My childhood was defined by a long period of extreme US economic volatility, at least by modern American standards.
The Great Inflation. The Oil Shocks. The Great Stagflation. The Volcker Recession.
The impact on my family: unemployment, substance abuse, a mental health crisis, and dislocation.
From that experience, I learned the powerful lesson that steady, speedy, and sustainable economic growth, marked by rising real incomes and low unemployment, is, like … really good for families! Call me crazy, I know.
Only later did I come to understand the importance of technological progress in driving productivity growth, the foundation of any strong economy over the long run. And it’s with that experience and understanding that I judge “A New Technology Agenda for the Right,” a piece recently published by First Things, a philosophical journal.
Sorry to say, it isn’t the tech agenda that conservatives have been looking for — at least those conservatives of the pro-growth, Up Wing variety (like myself). The authors of the agenda describe their views as such:
As scholars, writers, and policy experts, we believe that public policy should direct technology toward the flourishing of the family and the human person. Our laws and regulations must seek to form a technological order that provides a functional economic role for the household, protects human sexuality, rewards marriage, enriches childhood, preserves parental and communal authority, enables the practice of liberty, and ennobles our common life. These human goods are fundamental for thriving families and they must be guarded and advanced amid revolutionary technological change.
They then offer ten principles “for empowering families through technology,” as edited by me:
Death with dignity. Prioritize disease mitigation over “radical life extension.”
Natural reproduction. Support women’s biological processes rather than commercializing or bypassing female bodies.
Sexual integrity. Combat digital exploitation through pornography, AI companions, “sex robots,” and other dehumanizing technologies.
Screen-free childhood. Liberate youth from social media addiction; restore analog play and learning.
Non-addictive smartphone design. Oppose manipulative interfaces that exploit vulnerabilities.
Data ownership. Give citizens control of personal information.
Local autonomy. Promote right-to-repair and open-source solutions over centralized technological control.
Human-enhancing work. Favor technologies that augment rather than replace workers.
Home economics. Remove barriers to household production; shape policies to support family-friendly work arrangements.
Embodied aspirations. Pursue physical achievements like space exploration over virtual substitutes.
This agenda isn’t my cup of tea. Now, that isn’t to say humanoid (I would assume) sex-robot regulation isn’t a topic worthy of public policy discussion.
But for me, this agenda has far too little to say on more important topics: a) the value of economic growth for individuals and families to improve their lives and b) on the value of individuals and families having the personal freedom to make choices about their lives.
Also this: Too much empirically and conceptually weak policy ideation, much of which seems steeped in left-wing critiques of Big Tech from the late 2010s and early 2020s.
A (not all-inclusive, unfortunately) list of these conceptual and empirical missteps:
❌ An unmerited confidence in government’s ability to steer technological change. The notion that policymakers should favor worker-augmenting over worker-replacing technologies is a popular idea right now, especially among left-leaning economists such as Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu. But Friedrich Hayek’s classic insight seems quite relevant here: Bureaucrats and politicians lack the specialized knowledge to predict beneficial technologies. Private market actors are better positioned to identify promising opportunities than Washington-directed industrial policy. What’s more, technologies routinely evolve beyond their inventors’ visions. The internet, GPS, and microwave ovens all began as something different from their eventual widespread applications. This makes it nearly impossible to categorize technologies as “job-replacing” or “job-augmenting” in advance.
Moreover, equalizing labor and capital taxation — a common suggestion among the would-be technology planners — would discourage savings and investment with bad effects on entrepreneurship. Rather than manipulating technology adoption through tax engineering, better to help workers prepare for change and supporting those caught in transition. Finally, given economic history, assuming businesses won’t create new jobs seems oddly pessimistic. The market, not government planners, remains the superior resource allocation mechanism.
❌ An unhealthy obsession with personal data. The unfortunately still-conventional wisdom holds that personal data — especially generated by social media and e-commerce sites — fuels the modern economy much as oil powered that of the past century. Heck, maybe we personal data producers should be paid for our clicks! Data dough could be a kind of universal basic income, even!
The problem with the misguided metaphor: Data exists not as a monolithic resource like petroleum, but as myriad distinct collections of information, each valuable only within specific contexts. The value of personal data emerges primarily through network effects — the countless interactions between users rather than isolated bits of information. A social media “like” derives meaning from its connection to countless others, rendering individual ownership claims largely meaningless. As technology analyst Benedict Evans neatly puts it, “There is no such thing as ‘data,’ it isn’t worth anything, and it doesn’t belong to you anyway.”
