Big Solutions: Coevolution of Technology & Rules

Sometimes big problems that had seemed technological turn out not to be so, or could more plausibly be solved through other means. Until recently, famines were understood to be caused by failures in food supply (and therefore seemed addressable by increasing the size and reliability of the supply, potentially through new agricultural or industrial technologies). But Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate economist, has shown that famines are political crises that catastrophically affect food distribution. (Sen was influenced by his own experiences. As a child he witnessed the Bengali famine of 1943: three million displaced farmers and poor urban dwellers died unnecessarily when wartime hoarding, price gouging, and the colonial government’s price–controlled acquisitions for the British army made food too expensive. Sen demonstrated that food production was actually higher in the famine years.) Technology can improve crop yields or systems for storing and transporting food; better responses by nations and nongovernmental organizations to emerging famines have reduced their number and severity. But famines will still occur because there will always be bad governments.…It’s not true that we can’t solve big problems through technology; we can. We must. But all these elements must be present: political leaders and the public must care to solve a problem, our institutions must support its solution, it must really be a technological problem, and we must understand it.