The Coming Golden Era and Next U.S. Boom, If We Can Unleash the Animal Spirits of the Market
From yesterday's WSJ editorial by tech journalist Michael Malone:
"Three years after the recession was declared officially over,
unemployment remains high and there's worry that a new recession is down
the road. And yet waiting in the wings for when we get our economic
policies in order are a mounting number of stunning discoveries,
inventions and technological breakthroughs that could set off a burst of
growth and wealth creation as big as any in living memory."
MP: Those discoveries and technological breakthroughs outlined in the article by Malone include hydraulic fracking, nanoculture, cloud crowd, 3-D printing, Internet-based education and training, and self-health technologies. Here's his conclusion:
"It's all on the way. Together, these trends offer the potential for a
golden era. Getting there won't be easy, as we are currently governed by
leaders who want to manage our complex and dynamic economy from the top
down, to tame entrepreneurs with regulation, to tax the productive and,
ultimately, to pick the next generation of winners. That's never worked
well and isn't working today. But a better world awaits us if we elect
leaders who can imagine a better future and fight to unleash the animal
spirits of the market that will get us there."
15 Comments:
I tend to agree with Rush, the current regime seems more intent on killing versus just taming the private sector to take America down a peg & demote us from being an arrogant super power, as the uber leftists see he USA.
In his effort to find even more for which to criticize Obama Mr. Malone has gone off the deep end with his tech buzzwords.
"Nanoculture" was formerly "nano-technology" and has been around for at least a couple of decades. Yes, additional progress is being made, but it is hardly a 'breakthrough'. We have been hearing about 'quantum computing' as long as there have been PC's yet there is no sign of any workable model on the horizon -- if ever.
"Cloud Crowd": Household and business PC's have actively sourced their data from multiple servers from the first days of the internet. Example: photo (jpg) files are normally hosted on different servers than is the text on a web page. And, of course, the pop-up and animated ads that annoy us so much are from their own servers. Pitching "the cloud" as new technology is a sales gimmick.
"3-D Printing": Yes, that is new and offers immense potential.
"Handheld Diplomas" Those familiar with Wikipedia or any number of other sources of internet information have long been able to educate themselves. Some colleges have been offering 'class notes' and lecture material for many years now. Whether such learning tools plus an 'internet diploma' equates to a full college degree remains to be seen.
"Self-Health": Again the internet has been a tremendous source for health and wellness information for those who want to use it. Whether there will be any developments that actually lead to lower health care costs (or significant profits for anyone)is questionable.
Interesting that Mr. Malone highlights his article with the phrase "animal spirits", which was originally coined by J. M. Keynes; referring to how people are motivated to seek speculative or inflationary profits. But perhaps we shouldn't tell Mr. Malone; he might want to withdraw his article.
Ed,
How is that Hope And Change thing working out?
You Socialist will never learn a thing. Keep your government checks tightly hide, before the productive people stop paying...like Greece.
I agree with Malone that there are big things coming, but mostly concur with Ed that his examples aren't likely to hit anytime soon. Some of the nano stuff is here, much of it isn't. The cloud crowd is a new phenomenon driven by fast internet connections and now the mobile internet, but much of that big data stuff goes on behind the scenes, so difficult to say how important it is yet. I disagree that 3D printing will be anything worthwhile anytime soon. Online learning will be huge, but it will take a decade or two for them to develop their model fully. Lot of potential in self-health, but the same potential was there 15 years ago and as of yet, not much has happened.
Malone is right that there is so much that is possible now and some of these could break out at any time, but so much of it is just not being pushed in any meaningful way. Why work on these big ideas that nobody wants to fund, when you can easily get funding for yet another photo-sharing site and potentially cash out with a billion like Instagram? I actually think the focus should be on such internet sites, just not the dumb revenue-free models most are using now, but I do wish there were more money being funneled to these longer-term, riskier plays. Online learning is going to be massive but there seems to relatively little investment devoted to it as of yet.
>>>> Pitching "the cloud" as new technology is a sales gimmick.
Dude, I've been working with PCs for over 30 years. The Cloud is not the same as what came before any more than the internet was like BBSes and modem communications that preceded it. Some changes are phase changes. The Cloud is one.
I'm not sure I *like* the idea of The Cloud -- it seems to me to be pretty risky, since it suggests giving up knowledge of where your data is stored -- that means one hell of a lot of people can get massively screwed if some malcontent manages to find a hole in the protection of the indexing system.
I'm in favor of stuff being readily available anywhere. I'm not so sure it's a long-term Good Idea to have the owner have no idea of where their data is or how it's being kept, etc.
>>>> In his effort to find even more for which to criticize Obama
Dude, this hardly requires either contortions or work. The man's a walking pile of incompetency and arrogance.
