Quantifying the Rate of Change
We live in an era that involves an extraordinary amount of change. To see this, consider the rate of global economic growth, which in recent decades averaged around 3 percent per year.51 This is historically unprecedented. For the first 290,000 years of humanity’s existence, global growth was close to 0 percent per year; in the agricultural era that increased to around 0.1 percent, and it accelerated from there after the Industrial Revolution. It’s only in the last hundred years that the ...Knowledge Work
The growing importance of knowledge as an economic resource reflects the fact that, as economies and production technologies develop, they become ever more complex and specialized, leading to increasing coordination costs. In the language of information economics, the organizational or informational task of coordinating the diverse steps in the productive chain grows, as the number of transactions within and among productive units increases (Joncher, 1983). Logically, the increasingly complex...Knowledge is becoming increasingly specific. Professionals of all types are managing larger quantities of sybolic reasoning. Informational laborers or symbolic analysts are a growing portion of the workforce.
The Unspecialized Will Inherit the Earth
Why is it that our whole economic and political system has tended recently to become so sluggish and inflexible? Why have we become resigned to the idea that nothing substantial can ever be done in less than ten years? Obviously there are many reasons. But I believe the principal reason for this sluggishness is that our whole society has fallen into the same trap as our nuclear industry. Not only in the nuclear industry but in many other industries and public institutions, we have pursued eco...Meaning of Life in Super-Industrial Society
Technocrats suffer from econo-think. Except during war and dire emergency, they start from the premise that even non-economic problems can be solved with economic remedies. Social futurism challenges this root assumption of both Marxist and Keynesian managers. In its historical time and place, industrial society's single-minded pursuit of material progress served the human race well. As we hurtle toward super-industrialism, however, a new ethos emerges in which other goals begin to gain pari...Technocrats look at the world purely in terms of economics, but post-modern society looks for other meanings.
Innovation is Not Enough
The idea that successive waves of innovation are the main driver of long-term performance in a new or emerging business—or an existing one, of course—appears to be sound when viewed in the abstract. Clearly, innovations in technology, processes, and methodology have occurred, sometimes dramatically, in the U.S. and world economies. Whole new businesses emerged over the past two centuries as advances in manufacturing, transportation, services and communication came in sometimes rapid, succ...A lesson from the dotcom era of business, where companies thought if they could simply out-innovate competitors they would survive despite burning through investment money.
Two Economic Models for States
Walker also has an economic vision for his state—one which is common currency in the Republican Party today, but hitherto alien in a historically progressive, unionist Midwestern state like Wisconsin. It is based on a theory of economic growth that is not only anti-statist but aggressively pro-corporate: relentlessly focused on breaking the backs of unions; slashing worker compensation and benefits; and subsidizing businesses in order to attract capital from elsewhere and avoid its flight t...Interesting comparison between states that try to build up their economies with public programs that produce a strong and valuable workforce versus states that try to build up economies by reducing the value of the workforce, making it cheaper and more appealing to corporations.