Age of Anxiety

[pnorman]

By Paul Krugman
The New York Times

Monday 28 November 2005

Many eulogies were published following the recent death of Peter Drucker, the great management theorist. I was surprised, however, that few of these eulogies mentioned his book "The Age of Discontinuity," a prophetic work that speaks directly to today's business headlines and economic anxieties.

Mr. Drucker wrote "The Age of Discontinuity" in the late 1960's, a time when most people assumed that the big corporations of the day, companies like General Motors and U.S. Steel, would dominate the economy for the foreseeable future. He argued that this assumption was all wrong.

It was true, he acknowledged, that the dominant industries and corporations of 1968 were pretty much the same as the dominant industries and corporations of 1945, and for that matter of decades earlier. "The economic growth of the last twenty years," he wrote, "has been very fast. But it has been carried largely by industries that were already 'big business' before World War I. ... Every one of the great nineteenth-century innovations gave birth, almost overnight, to a major new industry and to new big businesses. These are still the major industries and big businesses of today."

But all of that, said Mr. Drucker, was about to change. New technologies would usher in an era of "turbulence" like that of the half-century before World War I, and the dominance of the major industries and big businesses of 1968 would soon come to an end.
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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/112805M.shtml

(Come Clean disclosure): Actually, my primary reason for posting this here is to alert/remind DUers that Paul Krugman and others can frequently be found at Truth Out. Since the NYT had changed their policy, those articles are accessable on-line ONLY to paid subscribers. (I wouldn't mind paying a reasonable price for on-line access, but I'd have pay for the full print version!) Here's the Truth Out home page: http://truthout.org/ Subscription is free, but like DU, is kept alive by donations.

pnorman

[Kolesar]

1. Where do I link to older Krugman columns?

I basically quit heading him when he became pay-only "Times Select"? thanks

[pnorman]

2. Use the "Search TO archives" at the upper right of the page.

Be sure to subscribe, and if possible, contribute. After DU (actually, WELL after it), Truth Out is my main source of timely information. I haven't watched TV in ~8 years, and I barely glance at the newspapers. As a Premium Subscriber to Salon, I get a "freebie" sub to Time magazine, but I just make a single pass through that. Thanks to DU & TO, I'm already familiar with almost all of it.

pnorman

[Kolesar]

3. Thanks. I'm Salon premium also

Of late, though, Salon seems to be lacking for articles. I find myself reading the War Room and the Daou report regularly. Every forthnight, Sid Vicious Blumenthal delivers a good rip, but as a whole the place has cooled. my 2 cents

[pnorman]

4. There's a lot of good stuff there if you dig deep enough,

but it's uneven. Actually, I should have placed Alternet.org (free!) ahead of Salon. I have AvantGo (paid) installed in my Sony TH-55, and I get both of those whenever I "synch" it to my desktop. I also get a very wide assortment of other news sources in that same manner. They're mainly MSM, but still worth reading. FUCK TV!!

pnorman

[pnorman]

5. More good resources on Truth Out:

http://www.truthout.org/multimedia.htm

Many of those videos have been mentioned here on DU, but this is the most complete collection I've ever seen to date.

pnorman