And is technological innovation the only road to growth?"
[WS:] Interesting question. To answer it, it may be useful to group innovations into four broadly defined and not mutually exclusive categories: 1. Efficiency improvements 2. Experiential proximity improvements 3. Bodily function improvements 4. Control improvements
Efficiency improvement is doing more with less, for example railroad vs. horse-drawn carriages and barges. Experiential proximity improvement is bringing a piece of equipment closer to human experience and thus increasing its convenience or personal appeal. Examples include automobile vs railroad or a tablet vs PC. The new product may be less efficient than the old one, but it has a clear advantage of being in closer proximity to the user in everyday life, hence its appeal. Bodily function improvement is self-explanatory, it includes all advances in medicine and related fields. Finally control improvement is innovation that allows the owner or operator a greater level of control of access to something of value.
To evaluate a potential of improvement in any particular field, we need to consider potential in which of these four categories. The development of IT can be instructive here. The initial growth went along efficiency improvement lines - aimed to improve raw computing power. Then came the PC revolution, which increased the experiential proximity of the computing devices by bringing them from the computer room to home. PC was a step down in terms of efficiency (i.e. vis a vis mainframe devices) but their ease of access made up for that deficiency. And then, the efficiency of PC s started to improve while experiential proximity remained the same. The next big innovation was the tablet/smart phone which basically followed the same trajectory - a step down in terms of efficiency made up by bring the device closer to human experience and then gradual improvements in efficiency while experiential proximity remains constant. Based on that trend, one would predict that the next big innovation in this area will be in improving experiential proximity, perhaps by integrating computing devices with human body.
A similar process can be observed in bodily function improvement. Hospital improved efficiency of health care vis a vis home care by individual physicians, but then the development of anti-psychotic drugs significantly increased the experiential proximity of cared that put mental hospitals out of business.
Control improvements are an altogether different animal. Unlike improvements in the previous areas that increase the general welfare of people, these improvements can be compared to cancerous growth because their main function is to restrict general access to that welfare for the exclusive benefits of the owners or operators of that technology. Included here are anything from surveillance technology, encryption, DRM, war machines, behavior control media, substances or devices, etc. These innovations are a product of property relations and as such the sky is the limit of their growth as long as social organization is built on private property relations. I would predict that neoliberalism will provide a great boost to innovations in this area, e.g. surveillance and attack robots (aka "drones") and various DRM/computer security technologies. Interestingly, however, there have been little progress in indoctrination techniques since Dr, Goebbels - large scale fear and hate mongering is still being used and never fails to work. Even the bogey man (socialism) is the same, even though socialists are near extinction.
The bottom line is that there is a potential for innovation of at least one of the four kinds in almost every field of the economy - energy, IT, materials, bio science, organization. There does not seem to be an end of progress and growth - albeit their forms may change quite substantially.
One more observation. The success of socialism in the past was achieved by espousing progress rather that rejecting it. Specifically, socialism espoused an innovation in the organization of the economy that offered a greater efficiency in the allocation of capital to productive uses than the market. This is why the Soviet economy grew while western economies were plagued by recession. However, the West came with another innovation that can be viewed as one of improving experiential proximity over socialism - instead of central government making most economic decisions Keynesian policies created an environment in which individual firms made these decisions that favored one direction over another. Neoliberalism, in turn, espoused another innovation in that field - that of the control variety. It increased the private control of capital by crippling but not dismantling Keynesian policies. BY so doing they enhanced elite control of the economy but preserved the mechanisms that subsidized and safeguarded their profits. Very clever indeed.
I do not think that socialism has any chance as long it keeps repeating its old Marxist mantras. It is like extolling the virtues of typewriters in the era of personal computers. The way to go is to espouse a nascent innovation in the organization of the economy. At this point the accumulation of great wealth in private hands is a fait accompli - by which I mean that personal wealth of every person increased quite substantially cf. savings, investments in house, retirement etc. Any hint of taking that away is DOA. The way to go is to come with an idea of a better use of that private wealth than the plutocrats and oligarchs are making of it now. One possible area is social investment i.e. investments that not only provide financial returns but also create identifiable social benefits - that gains increasing popularity in Europe and even in this country (e.g thanks to the Community Reinvestment Act, or interest of certain public sector pension funds in "socially responsible" investments). Thus far, some capitalist mouthpieces are trying to claim this development for capitalism, but I do not think they are on a very solid ground. A much stronger claim is that made by the social economy movement (basically cooperatives and mutuals in Europe) which even have representation in the European Commission http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/policies/sme/promoting-entrepreneurship/social-economy/ . So instead of pursuing silly dreams that denounce all institutions (cf. anarchism) or mindless protest actions, the way to go is to propose some version of social economy as a better, more efficient alternative to neoliberalism.
-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."