Abstract
This chapter examines the question of what changes are being brought about by digital technology and what consequences this has for the economy and society. Its particular focus is on the challenges for economic policy. The chapter briefly presents the key questions and the corresponding analytical focus of the book. It then explains the extent to which the central principles of the market economy, as formulated by Walter Eucken, can be used as a heuristic access structure in order to better understand the challenges which digitalisation poses for economic policy and in how far this determines the chapter structure.
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Notes
- 1.
Here and in the following, in the sense of Walras (2014, 41): “(…) all things, material or immaterial (…) that is to say, that are both useful and limited in quantity (…) all scarce things and only such things have value and are exchangeable”.
- 2.
The question of what a “liberal conception of man” is might also fill shelves. For the purposes of the following considerations, it must suffice at this point to first make the role of the individual and his relationship to the economy and society partially explicit, and which must be assigned to him within the framework of such a concept of society in which the economy has an instrumental character.
- 3.
Here we cannot avoid at least touching on the area of important anthropological, philosophical or sociological questions. Admittedly, this is not the actual subject of these considerations, but it is precisely the scope of the current technological change that makes it unavoidable—here and also later—to at least point out such perspectives.
- 4.
An exhaustive discussion of this problem area would be longer than this book alone, even without a focus on digitalisation, and already fills shelf metres in libraries. It would be more a contribution to the philosophy of technology than to the problems of economic policy. Be that as it may, it is no coincidence that the problem of the very nature of technology, i.e. instrumentality, appears in the discourse associated with questions of economic policy at the technological level of digitalisation in the narrower sense (e.g. ERP systems, business models, robotisation and its impact), at the level of its significance for long-term, economic-social change processes (e.g. digital transition and transformation) and also at the level of the economy in relation to society (e.g. the impact of digitalisation on wealth and employment). All three levels will be touched upon in the course of the book, without committing to only one. Fernández-Macías (2018, 5) has broken down this crucial element of instrumentality in the context of digitalisation to a minimum: “Analysed in greater detail, a technology can be understood as a domesticated natural phenomenon: a device that allows the reproduction and control of a mechanism observed in nature”. This attempt at explanation points very nicely to the problem of complexity that we encounter with digitalisation, namely ibid: “The more technologies that become available, the more the possibilities for the recombination and discovery of new phenomena and, therefore, the possibility for further technological development”. It is precisely this complexity, among other things, that is the danger to which Hayek (1979, 164) referred when he continues his argument cited in the text above as follows: for our modern economy “(…) has carried us to unforeseen heights and given rise to ambitions which may yet lead us to destroy it”.
- 5.
See Chapter 3.
- 6.
Eucken died while still working on this work during his stay at the London School of Economics; it was later published by his wife and K.P. Hensel. At this point, the principles—which, of course, also triggered an extensive and still ongoing academic discussion, see later on—are briefly mentioned; Eucken’s approach and its background are dealt with in due brevity in the next chapter.
- 7.
See Eucken (2004), 254–291. The principles were originally formulated in German, which is why there are slight variations in the translations commonly used in the corresponding discourse.
- 8.
See ibid., 291–304.
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Dötsch, J.J. (2024). Introduction. In: Economic Policy in the Digital Age. Contributions to Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53047-0_1
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