Technological history

I have been reading this fascinating site lately: Technology Innovation in New Zealand. Before you dismiss this as the bizarre interest of a pointy-headed economic policy bureaucrat, you should take a look. It's a fascinating story!

The site covers the history of technology and large-scale industrial developments in NZ since the early days of the colony. It goes from railroads and hydroelectric dams all the way through Rob Muldoon's Think Big projects in the late 70s and early 80s.

An aside: I have been increasingly interested in what New Zealand was like in the pre-1984 days, before Labour Finance Minister Roger Douglas sold off the many state-owned enterprises, opened the country to trade and financial flows, removed subsidies and deregulated the economy. The Wikipedia article on these radical changes describes Rogernomics as "the dismantling of the Australasian model of state development that had existed for the previous 90 years, and its replacement by the Anglo-American neoliberal orthodoxy based on the monetarist policies of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School." But what difference does this make? And what exactly was the "Australasian model"?

The TechHistory site actually goes a long way to answering that. It describes, in great detail, the genesis of various key features of the present-day New Zealand economy. The political and geographical wrangling and overseas advice that led to the construction of narrow-gauge railroads. The technological hurdles that had to be overcome in order to develop the unique method of steel forging used at the NZ Steel foundry, and the government's sale of the business at a cheap price days before a stock-market crash. The debates within the Ministry of Works over electrifying part of the North Island Main Trunk railway. The 1918 first issue of the New Zealand Journal of Science and Technology, which laid out many of the key issues that would be addressed over the next six decades.

In some ways, it was a quite dynamic and forward-looking time. Vast resources and expertise were marshaled in order to bring forth technologies that had never before existed in New Zealand. (The post-1984 era of liberalisation can seem a bit disappointing in comparison - for all the talk of increased economic dynamism and flexibility, financial speculation and overseas ownership (and exploitation) of resources has been more the rule.) But in other ways, it seems quite bureaucratic and regimented: discussions over which projects to pursue were carried out between the Ministry of Works, the Treasury, and the Department of Industrial and Scientific Research. For example, the construction of cables to carry surplus electricity from the South Island to the North were held up for years by South Island politicians who preferred cheap energy on their island, by Ministry of Works officials who wanted to keep their workers busy on new, relatively expensive power projects in the north...

It must have been a strange time; a bizarre mix of headiness and frustration. I wonder whether there was a sense of futuristic economic optimism engendered by Muldoon's Think Big projects, which were set up in a time of rising oil prices to convert natural gas from a large new find into substitute petroleum, fertilizer, methanol. Or would it have grated or felt like a statist imposition?

I suppose that it's not that different from our time. But now, economic-developmentally at least, our dreams and our dull practical limits come from elsewhere.

Addendum: Or maybe this is all too much high-flying theorizing. New Zealand then was just a frontier country full of practical men working hard to make it work, make it pay off for them. They probably didn't bother to think about development models and theories - it was probably more of a matter of building what could be built, in whatever way, and inventing what was needed. It's no coincidence, then, that economic dogmas started to take hold in New Zealand (through Roger Douglas at first) after the Labour Party filled up with academics and intellectuals, rather than its traditional trade union men.