Gandhi's mistake, Gunnar's too; and a response by Sauvik Chakraverti
The Indian Express 10 December 1996
Going through Gandhi, one sees how his mind was working on the confusing question of technology - boon or bane? In Young India, November 13, 1924, he attacked machinery: "Helps a few to ride on the backs of millions". He warned that 'the machine should not tend to make atrophied the limbs of man'. And he made an 'intelligent exception' of the Singer Sewing Machine because it had 'love at its back': Mr Singer saw his wife labouring over her sewing and invented a device that would save her trouble! Gandhi approved.
And he was honest about his confusion a long time later: In Community Service News, September-October 1946, he said: "As a moderately intelligent man, I know man cannot live without industry. Therefore, I cannot be opposed to industrialisation. But I have a great concern about introducing machine industry. The machine produces too much too fast, and brings with it a sort of economic system which I cannot grasp."
Why is it so difficult to grasp what machinery does? Only because we look at immediate - and not long-term consequences. Industry - Gandhi agrees - is a basic human impulse: we all strive to do whatever we do such that we save effort. Machines do the same. If they were bad, we would all be unemployed, our limbs atrophied, and we would yearn to be back in the Stone Ages, when we could have been much more active. But the obvious fact is that machines have raised production, wages, the standard of living and the sum total of human life on Planet Earth.
To examine the question, we look, like Henry Hazlitt did, at what happens when a new machine enters the factory of an overcoat manufacturer. Since it raises productivity, it displaces, say, 25 per cent of his workforce. This is more than what has been employed in manufacturing the machine itself. But look at the long-term consequences.
In a few years the machine `pays for itself. It has saved more than it was worth. These excess savings come to the man who bought it, who can either reinvest in his business, invest elsewhere or spend it thereby adding to employment. Further, the machine would probably have reduced costs in manufacture, giving the leader in introducing it an edge over his rivals.
Today, technophobic arguments are still heard all over the world. The anti-word is 'automation'. It is bad, and it reduces employment. The automobile industry is one in which automation is greatly opposed. Here is an industry
which has mechanised itself greatly, and the statistics are telling. In the
Evidence indicates that the khadi philosophy is seriously wrong. It cannot be a way of either increasing employment or national wealth. It can, at best, create a constituency. What it will not offer this constituency is a means by which their produce gets treated as art - as hand-work should be considered - instead of a subsidised, protected something that needs the state to shelter it from the machine. It does not call for the artistic pride of the weaver. It asks for his submission to state patronage under the aegis of Gandhians whose only claim to fame is that they worship their God without original - or even critical - thinking.
What is surprising is that a Nobel Laureate in Economics (1974) is committed to the same error. Gunnar Myrdal, shortly before he won the prize, wrote that machines which increased output should not be introduced into underdeveloped countries because they 'decrease the demand for labour. Can this be for real? At a time when
We live in times when even the existence of an intellectual-moral elite is doubtful - forget its capacity to guide the destiny of millions. Good economics and sound political science can offer some respite. This will never happen unless we are willing to sift through the heap of ideology we lug around and discard whatever is false.
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