I couldn’t agree more.
Clinton benefited greatly from the explosion in the micro-processing power and computer inter-connectivity. These gains continued, sustaining us through what could have been a really disastrous .com crash.
However, this is where your point has great relevance. We (the US and the civilized world) are to the point of technology saturation. What’s next? There doesn’t seem to be any new technology on the near-horizon that is so compelling it continues to drive demand for consumer goods.
This isn’t the only reason reason for the pickle we’re in, but it certainly is going to greatly complicate the recovery efforts.
Cheap energy would be something that would turn it around.
If we really wanted to we could do it with nuclear.
Cut all the red tape and simply do it.
“However, this is where your point has great relevance. We (the US and the civilized world) are to the point of technology saturation. What’s next? There doesn’t seem to be any new technology on the near-horizon that is so compelling it continues to drive demand for consumer goods”
I know I preach a lot about NAFTA and the other upcoming free trade groups, but the agenda behind it all is to elevate the economies and standard of living of these countries to merge them into one entity.
The benefit of this is to increase the GNP of the world from the present%25 with a participating standard of living to %100 by increasing the others standard of living. This will enable the world economy to grow by %75. In other words it’s not a new technology or product coming available to the existing world market but the expansion of the world market that is the objective; and an opportunity for the redemption of our debt or dilution of it.
It’s like saying we can only sell a washing machine that never wears out to x number of people in the world and that has been fulfilled, when we have %75 of the people who can’t buy one because they have no income to buy it with or no outlet to plug it into. Change the world market by elevating the standard of living and it will open up the markets. aka New World Order
The FCC just auctioned off a new area of spectrum set to release in February. The cool things about this spectrum are that they are a huge slew of bandwidth to play with, and easy as pie to get through walls (unlike WiFi). That plus the netbook ($300 tiny laptop) phenomenon means connectivity everywhere for cheap. It allows for far greater connectivity than anything we have seen so far. I would look there.