Message-ID: <009A9498.0A9DE1E0.55@bigvax.alfred.edu> Date: Thu, 3 Oct 1996 09:45:14 EST From: "William J. Walker, Jr." <mailto:walkerw@BIGVAX.ALFRED.EDU> Subject: Re: ideas of "appropriate technology" still respected? To: Multiple recipients of list DEVEL-L <mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU>
This discussion on appropriate technology has been going on for quite a while, so I quess I will throw in my opinion.I think a distinction needs to be made between "technology" and "political economy".
Technology is the knowledge and resources to make or do something. That something might be to broadcast Brazilian soap operas or it might be to produce potable drinking water in Nepal. If it involves using rice hull ash to make cement in Kenya because hice hulls are available and inexpensive, it is called "appropriate technology", if it involves using rice hull ash to make turbine rotors in California because it is an amazing raw material it is called "high technology".
Political economy includes such ideas as free market and government control and banking and entrepreneurship and distribution of wealth, which relate to who pays for the technology and who reaps the benefits of the technology. This discussion should more appropriately be called "appropriate political economy" and we should recognize that "appropriate technology" is just one aspect of this larger area (a pawn perhaps?).
An important difference between technology and political economy is that nobody questions whether chlorine will kill the microbes in the drinking water (even if another method might be better or more appropriate). However, the appropriateness of the free market or of central planning is debated almost everywhere regardless of scale or place. (Here in western New York we have been reading an eleven part series in the newspaper on how free trade is ruining our way of life.)
Lets stop blaming the technology for what people do with it.