There have been alot of fairy tales told about economy in the last decades. For example the future was supposed to be in research and science and technology. This kind of work would have compensated the loses in other obsolete kinds of jobs. Well guess what ? it didn’t happen, companies are not looking for research types, they actually shun them because they don’t have the right “personality”. The market lost a trillion dollars in the last few weeks, wow, alot of money just floating around not knowing what to do. If Tech and Science were important you would have seen a very large worldwide request for technology and science workers given the amount of money looking for something to do. I haven’t seen much request for them, and in most countries outside the USA it is even worse.
The truth is science and technology have stopped delivering, have a low return on investment. Science and technology have mostly run their course, they are at the end of the road. Now there are mostly small incremental improvements, that don’t really translate into a “product”. Aside from the fact that I never understood why any kind of “product” should come out of research, when the goal would be knowledge.
So the fairy tale of growth based on technology has been proven to be a pure leap of faith, not really based on anything. And just because we had a great cycle of “progress” in the last 100 years doesn’t imply that the next decades will be anything close to that cycle. Like peak oil, we have run out of ideas, inventions and science, most of the major discoveries have been made and applied. Of course we will have many gadgets, many new pseudo-products like a radio-telephone. Those are not really new products, just a new package of an old product.
The last 200 years of the west was based on three things: cheap oil, cheap labor and applied science. Cheap oil is running out, applied science has run its course, what is left is cheap labor. But cheap labor can’t last too long if they can’t buy all the crappy products industry churns out. So they must increase the pay of Chinese and Indian workers, start giving them 1000 dollars a month so they can consume like Americans, since the USA may have run out of money at this point.
I would say that most of the progress in the last decades is chip - electronics based. It is almost a writing system, a symbol system with computer models and simulations, almost a virtualization of science. I am not sure, but in Science and Technology you can never know and never predict the future. All of a sudden something completely unexpected can pop up and everything can change. maybe tomorrow morning, maybe in a 100,000 years, who knows ?
The link between technology and economy is a complex one, both cultural and values based, sometimes quirky, sometimes unknown. I agree that many should not just take for granted that technology will advance and create new “jobs”, this is not at all to be taken for granted. Alot of new “products” and technology is behavior based, implies a certain behavior like always talking to people on a cell phone, always working and e-mailing like with blackberries. Very vague and unclear who pilots the whole deal, or if it is just an emerging behavior…
The big boyz know what to do with the “trillions of dollars hanging around in the world not knowing what to do”: lend it to poor (once known as “middle class”) people to make them buy mansions they think they can pay. Hike up the morgage and also just lay off the poor people you lent the money too. Write off the loans as definitely lost so foreigners can once again give the banks the money they just ripped off the poor. Result, the poor get robbed of everything, the banks recieve billions from Japan and Arabia.
“Citigroup Inc is selling up to 4.9 percent of itself for $7.5 billion to the Gulf Arab emirate of Abu Dhabi, giving the largest U.S. bank fresh capital as it wrestles with the subprime mortgage crisis and the resignation of its chief executive.”
“China agreed to pump $5 billion into Morgan Stanley as the US investment bank reported a stunning fourth-quarter loss fueled by a bigger-than-expected $9.4”
Reading things on the internet it is amazing how brainwashed people are about the “hard work” thing. Actually the harder you work the less money you make and the poorer you are. In China you either work for 12 hours a day in a sweatshop and make 100 dollars a month or you starve. In most of the rest of the world the hardest jobs are the ones less paid. But the right wing always says poor people are “lazy” and deserve to be poor. Wow, what an incredible contradiction!
The financial boyz make alot because of their “intellectual skills”. Acutally if there is something there is too much of today is “intellectual skills”, there are too many degreed people, too many white collar people.
If you want to solve the housing mess, local municipalities should just appropriate the foreclosed homes and rent them for 300 or 400 dollars a month to the former owner who went broke or something like that. Just giving billions to banks won’t change anything and just giving a 1000 dollars bonus to families across the US won’t change anything either. It is a “structural problem”.