Brian Easton says we should not assume that all adopted innovations are progressive. Jonathon Haidt’s ‘The Anxious Generation’ illustrates that sometimes they require social measures to enhance well being

This is a re-post of an article originally published on pundit.co.nz. It is here with permission.

The Anxious Generation is a book which probably everyone engaging with adolescents should read. Haidt’s thesis is that smartphones replacing flip phones led to a marked deterioration in the wellbeing of American adolescents, causing an epidemic of mental illness. He is a social psychologist so I am not qualified to judge how right Haidt is but he certainly appears convincing. (I also greatly admired his The Righteous Mind, where he is acting as a public intellectual.)

The thesis reminded me of the wider problem of how to deal with technological innovation. Smart phones are an impressive technology, but do they improve wellbeing? Are they progress?

Progress is a relatively recent notion in the history of humankind. Plato described how once there had been a golden age, and how things have gone downhill since. When Copernicus proposed that the earth went around the sun, the conventional wisdom comforted itself that Pythagoras had already thought of that; it couldn’t be new knowledge, could it?

About five hundred years ago, the view developed that not all valid knowledge was imbedded in the past – in books – but that it would evolve out of empirical investigation. An early proponent was Francis Bacon in his Novum Organum (written a decade after the King James Bible, but in Latin). That approach has since driven science. In a meaningful sense science is progressive because it builds on past results modifying and discarding old theories.

This is nicely illustrated by the suggestion that were Plato to be reincarnated there would be a bidding war for him – no doubt won by Harvard, the world’s richest university. (This is not to say that there have been no great philosophers since but I would go to a lecture by Plato – providing it was in English and not Greek.) However a reincarnated Archimedes, the greatest Greek scientist, would be relegated to a 14-year-old’s maths class. Science progresses.

Science creates technologies – ‘blueprints’ for doing things which get applied to human endeavour, most notable with the economy. Before science, per capita economic output had been constant for millennia. Had economies stagnated at that level, today’s per capita output would be a fifteenth of its current level. (That does not mean we are fifteen times happier, or even any happier. But we have undreamed of choice and opportunity and live longer and healthier lives.)

Thus we think of technology as progressive too. But is it? The answer has to be cautious. Just because someone is promoting the new, it is not necessarily beneficial. Very often the real benefit comes after we have provided a social framework for its use.

That’s what Haidt is saying about smartphones. He is not against them but thinks that there should be rules for their use:

•             1. No smartphones before high schools;

•             2. No social media before 16;

•             3. Phone-free schools;

•             4. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence.

I am not in a position to assess these policies, but an economist notes that the first two cannot be implemented by the state and yet are not simply a matter for individual parents since they won’t want their child to be left out if everyone else has them. The third could be state-imposed, but in my view it’s a direction to be implemented by individual schools to allow for local particularities (and to work with parents to effect the first two recommendations). The fourth is very much parental – read the book about how it fits in.

Sometimes greater state intervention is necessary. Laissez faire does not always work especially when a new technology arises. But a caution: we don’t usually know when a significant new technology appears how to regulate it. Smoking is a good instance.

Legislation was passed in 1907 to ban tobacco sales to persons under the age of 16, as it was feared that tobacco would ‘stunt’ a minor’s growth. It was a response to the introduction of cheap cigarettes. A feature of the parliamentary debate was that MPs said that smoking was appropriate for adults (i.e. themselves) but they were concerned for adolescents. They had no evidence.

It took half a century for scientists to be sure that smoking was harmful to the smokers. By then, there were powerful tobacco companies which not only opposed control but deliberately suppressed their evidence that smoking was damaging to health. Given that tobacco is also addictive, it has taken till now to reduce tobacco usage substantially.

The new development is vaping. We don’t know how damaging it is – it will take a generation of vapers to assess its impact on their health with confidence; the 1907 debate indicates that initial assessments can be very wrong. The current advice is that it is better to vape than smoke but who knows? Best give up both.

Vaping is but one recent innovation with puzzling impacts. Make your own list of concerns: AI, social media, microplastics, smartphones ... it goes on.

This column appears to make conflicting recommendations. One is that almost every significant technological change will need a public policy response which the longer we leave, the harder it will be to overcome entrenched interests. But second, identifying appropriate policy responses early is difficult and we may get them very wrong.

It must be a concern that we do not have much capacity to introduce early responses. The changes that this government has made to science funding have virtually closed down serious social science research except what can be funded under the medical science remit. (Much of what was previously funded was so woke it hardly counted as serious research, but that should have been addressed by tightening up criteria and appointing more credible selection panels.) We are left very exposed to failing to use many new technologies in a socially effectively way.

Importing findings from other countries is hardly the whole answer. We need local research capacity to channel overseas research into New Zealand for responses to the innovations may be affected by cultural circumstances. This is nicely illustrated when Haidt describes quite different responses by boys and girls to smartphones (although both end up with higher rates of mental illness). Readers will not be surprised by the differences; Haidt does not tease out why. If there is this difference within America – Haidt mainly focuses on American Whites implying that things may be further different for Blacks and Latinos – then how much of his analysis is relevant here in Aotearoa New Zealand? (The answer must be some – but which?)

The government’s focus on economic growth means it is concerned with technological innovation. Given there is no certainty that the innovation will enhance wellbeing and that some will be detrimental, it is unwise not to strengthen relevant social science, instead of relying on the laissez faire of low government involvement. Haidt’s The Anxious Generation illustrates its dangers, while the book’s drawing on a wide range of American social science research illustrates that neglecting it here will compound those dangers.

*Brian Easton, an independent scholar, is an economist, social statistician, public policy analyst and historian. He was the Listener economic columnist from 1978 to 2014. This is a re-post of an article originally published on pundit.co.nz. It is here with permission.