Regulation and Technology
I despise what is commonly called “market fundamentalism”—the facile and destructive assumption that the “free market” (which does not exist, and never has, and never will, because it cannot) is the best solution for all society’s wants and needs, and that every implementation of regulation of markets is wrongheaded. It’s not just rubbish; it’s a disease, just like any other brand of fundamentalism.
Regulation—as used here, the imposition of the state on the development and use of what we humans make—has always been an important influence on the development and use of technology. Regulation, like food or sex, is not inherently “good” or “bad.” It just is, and it can be either helpful or harmful, depending on the circumstances—or both, simultaneously, in different ways. And, also like food and sex, we need regulation.
I haven’t focused much on regulation and technology in Leeway, but better late than never. As usual, something in current events sparked the idea for this installment. Regulation, though, is not a “today” phenomenon—or even a modern one. We can go as far back as we want to with it.
Today’s “spark”—an apt metaphor, actually—was news about a new initiative in internal combustion engine development, spurred by the retreat of some governments from their recently-announced mandatory timetables for the full transition to EVs (electric vehicles). A consortium of major automakers around the world are going to work together to produce the next generation of small, ultra-efficient internal combustion engines, designed to run on multiple fuel alternatives, with even better power-to-weight ratios.
I’m not going to make this about that, but weight is the key factor there. To oversimplify, the regulatory apparatus guiding vehicle powertrain development was laser-focused on vehicular CO2 emissions and not on overall reduction in carbon footprint—and weight, usefully considered as units of weight per person transported, is an important component of that.
We can’t begin to understand why our cars are the way they are without understanding the regulatory environment behind them—and that regulatory environment reflects two things: powerful public opinions, and the lobbying efforts of “special interests”—the bugbear of every U.S. political stump speech. Those two forces can clash, cooperate, or something in between, and how that falls out will determine what regulations are implemented.
In an autocratic state, both these influences are weakened dramatically. One “special interest”—the political elite—largely determines the regulatory environment.
In the early modern British Empire, which I happen to know something about, public opinion did matter, despite the absence of democratic government, though not as much as it does now, as the political elite was not beholden to a large electorate. Lobbying was more important. “Special interests” are not, of course, necessarily bad—unless one of them has undue influence on policies that affect everyone in the society. The government, however it is constituted, has to consider the positions of all the “special interests” lobbying them, as well as its own interest—and the perennial number-one interest of a government is revenue. Now, much of that revenue goes into infrastructure and social welfare and other efforts that directly benefit society at large. In the British Empire of, say, 1730, that was starkly different. In the early modern period, most government revenue was earmarked for one thing—war, whether current or anticipated. We spend plenty on war, but not, proportionally, what they did. It’s no wonder, then, that much of government interest in, and investment in, technological development was for military purposes.
We are accustomed to thinking of military technology—which is funded by governments, who are not profit-seeking, and who usually have very deep pockets compared to private interests—as the vanguard of development, whose benefits will bleed over into wider application. Examples from our own time are legion—one being riveted and bonded aluminum unibody construction of airplanes, mastered in the 1930s, adopted not only for civilian aircraft production, but for use in production automobiles by Jaguar Cars in 2003. (Those of you who’ve read these for a while won’t be surprised that I know that.)
A hundred years earlier, the British government invested a mountain of money in the development of the marine steam turbine powerplant, which its earliest successful proponent, Charles Parsons, had proven in a brash demonstration during Fleet maneuvers could literally run circles around conventional piston-powered warships. The crossover into civilian use happened in the new fast ocean liners, which bore the prefix “RMS”—for Royal Mail Ship. The subsidies provided the lines by the government obligated these ships to carry the Royal Mail—which they were ideally equipped to do, given their unheard-of speed.
Our warships are still powered by turbines. The steam for some of them is generated by onboard nuclear reactors, though.
In the seventeenth century, the English (later British) government offered a bounty for the construction of any merchant ship over a certain size, with the stipulation that the ship could be requisitioned by the government in time of war. The bounty made it cheaper, and thus easier, for shipowners to afford larger craft. So, a government policy had a direct important effect on the merchant shipping fleet.
It went further than that. There was no viable means for accurately measuring the true tonnage of a ship in the seventeenth century. Experts could get close, but the best estimate was just that. So, for tax and customs duties purposes, Parliament adopted a “tonnage rule”—a simple formula for calculating the tonnage of every merchant ship for those purposes. Over time, shipwrights and merchants figured out how to minimize their tax and duties liabilities by modifying the designs of ships to take advantage of “holes” in this tonnage rule. This response to a regulation altered the core of British merchant ship design. Eventually, Parliament was forced to acknowledge that the regulation had become completely detached from reality, and they changed it.
Let’s consider some of the most common ways regulation affects technology.
Tax avoidance—altering how something is made to lower one’s tax burden, given existing tax rules. So, if your house is taxed on how many windows it has, have fewer windows. If your ship is taxed by the area of its upper deck, bring the sides in and make that deck smaller.
Safety—this is modern; there was no real push for the enforcement of safety regulations until the nineteenth century. It’s massively important in our cars—and “massive” isn’t a bad choice of word, as the safety tech in our cars, which has saved so many lives, makes them heavier. (And more expensive. And raises the beltline, which is why you can’t hang your arm out the window of a modern convertible the way you could when I was a kid. And reduces visibility by demanding that the roof support the vehicle’s weight in a rollover—which means thicker A, B, and C pillars, and now we use little cameras to help compensate for that…) It’s sad to say but most safety regulations are imposed as a reaction to something horrific that any expert could have predicted.
The specific needs of the state—as mentioned, historically this has usually meant military agendas—the priority placed on being prepared for war. But it can be much broader than that. If the government wants a certain type or size of merchant ship to exist, and incentivizes that, that type or size is likely to be more prominent than it would have been otherwise, compared to alternatives.
There’s also a sense in which we can usefully talk about regulation outside the strict parameters of the law, or the state. When all the electric companies decide on AC or DC, and a standard voltage—or when one company is so dominant that it can impose its own wish—then any electrical appliance has to work on that standard, and that makes them different from those that would work on another standard.
And there can be a combination of the two. If one railroad company uses one track gauge, and another uses a different one (this was how it was in the early days of railroading), and the government is making possible the development of a hugely-expensive long-distance railroad by subsidizing it, then the government may well tip the balance in favor of one gauge or the other—with the ardent support, of course, of whichever company is already using that gauge.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve encountered a technological characteristic that, as it turns out, was primarily shaped by regulation. We shouldn’t try to understand any technology without giving serious consideration to how the state, or perhaps another powerful body setting standards, has influenced how that technology was made and how it was used. This applies whether we’re thinking about the ceremonial barge of an Egyptian pharaoh or a truck/lorry. Or a computer, or a granary. Something made by a human is rarely shaped only by the will and perspective of that human.