Technological change often prompts calls for regulation. Yet formulating regulatory policy in relation to rapidly-changing technology is complex. It requires an understanding of the politics of technology, the complexity of the innovation process, and its general impact on society. Chapter 3 introduces a variety of academic literatures across the humanities, law and the social sciences that offer insights on understanding technological change that have direct relevance to the challenges of regulating new and emerging technology. The chapter discusses different strands of scholarship, ranging from the history of technology, innovation studies and the growing field of law and technology that have until now remained largely fragmented and siloed, focusing primarily on digital technologies.

Within a few decades following the end of the Second World War, Germany moved from a country of middling wealth per capita to one of the wealthiest countries in the world. In the meantime, the Japanese, very poor indeed in 1945 in spite of a strong showing in terms of industrialisation and technology, joined that select club only about a decade after the Germans. At the same time, Germans and Japanese became in general more economically equal. This is reflected in the rise of consumerism in both countries, and increasingly the nations’ affluent consumers showed no hesitation whatsoever in purchasing domestically manufactured white goods and many other products. In doing so, they helped power the countries’ respective economic miracles. Moreover, their purchases and savings also made the companies that produced the goods more financially secure while at the same time enabling increasing levels of technological capability. This provided a sound basis for those firms to move ever more aggressively into export markets by the end of the first quarter-century after the war’s end. West Germany forged into these export markets earlier than the Japanese, who were less reliant on export for growth.

Advances in technology have opened up new opportunities for people to live in different ways. Human creativity is one of the most important causes of changes of this kind. Flourishing probably requires space for people to be creative (in a broad sense) and to benefit from (and rejoice in) the creativity of others. But creativity is often destructive, as Joseph Schumpeter famously noted, destroying value as well as creating it. That change will take place is predictable, but the direction of the change and how rapid it will be are things that probably cannot be known ex ante. Predictions made 50 years ago about what life would be like today are not noted for their accuracy. More recently, the uses of social media have gone beyond what the developers of the technology could foresee. In a world of increasing and unpredictable technological change, what will a life that we have reason to value look like?

This chapter brings together ideas from earlier chapters on decision-making and integrates them with perspectives from evolutionary economics to analyze the process of structural change. It begins with a neo-Marshallian view of the competitive process and price setting in a mature industry, which is then extended to consider how selection processes work when an industry is disrupted by customers switching to different products or the uptake of innovative production systems. This leads to a view of industries as being akin to sporting leagues in which the winners can increasingly dominate unless new entrants or less-successful firms can fight back despite smaller profits by rewriting the rules of the game. The uptake of new concepts is analyzed via Dopfer et al.’s “micro–meso–macro framework,” in which a “meso” is a generic concept that firms apply in different “micro” ways, often triggering much wider “macro” changes (e.g., impacts of smartphone apps) but where adoption can be delayed by deal-breaker issues with initial versions and other sources of resistance to change. Finally, the chapter examines how shifting corporate politics shapes how bold firms are in making innovations and how the changing distribution of knowledge in an industry affects the division of labor between firms.

The importance of labor market dynamics to the study of American political development has never been in question. The labor market is, at one and the same time, a point of distribution of economic production, an arena for political interest articulation, and – perhaps most interesting – an allocation of private political power. Of course, there are other markets with these properties (in particular housing and credit), but labor income still predominates the budgets of most of the population, time at work dominates the activity of most working-age adults, and political emotions such as status and dignity clearly owe a great deal to the distribution of power and autonomy at the gates of and inside the “hidden abode of production”

Perhaps the most extraordinary contribution of the United States since the late nineteenth century has been as driver of the three great successive waves of radical technological and techno-organizational innovation through the subsequent 120 or so years. Economic historians often refer to these three waves respectively as the Scientific Revolution (late nineteenth and early twentieth century);1 the Fordist Revolution (1920s to the 1970s); and the ICT Revolution (1980s on).2 (They were preceded by the first wave, the so-called Industrial Revolution, based on iron, steam, coal and textiles, and centered on the UK, which had taken place from the late eighteenth through the mid nineteenth century.) By driver of radical innovation is meant the carrier-through of these innovation waves across society, typically from research to the rapid scaling-up of giant companies. The USA has also been central to scientific inventions.

Will economic and productivity growth be slower going forward than in US experience over the past century or even over the postwar period, as techno-pessimists suggest? Or will technological changes usher in a new era of faster productivity growth and enhanced welfare? Are “headwinds” to growth from demographic, competitive, and social trends bound to blunt potential gains trumpeted by techno-optimists? This chapter describes the key arguments of the techno-optimists and the techno-pessimists. It argues that there is little a priori reason to doubt that technological advances will continue. The debate should focus on the link between those advances and broad measures of productivity growth. Consistent with early periods of technological diffusion, the time period between general technological advances and their impact on productivity may be long; the chapter extends these arguments to contemporary discussions of AI and machine learning. While it shares concerns about macroeconomic headwinds to growth, the chapter emphasizes microeconomic policies to support intangible capital accumulation and its diffusion to general productivity, and finds for the techno-optimists.

The consensual, moderate politics that characterized the golden age of democratic capitalism hasgiven way, in the past decades, to growing public dissatisfaction toward political elites,ideological polarization, and the rise of populist parties. This chapter starts by exploring theeconomic foundations of that remarkable political turnaround. It then describes the historicalsequence through which populist movements took advantage of those changes. And it concludesby discussing potential responses to the new economic and political challenges faced byadvanced economies.

The present and past are insufficient guides for designing learning: we must also make wise use of futures thinking. Today, we have tools available that give clear indications of future trends. These trends are certainly not immutable; they will change but they also can be shaped. Educators need to consider how to prepare learners to understand and shape the direction and impacts of these trends. What it means to thrive has to be filtered through the awareness of emerging challenges for our planet, our societies and ourselves. Current scholarship and analysis suggest that humanity stands at the cusp of three great pivot points in its history. First, the planetary emergency, encompassing the climate crisis, consequences of the anthropocene, and the Sixth Great Extinction. Second, the apotheosis of technology, through artificial intelligence. And third, the possibilities for human evolution as multiple biomedical technologies converge. Never in human history have such profound, literally unprecedented changes been in prospect. But nothing is immutable. The future is not a straight line; it can and will be shaped by how and what young people learn in schools.