What is the connection between technology and economics and parecon?
Technology is similar to science, of course, in its trajectories of pursuit and logic of development. Those who work to produce it in a parecon, let’s now call it applied science, are like those who work in any other endeavors regarding influence, conditions, and income. The critical change is the determination of what technologies are worth pursuing and implementing. In capitalism this is determined by profit making possibilities and the need to maintain or even enlarge the relative advantages of elites which include capitalist and coordinator class dominance as well as hierarchies regarding race, gender, polity, etc. As a result the direction of technological innovation reflects the needs of narrow sectors of the population, not generalized human well being and development. In the U.S., for example, technological nightmares abound. Indeed the whole idea of high tech and low tech is revealing. It is high tech if it involves huge apparatuses and massive outlays of time and energy to ge
