postindustrial economy

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pages: 391 words: 22,799

To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise by Bethany Moreton

affirmative action, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Gilder, global village, informal economy, invisible hand, liberation theology, longitudinal study, market fundamentalism, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, price anchoring, Ralph Nader, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, walkable city, Washington Consensus, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, Works Progress Administration

Her mobilization of conservatives succeeded in removing homosexuals from Dade County’s antidiscrimination clause.89 The image of vulnerable human life tossed out as refuse likewise dramatically haunted conservative Christianity after the mid-Â�1970s. Jerry Falwell’s account of his awakening to an active pro-Â�life position invokes a dumpster in Los Angeles overÂ�flowing with the dismembered remains of 1,700 fetal bodies and a trash incinerator in Wichita sendingÂ€up hundreds more in smoke, like the victims of Auschwitz.90 The postindustrial economy’s accelerated drive to render people functionally obsolete was figÂ�ured in the imagery of the political Left as the dispossessed, the economic refugees, the reserve army of the unemployed. But its mirror image on the Right was an equally visceral horror at the potential loss of meaning in human reproduction. The dispossessed in this cosmology were the children unconceived or unborn because of their economic superfluity.

Despite its gleam of pure sciÂ�enÂ�tific rationality, developing and deploying high technology has been in part a 132 MAKING CHRISTIAN BUSIN E S S M EN spiritual exercise from the beginning, no matter the political context. The countercultural devotees of Buckminster Fuller, Ken Kesey, and the Whole Earth Catalog brought their dreams of antiauthoritarian, transcendent elitism into the cyber revolution in California. Blending their privileged vision as “comprehensive designers” with the decentralized technologies they developed, this loose fraternity marked an entire wing of the postindustrial economy with their conviction that their new tools made them “as gods.” From the Berkeley Free Speech Movement’s rebellion against the university as “knowledge factory,” the West Coast generation thumbed its nose at the men in the gray flannel suits—often their own fathers, whose bureaucratized work lives looked to them like a vision of hell on earth. The students found a short-term solution in their romantic dreams of country living, founding a wave of rural communes where virtually evÂ�eryÂ�one was white, well-educated, and young, and where the chicks baked the bread.

One out of evÂ�ery three young people attended college, a ratio that was to hold essentially steady through the end of the century.47 The explosion of the college population that America subsidized after World War II had different effects in the Sun Belt than in the industrial North. In Detroit and Newark, the new crop of students came from the households of second-generation factory workers, the descendants of the late-nineteenth-century immigration wave. For some of them, the increasingly visible shift to a postindustrial economy produced a renaissance on the Left: If the industrial working class was to be replaced by sciÂ�enÂ�tific technocrats running automated industries, as theorists like Daniel Bell and Alain Touraine predicted, then students need not endlessly wait for their parents to charge the barricades from suburbia.48 In the South and parts of the West, however, the accounting and marketing students were fresh off the farm, encountering the punch card without prior experience of the assembly line.

pages: 121 words: 36,908

Four Futures: Life After Capitalism by Peter Frase

Airbnb, basic income, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, full employment, future of work, high net worth, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), iterative process, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, litecoin, mass incarceration, means of production, Occupy movement, pattern recognition, peak oil, plutocrats, Plutocrats, post-work, postindustrial economy, price mechanism, private military company, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Gordon, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart meter, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck

Both the possibility of ecological limits and the political constraints of a class society are, in this view, “material” constraints. And the interaction between them is what will determine our path forward. The existence of capitalism as a system of class power, with a ruling elite that will try to preserve itself into any possible future, is therefore a central structuring theme of this book, a theme that I believe is absent from almost every other attempt to understand the trajectory of a highly automated postindustrial economy. Technological developments give a context for social transformations, but they never determine them directly; change is always mediated by the power struggles between organized masses of people. The question is who wins and who loses, and not, as technocratic authors like Costanza would have it, who has the “correct” view of the objective nature of the world. So for me, sketching out multiple futures is an attempt to leave a place for the political and the contingent.

Malthus’s view turned out not to account for the factors that have allowed the Earth to sustain a much larger population at higher living standards than were possible 200 years ago, beginning with increases in agricultural productivity. However, the general theme of material limits to growth recurs in both mainstream and critical left-wing treatments of capitalism. Stanley Jevons, one of the progenitors of modern mainstream economics, became preoccupied with an issue that is still central to industrial and postindustrial economies: energy scarcity. In his 1865 book The Coal Question, Jevons analyzed British economic growth and its dependence on tapping coal reserves.5 He projected that within less than a century, economic growth would have to stall as coal production peaked and declined. Moreover, he saw efforts at energy conservation as inevitably doomed. Making the case for what came to be known as the “Jevons paradox,” he argued that increased energy efficiency would simply lead to more energy consumption because the cheaper power would be used more.

