Our Economy Was Just Blasted Years Into the Future

The pandemic brought the economy to a temporary standstill. The pause let us see through the usual blur of change to the deeper permanence of our arrangements. In 2020, inequality killed large numbers of Americans. Whatever the arguments about government spending and taxes and regulations, our economic system makes national solidarity in a crisis i

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system. The US tech industry has squandered the opportunity to remain the center of the new age of ubiquitous computing and networks. And so the clock is ticking. Silicon Valley is not alone in the world. China is gearing up to match American power and push its own model forward. What we’re currently going through is a very complicated game being p

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In the past, the dominance of physical goods and limits of geography helped rein in consumer monopolies. (U.S. antitrust laws didn’t hurt either.) But going forward, digital goods and services will continue eating up larger shares of the consumer pie, and autonomous trucks and drones will dramatically slash the cost of shipping physical goods. Inst

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This is a future in which, for the privileged, almost everything is home delivered, either virtually via streaming and cloud technology, or physically via driverless vehicle or drone, then screen “shared” on a mediated platform. It’s a future that employs far fewer teachers, doctors and drivers. It accepts no cash or credit cards (under guise of vi... See more