Opposition to public markets

Since the dawn of commercial computing, millions of jobs have been lost to successive new technologies. The pain involved is generally regarded as an unavoidable part of progress: as one commentator told Business Week in 1993, when cheaper software for clerical and administrative functions was becoming widely available, ‘people who don’t add value are going to be in trouble’.54 A full-scale GEMs system would be but the latest encroachment of computerization on previously established ways of doing business. A crucial difference, however, would be the status of its victims: corporations and executives rather than humble office workers. Will they accept their fate as thousands of past employees were expected to and resign themselves to irrelevance? They might not and they would have ample scope to resist. A GEMs service should not be initiated without full public debate. That would ensure the legitimacy of government involvement in a launch and, as a bonus for the consortium behind the system, heightened public awareness. During this phase the proposed system would be vulnerable to attack on several counts. Like all previous major public infrastructure projects, it would push existing technology to its limits in a leap of faith that initially may not stand up to aggressive probing. Historians would recognize the pattern. In 1845, for instance, work began on Britain’s Chester to Holyhead railway with a 5- mile gap in the plans because no one knew how the plunging gorge of the Menai Straits was to be bridged. A race for solutions led finally to the invention of box girders, which could bear all required loads, even as lines leading to the gorge were being laid.55