3. National Science Board Science and Engineering Indicators in 1941 than did Napoleons army in 1812. 2008 available at: www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind08/ In this special but important case, the horse 4. www.number10.gov.uk/Page13791 became more important with time, despite our To comment on this article and others in our image of a German army dominated by the innovation series, visit http://tinyurl.com/5uolx2.
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