Technology

Technology is most fundamentally a way of doing things. Technology advances improve how an entrepreneur can produce a good, including increases in knowledge about how to combine factors more efficiently and developing capital goods that are more productive than those used before. Production of capital goods embodying more advanced technology requires research and development facilities and plants that can produce more technically advanced capital goods. Technological advance in consumer goods also significantly contribute to prosperity. Technology is not autonomous, but necessarily embodies concrete capital goods and must be applied entrepreneurially. Bringing new production technology into the production structure requires much effort by people operating at relatively higher stages of production. It requires research that eventually results in working prototypes, which evolve into producer goods what are priced low enough to make their purchase attractive to entrepreneurs. Because evaluating the use of specific technology in specific production projects require economic calculation, technological advance also requires private property. Innovators must have the freedom to think, experiment, and trade with each other. It requires saving and investment. It requires freedom and the economic blessings that flow from it.