Technology is not innovation
We wrongly treat technology as the same thing as invention and the new, so we ask what is coming next and not what people actually rely on. The useful question is what is in use, by whom, and how much.
Business
Research spending doesn't drive growth
There is no positive link between how much a country spends on research and how fast its economy grows. Most growth comes from adopting technologies already invented elsewhere. Most inventions fail and most patents are never used, so inventive nations aren't necessarily rich ones.
Spectacular weapons can cost victories
Glamorous new weapons can absorb resources that would have done more good spent on ordinary arms. The cost of one rocket programme could have bought 24,000 fighters, and each rocket killed more of the forced labourers who built it than of the enemy it was aimed at. Wars are mostly decided by artillery and infantry, not wonder weapons.
Old tools do the essential work
The most important work is usually done with old, cheap, mass-produced technology, while money gets wasted on new gadgets. A bomber built in the 1950s dropped nearly a third of American bombs in a 1991 war, and one simple postwar rifle design makes up most of the world's assault rifles.
Modernity can increase old methods
Industrialisation often expands the use of supposedly outdated methods rather than replacing them. A twentieth-century army invaded Russia with more horses than one 130 years earlier, and India had twice as many bullock carts in 1981 as at independence.
Old firms dominate new innovation
The biggest spenders on innovation are usually long-established companies, not new upstarts. Four of the top five research spenders in 2003 were in business before 1914.
Old industries get new purposes
Supposedly obsolete technologies are revived and reshaped for new markets instead of simply dying out. Whaling became a new kind of twentieth-century industry mainly to make margarine, and by the 1990s half of America's antibiotics went to speeding animal growth.
The poor world remixes technology
Most people live neither behind nor ahead but in a poor world of creole technology, where old and new things are adapted, repaired and repurposed locally. Understanding technology means looking at the small, mundane, feminine and poor, not just the new, big and spectacular.
Name failures to avoid repeating them
Prestige projects that waste money must be recognised plainly as failures, or we have no basis for deciding whether to build the next one. Supersonic airliners failed economically because they were a dreadful waste of money. Hype about where technology is heading is reliably wrong.