Could Technology Make State Poorer?

Could it be that technology-induced changes underway in the economy are going to lead to the rich getting still richer while the poor get poorer? Issues of equitability aside, I am concerned about such a trend because it could be an important new contributor to social unease.

In my view, technology is not going to be the great leveler and certainly not one in socioeconomic terms. Accepting this tenant implies that Arkansas, ranking low in most national indicators for positive economic change, is at risk of becoming poorer still, at least so in relative terms among the states.

What might we observe that would indicate that such a trend is really emerging? Are the rich getting demonstrably richer and poor poorer?

A few years ago we were confronted with arguments about what was going to happen to the average IQ of Americans. Those arguments went something like this (rather oversimplified): Smart people are attracted to, marry, and have children with other smart people. That leaves less intelligent people to marry and have children with other less intelligent people. Because the less intelligent people are likely to be less well educated, they will be poorer and are likely to have disproportionately more children. There was an assumption that children will have IQs tending to those of their parents. So the appearance of smarter people, but fewer of them, or so the argument went. On the downside, there were to be more of the less intelligent in the population. One charming label applied to this hypothesis by the popular press was the “Genius Explosion.”

Proponents of the Genius Explosion idea may have minimized a few small considerations such as the central tendency in population dynamics, but what the heck, the argument did have a certain plausibility about it. In the meantime, the whole concept of using IQ as a metric was falling into public disrepute. IQ became so burdened with the demands of political correctness that we still have a hard time rationally discussing any issue in which native intelligence is a central matter, much less using it as a metric to test a controversial idea.

Back to the question, are the rich getting richer and poor getting poorer? How many economic theories are there? How many political positions can be taken? How about the “digital divide?” While we cannot incautiously use IQ as a metric in socioeconomic studies, we must also be chary of statistics as evidence for other reasons (you know the liars, damned liars, as statisticians joke).

Now I do not know what is happening to the average IQ, although by definition it should still be 100. It does seem, however, that there are legitimate current statistics pointing to large numbers of poor even in these times of remarkable prosperity and economic growth. On upper end of the spectrum we clearly have a new class of the mega-rich. Wealth is not evenly distributed (In terms of statistics, it is not a normal or bell-shaped curve,) but is skewed to the lower end.

The forces from which this uneven distribution is derived should be of concern to us all. Access to and the ability to use of technology to increase personal wealth is one of those forces and may, indeed, be the dominant force at play today.

All of this raises the question, what can we in Arkansas to counter the forces driving this trend? I have said it before, and I will say it again, “For Arkansas to have a chance to improve its economic status and the well-being of its citizens, we urgently need more than a little out of the box thinking, a willingness to try new things sooner rather than later, and true leadership.” And that is still a tall order.

For individuals, the way out of the box is most likely to be education — the kind of real education that requires both the provision of new technology-oriented educational opportunities and individual effort.

R.R. Goforth is general manager of Beta-Rubicon LLC in Fayetteville which may be reached on the web at www.beta-rubicon.com.