pages: 316 words: 87,486


Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Burning Man, centre right, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, full employment, George Gilder, gig economy, Gini coefficient, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, microcredit, mobile money, moral panic, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, payday loans, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, union organizing, urban decay, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

The professions are supposed to be disinterested occupations or even “social trustees”; unlike other elements of society, they are not supposed to be motivated by profit or greed. This is why we still find advertising by lawyers and doctors somewhat off-putting, and why Americans were once shocked to learn that radio personalities took money to play records they didn’t genuinely like: because professionals are supposed to answer to a spirit more noble than personal gain.7 With the rise of the postindustrial economy in the last few decades, the range of professionals has exploded. To use the voguish term, these are “knowledge workers,” and many of them don’t fit easily into the old framework. They are often employees rather than independent practitioners, taking orders from some corporate manager instead of spending their lives in private practice. These modern professionals aren’t workers per se, and they aren’t capitalists either, strictly speaking.

Bush, Jeb Callahan, David Canada Caribbean Free Trade Initiative (CAFTA) Carney, Jay Carter, Ashton Carter, Jimmy Caterpillar CEO compensation Changing Sources of Power (Dutton) charter schools Chicago Christensen, Clayton Citibank Citicorp Foundation Civil Rights Act (1964) Civil Rights Division, Department of Justice Clinton, Bill appointees and big government and change and consensus and counter-scheduling and crime bill and deficit and deregulation and DLC and economy and education and election of 1992 and election of 1996 and GOP attacks on health care and impeachment of Martha’s Vineyard and meritocracy and microlending and NAFTA and Social Security and tax cuts and Wall Street and welfare reform and Clinton, Chelsea Clinton, Hillary Arkansas career of Bill Clinton presidency and Black Lives Matter and Clinton Foundation and health care and inequality and Iraq War and mass incarceration and meritocracy and microlending and presidential campaign of 2007–8 and presidential campaign of 2015–16 and as Secretary of State Senate career of Wall Street and welfare reform and women’s rights and Clinton Foundation Clinton Presidential Library Cluetrain Manifesto, The (Locke) Coca-Cola cocaine-crack disparity colleges and universities Commerce Department Commodities Futures Trading Commission Commodity Futures Modernization Act (2000) complexity Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Cool Cities Initiative COPE Council of Economic Advisers counter-scheduling Cowie, Jefferson Craig, Gregory cramdown creative class credit-default swaps crime. See also mass incarceration; Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act Criminal Division, Department of Justice Croly, Herbert “Cross of Gold” (Bryan) Cruz, Ted Cuba Cuomo, Andrew Daley, Bill Davis, Lanny Dayton, Ohio Death of the Liberal Class (Hedges) death penalty de Blasio, Bill Decatur, Illinois Defense Department deindustrialization. See also postindustrial economy Delaware DeLay, Tom Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) Democratic National Convention 1968 1972 1992 1996 2004 Democratic Party. See also McGovern Commission; New Deal; New Democrats; and specific elections; legislation; and presidents blue states and centrism and creative class and education and entrepreneurship and evolution of inequality and innovation and meritocracy and New Economy and professionals and rich liberals and Silicon Valley and Social Security and Wall Street and Denny’s restaurants depression of 1930s deregulation D.

See also subprime mortgages mortgage crisis Moving the New NY Forward (Cuomo) Murakawa, Naomi Nasdaq National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) National Economic Council National Public Radio (NPR) National Security Agency (NSA) neoliberalism New Deal demise of coalition New Democrats New Economy New Jim Crow, The (Alexander) New New Deal (Grunwald) New Republic Newsweek New York Times Magazine 9/11 terrorist attacks Nixon, Richard No Ceilings North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) Northeastern University Nuclear Regulatory Commission Obama, Barack antitrust and appointees and bailouts and bipartisan consensus and Cooper Union speech deficit and economic policy and education and election of 2008 and election of 2012 and financial crisis and foreign policy and GOP obstruction and Grand Bargain and Hillary Clinton and inequality and innovation and job creation and keynote speech of 2004 labor and legislative victories and Martha’s Vineyard and mass surveillance and meritocracy and microlending and ocean liner theory and Patrick and sharing economy and Silicon Valley and Social Security and State of the Union Addresses stimulus and TPP and Wall Street and white collar crime and Obama, Michelle Office of Management and Budget Office of Price Administration Orszag, Peter Otero, Maria Oxford University Pact, The (Gillon) Page, Clarence Palin, Sarah Parker, Sean Patent and Trademark Office Patrick, Deval Paulson, Hank pensions and retirement “People’s Republic of Zuckerstan, The” (Summers) Perot, Ross pharmaceutical industry Philadelphia Inquirer Phillips, Kevin PhRMA lobby PIMCO Pixar Plankenhorn, Royal Plouffe, David Politico Politics of Rich and Poor, The (Phillips) populism postindustrial economy poverty deep and extreme microlending and welfare reform and Powell Memo presidential nomination campaigns. See also elections, presidential 1984 2007–8 2015–16 President We Deserve, The (Walker) Primary Colors (Klein) Pritzker, Penny privatization professional class Bill Clinton and Carter and creative class and defined Democrats’ shift to Hillary Clinton and Massachusetts and NAFTA and Obama and Social Security and virtue and Wall Street and Progressivism Promise of American Life, The (Croly) public employees public schools Qaddafi, Muammar Qualcomm Quayle, Dan race and racism Raimondo, Gina Rainbow Coalition Reagan, Ronald Rector, Ricky Ray Reed, Bruce regulation.

