They must pay the soldiers and sailors and the munitions makers who keep the country safe and the policemen and lawyers and judges and jailers who maintain domestic order. An economy can become more productive because computers are transmitting information about the entire political economy at a greater clip, so that there are more loaves of bread and more sides of beef available to the entire economy. But if at the same time the representatives of the people in the government are making horrendous mistakes in their basic mission of taxing and spending and managing the national coinage, then computers are only more efficient when it comes to sharing the national scarcity. There may be more loaves of bread and more pounds of hamburger, but if they have to be divided among millions of lawyers and accountants and judges and jailers and financial intermediaries who work night and day to try to figure out what Alan Greenspan will do next week with the national coinage, then you see individual standards of living are not helped much at all. Standards of living have increased to some degree from the days when I was a teenage, fifty years ago.
People live longer is the best evidence of that.
The nation, though, does have to spend more of its production of bread and meat to keep their parents and grandparents alive longer, and they work harder and harder so they can enjoy as much of their youth while taking care of the elderly. To the degree computers help produce better medicines and better training of physicians and dentists, they certainly help people live longer lives at the same time they make it easier for the healthy among us to live better lives while they are still healthy. You are on the right track when you criticize Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan for identifying high-tech as the ultimate savior of all of us. He should read the writings of the Unibomber to disabuse himself of that notion. Several years ago, when Greenspan and I were still on speaking terms, I told him to his face that technology was not the answer to poverty.