>>> I disagree that 3D printing will be anything worthwhile anytime soon.
By itself, mmmm, perhaps not.
Tied to fully computer controlled milling machines, yes.
A 3D Printer and CAMilling Machine together qualify as a first-gen "Star Trek Replicator" technology -- much as a smart phone, with its various sensors, qualifies as a first-gen "Tricorder". They are in their infancy and already have tremendous potential. For example, an implanted, wireless body monitor could keep real-time health info -- ekg, eeg, body temperature, hormone balance, certain other important body chemicals -- and make tracking those things -- not only for you, but for the entire populace -- readily available. This could easily produce not only a lot of pre-emptive warnings of serious problems well before they become dire or cause a serious event (a heart attack, say, or a stroke), but, even more importantly, could produce a literally tremendous amount of data to be analyzed. Suppose a spike in such and such a set of body chemicals signaled the presence of a cancerous tissue? Or such and such a spike in a hormone meant a seizure was imminent, even in those who had never had noted seizures before? The mass of data could be sifted through to note these things, and advance medicine by leaps and bounds within a couple decades. Instead of having to "experiment" to find out if x lead to y, they could sift through the historical data for all people who had encountered 'y', after the fact, and find out what, if any, detectible precursors existed.
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Knowledge is power.
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Do not underestimate that.
MP: Those discoveries and technological breakthroughs outlined in the article by Malone include hydraulic fracking, nanoculture, cloud crowd, 3-D printing, Internet-based education and training, and self-health technologies.
Hydraulic fracking is not new. Fracking has been used for more than a century. Horizontal drilling has been around for decades. The first Western commercial application for tight gas and oil production took place fifteen years ago.
Nanotechnology has been the 'next big thing' for decades but we have yet to see a major development that provides a low cost solution to real problems.
3D printing is fine and could prove useful but is hardly a major development other than in niche applications. Internet education is simply amazing but the institutional resistance will make it difficult to gain acceptance in developed nation even as it helps developing nations immensely. What is good for the world may not turn out to be great for the United States.
Here's his conclusion:
"It's all on the way. Together, these trends offer the potential for a golden era. Getting there won't be easy, as we are currently governed by leaders who want to manage our complex and dynamic economy from the top down, to tame entrepreneurs with regulation, to tax the productive and, ultimately, to pick the next generation of winners. That's never worked well and isn't working today. But a better world awaits us if we elect leaders who can imagine a better future and fight to unleash the animal spirits of the market that will get us there."
Power corrupts. No matter who you elect you will always have the worst grasp for power at various levels of the bureaucracy and stifle innovation. The solution is simple. Eliminate 90% of what the state does and let people work at solving problems in the market as they attempt to get richer. But given the sentiment among the public and the clear resistance to economic liberty in academia and the second hand dealers in culture what are the odds of that happening without a collapse coming first?
Power corrupts.
To paraphrase Shakespeare, "First, shoot all the psychopaths and greed/power/control freaks".
Hydraulic fracking is not new. Fracking has been used for more than a century. Horizontal drilling has been around for decades. The first Western commercial application for tight gas and oil production took place fifteen years ago.
Commercially viable hydraulic fracking is new. The technology has been around for a while, but it wasn't until very recently that it became cheap enough to use on a large scale.
And just wait, "super-fracking" is on the way.....
All super fracking means is fracking the same well more than once... an admission that depletion rates are very fast, much faster than is generally recognized or admitted.
"The propensity to swindle grows parallel with the propensity to speculate during a boom... the implosion of an asset price bubble always leads to the discovery of frauds and swindles"
-- Charles P. Kindleberger, economic historian
"There can be few fields of human endeavor in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance.Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is dismissed as the primitive refuge of the those who do not have insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
Commercially viable hydraulic fracking is new. The technology has been around for a while, but it wasn't until very recently that it became cheap enough to use on a large scale.
Fifteen years is long enough. The fact that you still can't generate positive cash flows for most companies in the shale sector tells us what we need to know.
Super fracking is not repeat fracking. Super fracking is a more thorough initial fracturing of the formation rock or shale holding the gas/oil. Much of the innovation around fracking is what to inject into the fracture to keep it open and producing. Also the newer horizontal drilling rigs and seismic tools are incredibly precise. These aren't the drilling rigs of the last oil boom.
Super fracking includes repeat fracking, but I should have included the technical side too.
Obama is certainly an incompetent clown Bozo. He is not a leader at all but is rather an activist and an ideologue.
But predicting future technological trends is very dangerous. Brian Wang of NextBigFuture.com is one of the best, and even he will probably end up with less than a 0.500 average.
Technological innovations and breakthroughs work themselves out in an environment that allows for them to happen. The environment of the Obama wrecking crew makes innovative growth very difficult -- biasing the field in favour of those with inside connections.
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