pages: 322 words: 87,181

Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy by Dani Rodrik

3D printing, airline deregulation, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, global value chain, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, meta analysis, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pareto efficiency, postindustrial economy, price stability, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steven Pinker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Labor productivity in manufacturing industries rose much faster than in the rest of the economy. That meant that the same or higher quantity of steel, cars, and electronics could be produced with many fewer workers. Manufacturing’s share of total employment began to decline steadily in all the advanced industrial countries sometime after the Second World War. Workers moved to service industries—education, health, entertainment, and public administration. Thus was born the postindustrial economy. For some, work became more pleasant. For those with the skills, capital, and savvy to prosper in the postindustrial age, services offered inordinate opportunities. Bankers, consultants, and engineers earned much higher wages. Equally important, office work allowed a degree of freedom and personal autonomy that factory work had never provided. Hours may have been long—longer perhaps than in factory work—but service professionals enjoyed much greater control over their daily lives and workplace decisions.

Teachers, nurses, and waiters were not paid nearly as well, but they too were released from the humdrum mechanical drudgery of the shop floor. On the other hand, for less skilled workers, service sector jobs meant giving up the negotiated benefits of industrial capitalism. The transition to a service economy often went hand in hand with the decline of unions, job protections, and norms of pay equity, greatly weakening workers’ bargaining power and job security. So, the postindustrial economy opened a new chasm between those with good jobs in services, which were stable, high paying, and rewarding, and those with bad jobs, which were fleeting, low paying, and unsatisfying. Two things determined the mix between these two types of jobs and the extent of inequality the postindustrial transition produced. First, the greater the education and skill level of the workforce, the higher the level of wages in general.

The United States, where many workers are forced to hold multiple jobs in order to make an adequate living, remains the canonical example of this model. This is the story mainly for advanced, Western countries. A few places in the non-Western world have gone through a similar evolution. The most notable cases are Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Each has experienced significant industrialization, and then deindustrialization. They now share with other advanced countries the feature that they are postindustrial economies where the nature of jobs is determined by the interplay between productivity and labor market practices in service sectors. High productivity combined with labor market protections make for good jobs. Low productivity combined with atomistic labor markets are a recipe for poor jobs. It is tempting to extrapolate this story straightforwardly to countries that have lagged economically. These are the low-income and middle-income countries in which a majority of the world’s workers live.

pages: 350 words: 110,764

The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries by Kathi Weeks

basic income, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, deskilling, feminist movement, financial independence, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, glass ceiling, late capitalism, low-wage service sector, means of production, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, pink-collar, post-work, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Shoshana Zuboff, social intelligence, two tier labour market, union organizing, universal basic income, wages for housework, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

This politics of work could be conceived as a way to link the everyday and sometimes every-night experiences of work—its spaces, relations and temporalities; its physical, affective, and cognitive practices; its pains and pleasures—to the political problematic of their present modes and codes of organization and relations of rule.8 Although the category of class remains analytically powerful, I would argue that its political utility is more negligible. The problem is that while the oppositional class category of the industrial period—the “working class”—may accurately describe most people’s relation to waged labor even in a postindustrial economy, it is increasingly less likely to match their self-descriptions. The category of the middle class has absorbed so many of our subjective investments that it is difficult to see how the working class can serve as a viable rallying point in the United States today. A politics of work, on the other hand, takes aim at an activity rather than an identity, and a central component of daily life rather than an outcome.

The othering of various immigrant groups delivered a similar reward to wage laborers, paying what W. E. B. Du Bois called a “public and psychological wage” to the white working class (quoted in Roediger 1991, 12). Thus the work ethic traveled down the class ladder in part on the energies of racism, ethnicity, and nationalism. The racialization of the work ethic also played a role in the postindustrial economy by facilitating the acceptance of white-collar work. Indeed, C. Wright Mills notes that, despite the fact that most of such work was routinized and unskilled, white-collar workers in the United States could nonetheless claim greater prestige than blue-collar workers on the basis of the whiteness and citizenship status of those in the white-collar occupational niche (1951, 248). Once again, the norm’s exclusions based on race, nation, and ethnicity fueled its inclusiveness in terms of class.

