Ben Bernanke Is Right About Interconnective Innovation

[Addison]

from http://azizonomics.com/

I’d just like to double down on Ben Bernanke’s comments on why he is optimistic about the future of human economic progress in the long run:

Pessimists may be paying too little attention to the strength of the underlying economic and social forces that generate innovation in the modern world. Invention was once the province of the isolated scientist or tinkerer. The transmission of new ideas and the adaptation of the best new insights to commercial uses were slow and erratic. But all of that is changing radically. We live on a planet that is becoming richer and more populous, and in which not only the most advanced economies but also large emerging market nations like China and India increasingly see their economic futures as tied to technological innovation.

. . .

My reasons for optimism for the long run are predominantly technological rather than social. I tend to see the potential for a huge organic growth in the long run resulting from falling energy and manufacturing costs from superabundant alternative energy sources like solar, synthetic petroleum, wind, and nuclear, as well as decentralised manufacturing through 3-D printing and ultimately molecular manufacturing.

But Bernanke’s reasons are pretty good too. I see it every day. Using Twitter, the blogosphere and various other online interfaces, I discuss and refine my views in the company a huge selection of people of various backgrounds. And we all have access to masses of data to backup or challenge our ideas. Intellectual discussions and disputes that might have taken years now take days or weeks — look at the collapse of Reinhart & Rogoff. Ideas, hypotheses, inventions and concepts can spread freely. One innovation shared can feed into ten or twenty new innovations. The internet has built a decentralised open-source platform for collaborative innovation and intellectual development like nothing the world has ever seen.

. . .

[jtuck004]

1. Yes, but it is not necessarily good news. We have to consider whether we can catch up to it

in a social or intellectual manner.

For example, to build earlier in the century demanded thousands upon thousands of workers to simply move parts around a factory, Ford comes along with his assembly line and immediately dis-employed many thousands of those workers, some who never were able to work again. Go forward over the decades and watch the technological introductions of plastics and electronics and many more thousands of those workers lose their jobs, their lives. Some find other work, but it is hard to pay the kind of taxes that support schools and colleges for new technological innovations when being a Walmart greeter or health care aide.

But what hasn't changed is the for-profit model of the wealthiest people, which well-published facts tell us ebbed a bit during the first part of this century but has come roaring back, with an inequality in wealth greater now than it has been in decades, and politicians who seem hell-bent on continuing it.

Curing cancer, factories putting out Jetson-like floating cars while manned by 27 people running 3-d printers and some servers for twittering is most likely desirable, but if they are surrounded by tar-paper shacks and people who live much shorter lives than the wealthy as they are doing today, while only a few profit from the growth in countries around us, I'm not sure it's a reason to pop the champagne corks. Except for folks like Mi$$ RobMe and his friends in our administrations, political offices, and banking institutions, of course.