[lukeschlather]

I'm not saying that they're the only people using pneumatic tools out there, I'm saying that they're building new pneumatic tools every day, and some of them probably are pneumatic tools no one has ever built before. That's valuable to society at large if engineers from your car factories are visiting the Amish and swapping ideas.

Yeah, the Amish themselves aren't going to reap any benefits, and they probably aren't going to work as fast as people in a fancy lab, but they're also likely to find some one-in-a-million ideas you would never come up with in a fancy lab.