Closely related to the idea of owning your data is that tech platforms engage in privacy-invading “surveillance capitalism.” Unlike secret-police dossiers from some John le Carré novel, tech platforms deploy sophisticated algorithms that render individual data practically inscrutable. These firms do not peddle personal information; rather, they act as algorithmic intermediaries connecting advertisers with relevant audiences. It’s a model that yields substantial economic benefits, allowing small enterprises to target customers precisely at minimal cost.
❌ An unwise dismissal of the downsides of working from home. We haven’t learned anything from our pandemic-era, WFH experiment that suggests that pre-pandemic thinking about this issue should be tossed aside. While the immediate transition in 2020 proved surprisingly smooth, it masked several structural problems.
The initial WFH success largely reflected peculiar circumstances: a) employees, anxious about looming job loss, redoubled efforts to demonstrate value; b) pre-existing workplace relationships, cultivated through years of in-person interaction, temporarily sustained virtual collaboration; and c) 2020 lockdowns eliminated external distractions. Such conditions were temporary.
The economic literature — which should deeply inform any baseline expectations about WFH — suggests employee proximity yields substantial dividends. Professional networks, those invisible scaffolds of career advancement, deteriorate without regular reinforcement through face-to-face encounters. Innovation suffers when serendipitous exchanges — the proverbial water-cooler conversations — vanish from the corporate landscape. For junior staff, the absence of observable workplace norms and casual mentorship represents a particularly damaging loss. The remote-work ledger, initially promising, may ultimately show diminishing returns as these hidden costs compound over time.
❌ An unnecessarily cramped vision of technology and education. It seems profoundly unimaginative to say classrooms and schools must always resemble those of the industrial age, and that computer screens of all sorts must be “removed from the center of the classroom while restoring physical books and the mechanical arts.” There seems scant room in this vision for any new kind of learning experience informed by technological advances.
In the not-so-distant future, perhaps, students might wear lightweight AR glasses that overlay information onto their environment as needed. Teachers might evolve into learning guides and mentors rather than primary knowledge sources. They would work alongside AI teaching assistants that could provide personalized support to each student, tracking their progress, identifying strengths and areas for improvement, and adjusting curricula accordingly. Students might still gather in groups for social interaction and collaborative projects, but each would follow a customized learning path optimized for their interests and abilities. If a certain subgroup of conservatives wants 20th-century-style schools with a “great books” curriculum, so be it. But maybe there’s a better way, and schools should have the flexibility to explore these new paths.
I could go on and on:
— What counts as a radical life extension? Should conservatives oppose the elimination of major disease-related causes of death in the US (heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, respiratory illnesses, and kidney disease) if it vaults our average life expectancy to a (vigorous) 100 years or more? Too much?
— Just how solid, really, is the science behind calls to regulate and limit social media?
— Isn’t there a plausible pro-life case for artificial wombs if they could allow fetuses to develop outside the mother’s body, potentially saving lives that would otherwise be terminated through abortion?
A widescreen image featuring a bright red octagon-shaped street sign clearly displaying a cartoon-style, friendly robot icon. The robot should be simple, cheerful, and visually appealing with expressive eyes and a welcoming smile. The sign is prominent and sharply outlined against a softly blurred background hinting at an urban street or suburban neighborhood. The overall art style is playful, vibrant, and inviting, emphasizing clean lines and bold colors.
A widescreen image featuring a bright red octagon-shaped street sign clearly displaying a cartoon-style, friendly robot icon. The robot should be simple, cheerful, and visually appealing with expressive eyes and a welcoming smile. The sign is prominent and sharply outlined against a softly blurred background hinting at an urban street or suburban neighborhood. The overall art style is playful, vibrant, and inviting, emphasizing clean lines and bold colors.
Behind the manifesto’s veneer of technological prudence lies a more fundamental anxiety: not about innovation but its socially disruptive effects. The authors have a weakness for “nostalgia economics” — a selective approach to technological governance that attempts to channel innovation toward reinforcing traditional social arrangements. Consideration about how this agenda might affect innovation and growth is nowhere to be found.
But that’s a risky approach when you’re dealing with an economy that downshifted after the mid-1990s to mid-2000s tech boom and faces strong debt and demographic headwinds going forward. We saw the results of economic stagnation after the Global Financial Crisis: a surge of populism and intolerance that has yet to abate. I don’t look forward to what American culture would look like under long-term stagnation. So maybe it’s worth thinking hard about policies that support the tech-driven innovation — especially now given big advances in AI, energy, space, and biotechnology — that’s critical for growth before shifting to the issues in the above agenda.
Bottom line: Growth creates the conditions for human flourishing, including human families. Dynamic economies generate opportunities for kids to dream and strive while enabling parents to deploy their talents productively, contribute meaningfully to society, and support their families. The resulting improvements in living standards facilitate economic mobility. This is the most important way that techno-capitalism uplifts families.
I think the “new technology agenda for the right” misses pretty much all of that.
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