How to Make Almost Anything: In recent decades, the world has been rocked by revolutions in the digitization of computation and communication. Now the physical world is being digitized, thanks to new technologies that can turn data into things and things into data. Digital fabrication will let people build custom home furniture, living organs out of cells, and drones that can fly out of a printer; science fiction is becoming industrial fact.
Joseph Stiglitz's recent article in Vanity Fair is an excellent analysis of the western world's current economic problems. Stiglitz is a professor of economics at Columbia University and a Nobel prize winner . The article asserts a central tenet of modern economic theory that strikes me as elementary . That tenet is that a strong economy is based upon the spending of a robust middle class . That, historically, is what drives consumption . In America, the owners of businesses are short sighted to simply cut taxes to their own class, because their own class benefits most from a flush middle class . What they gain in the short term, they lose in the medium to long term. In addition, they condemn their businesses and the overall economy to more frequent and unnecessary boom and bust cycles in the process. The American economy is undermining its own engine of growth, consumption , in the hapless pursuit of immediate riches for the wealthiest Americans, who need the m...
Comments
Post a Comment