• Unlike economies as a whole, manufacturing industries exhibit strong unconditional convergence in labor productivity. The article documents this at various levels of disaggregation for a large sample covering more than 100 countries over recent decades.
• Put differently, successful countries experience both productivity convergence in formal manufacturing and rapid industrialization. Unsuccessful countries make do with just the former.

• This means that for every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage.
• you would be surprised at how many people believe that new technologies are unmixed blessings
• Idea Number One, then, is that culture always pays a price for technology.
• the advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed evenly among the population
• And so, that there are always winners and losers in technological change is the second idea.
• Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three powerful ideas.
• every technology has a prejudice
• The third idea, then, is that every technology has a philosophy which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in what it makes us do with our bodies, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards.
• Technological change is not additive; it is ecological
• Capitalists are by definition not only personal risk takers but, more to the point, cultural risk takers.
• There, they developed and promoted the technology known as the standardized test, such as IQ tests, the SATs and the GREs. Their tests redefined what we mean by learning, and have resulted in our reorganizing the curriculum to accommodate the tests.
• They did not mean to turn political discourse into a form of entertainment
• I come now to the fifth and final idea, which is that media tend to become mythic
• The best way to view technology is as a strange intruder, to remember that technology is not part of God’s plan but a product of human creativity and hubris, and that its capacity for good or evil rests entirely on human awareness of what it does for us and to us.
• First, that we always pay a price for technology; the greater the technology, the greater the price. Second, that there are always winners and losers, and that the winners always try to persuade the losers that they are really winners. Third, that there is embedded in every great technology an epistemological, political or social prejudice. Sometimes that bias is greatly to our advantage. Sometimes it is not. The printing press annihilated the oral tradition; telegraphy annihilated space; television has humiliated the word; the computer, perhaps, will degrade community life. And so on. Fourth, technological change is not additive; it is ecological, which means, it changes everything and is, therefore, too important to be left entirely in the hands of Bill Gates. And fifth, technology tends to become mythic; that is, perceived as part of the natural order of things, and therefore tends to control more of our lives than is good for us.

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