Few of us who have survived the last year aren’t grateful for technology.

Zoom, email, connected workplaces and solid internet connections at home have made it possible to work, shop, study and carry on our lives in a way that wouldn’t have been possible had the pandemic hit, say, 20 years earlier.

But parts of big tech — the parts that track us and drive us to think dangerous and antisocial things just so we keep clicking — are doing us enormous damage.

Although it might seem like we can’t have the best of both worlds — the connectivity without the damage — I reckon we can. But we are going to have to change the way we think about big tech.

The first thing is to recognise that big tech is intrinsically weak. Yes, weak. The second is that it has only become strong each time we have let it.

By “big tech” I mean Facebook and Google and related companies such as Instagram and YouTube (owned by Facebook and Google respectively).

NSW is doing what Labor’s Bill Shorten could not – explaining why Australia’s capital gains tax concession is knocking first home buyers out of homes.

Shorten went to the 2016 and 2019 elections with a plan – Labor would halve the capital gains tax concession used by landlords who buy and sell properties.

Ten years ago, in the lead-up to Australia’s short-lived carbon price or “carbon tax” (either description is valid), the deepest fear on the part of businesses was that they would lose out to untaxed firms overseas.

Instead of buying Australian carbon-taxed products, Australian and export customers would buy untaxed (possibly dirtier) products from somewhere else.

It would give late-movers (countries that hadn’t yet adopted a carbon tax) a “free kick” in industries from coal and steel to aluminium to liquefied natural gas to cement, to wine, to meat and dairy products, even to copy paper.

It’s why the Gillard government handed out free permits to so-called trade-exposed industries, so they wouldn’t face unfair competition.

At the risk of being political – and politics is important, it will determine how we are governed for the next three years – economic conditions could scarcely be better for a government seeking re-election.

The economic things that matter most to most people are, in my view:

• jobs – if employment is climbing rather than falling, most people are not at much risk of losing their job

• economic growth and wages growth – if things are getting better rather than worse, even in small ways, people feel better about the future

• the ability to buy a home – if it is getting hard, even for other people or for their children, they are concerned about what the future will become

• mortgage rates – as long as rates stay low they know their own personal budget won’t go out of whack

Prime Minister Scott Morrison says he wants to keep prices down.

Without his party in power, “you’re going to see petrol prices go up, you’re going to see electricity prices go up”.

There’s something practical he can do straight away to stop prices from rising.

Apart from a home, a car is the most important purchase most Australians make.

We typically hold on to our cars for six years, and most last many years longer.

This means that when we buy a car we have to have an eye on the future, on what it will make sense to drive half a decade down the track.

Electric cars are cheaper overseas

In almost every way, certainly when it comes to running and maintenance costs, electric vehicles are the best option.

The good news is supposed to be that when the government gets out of the way “can-do capitalism” will have us roaring back to where we were before.

That’s the prime minister’s newest slogan, and we had better hope for more.

The unpleasant truth is that before the pandemic Australia’s economy was disturbingly and unusually weak. Can-do capitalism wasn’t doing what it should.

Reserve Bank chief economist Luci Ellis put it this way a few days after Morrison talked about freeing the engines of the economy to do their work.

In the decade or so leading up to the pandemic, there was a nagging sense that these engines of prosperity were running out of steam – investment was low, productivity growth was lagging, and many of the behaviours we associate with business dynamism were on the decline.

Outside of mining, business investment had been shrinking as a share of the economy for more than a decade.

How much cash would you need to be paid to agree to live without a smartphone for a year?

If you are like the typical American, the answer is US$10,000 – which is far, far more than what we are actually charged for having and using smartphones.

How much would you need to be paid to live without a computer?

According to the same research, just published by Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, a typical American would want US$25,000 to live computer-free for a year.

For the GPS system that lets us map where we are on all our devices, the answer is US$3,000; for streaming services such as Netflix the answer is another US$3,000.

For refrigeration the answer is US$10,000; for air conditioning, another US$10,000; and for running water US$50,000.

What’s the boldest thing the Morrison government could do in next month’s budget?

It would be to forecast an unemployment rate below 4% (a rate of three-point-something), then to pledge to go further, to two-point-something.

Neither have happened for half a century; not since the long Coalition reign of Robert Menzies and his successors from the 1950s to the early 1970s, when unemployment was between 2 and 3%.

Astoundingly, both are now within Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s reach in a way they weren’t mere weeks ago.

Sometimes the best things you can do are invisible.

Such as fighting cholera by ensuring drinking water wasn’t contaminated by sewage, as happened in London in the 1840s.

Or setting up an emissions trading scheme, which drove emissions down, despite former prime minister Tony Abbott attacking it as a “so-called market in the non-delivery of an invisible substance to no one”.

Air free from contamination is as invisible as uncontaminated water, but the case for air isn’t yet as widely accepted as it is for water.