Indeed, the focus on housewives and the claim about the productivity of their work, together with the assertion of the political character of relations in the supposedly private sphere of the family, were at once the product of this Fordist order’s own imaginary and perhaps one of the more trenchant expressions of its refusal: a refusal of the privatization and depoliticization of the personal, a refusal of the naturalization of allegedly nonproductive domestic practices, and a refusal of the gendering of the division between production and reproduction. But in the move from an industrial to a postindustrial economy, from Keynesian to neoliberal regimes of governance, from Taylorist to post-Taylorist labor processes and management strategies, and from a Fordist wage relation predicated on mass production for mass consumption to a more heterogeneous model of the wage relation based on flexibility, the relation between production and reproduction that the wages for housework perspective attempted to map becomes even more complex and the borders between them more difficult to discern.

pages: 452 words: 110,488

The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead by David Callahan

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, business cycle, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, East Village, fixed income, forensic accounting, full employment, game design, greed is good, high batting average, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, job satisfaction, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, McMansion, microcredit, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old-boy network, plutocrats, Plutocrats, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Oldenburg, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

Free-market ideologues have also successfully pushed tax polices that favor the wealthy and further concentrate wealth at the top of our society.6 Inequality has grown across the industrialized world since the 1970s, but it's more acute here in large part because America has done next to nothing to tackle the problem: There have been no huge new investments in education or job training to ensure that everyone can compete in the postindustrial economy; no consistent government efforts to prime the economic pump to keep labor markets tight and raise wages for those at the bottom; and no major assistance to lower-income families to help them build wealth in the form of homes and retirement savings. Many say that inequality doesn't matter. It's said that as long as there is opportunity, as long as people can move upward and transform their lives through hard work, inequality is not a social problem we should worry about.

In his book The Moral Foundations of Trust, scholar Eric Uslaner used a variety of opinion surveys taken over the past several decades to examine how and why people trust others. He writes: "If you believe that things are going to get better—and that you have the capacity to control your life—trusting others isn't so risky. Generalized trusters are happier in their personal lives and believe they are masters of their own fate."37 It's not easy to feel like you can control your life in America's postindustrial economy. In a winner-take-all market plagued by stagnating wages, downsizing, and rising prices for key life necessities like health care and housing, many people have good reasons to be pessimistic and resentful. Polling during the boom periods of both the 1980s and 1990s showed that even as the economy grew by leaps and bounds, many people didn't believe that their own incomes would rise. More than half of Americans consistently said that they weren't making enough money to lead the life they wanted, and many didn't see such money in their future.

Smart proposals abound for how to help more people create personal wealth: birth endowments that give every child a nest egg on day one and, through the miracle of compound interest, translate into real assets by adulthood; Individual Development Accounts that leverage government money to encourage poorer Americans to save; special housing programs that offer low-interest loans to first-time homeowners; micro-credit loans that allow more people to start a small business. The ideas are all there. What is needed now are serious investments aimed at creating a true "stakeholder society."4 Fourth, more needs to be done to reduce key insecurities that are part of our postindustrial economy. Americans may never again have the kind of job security that was common forty years ago. The days of strong labor unions and benevolent employers who provide good benefits may never return. More and more workers in the new economy will increasingly operate as free agents and have responsibility for meeting their own pension, health-care, and child-care needs. All of this can be a good thing, giving people more freedom, organizations more flexibility, and the economy greater dynamism.

Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age by Lizabeth Cohen

activist lawyer, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, charter city, deindustrialization, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, garden city movement, ghettoisation, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, land reform, megastructure, new economy, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, rent control, Robert Gordon, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Vilfredo Pareto, walkable city, War on Poverty, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

The good news is that after years of disinvestment and disinterest from middle-class metropolitan residents who preferred to head back to the suburbs at the end of every workday—the reality that Ed Logue battled—urban living appeals again. Whether young professionals employed at start-ups and tech firms increasingly locating downtown or formerly suburban empty nesters returning to the city, these new urbanites are willing to pay more and live smaller to be in the city, so long as it is the prospering kind that has successfully transitioned from a declining industrial to a flourishing postindustrial economy. New York, Boston, San Francisco, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, and their peers are considered attractive; Detroit, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Newark, and Memphis much less so. But now for the bad news. Low-income residents have few prospects in economically declining cities, but their options are also worsening in more dynamic urban areas. Despite the fact that their labor often keeps these cities running, lower-income people find it increasingly difficult to survive as better-off residents are drawn there.

“Fresh, healthy arteries,” Rotival told Architectural Forum in 1958, “encourage all kinds of tissue to grow around them,” conveying optimism about the future with the same bodily metaphors that at the time commonly portrayed slums as “diseased” and cities as “dying.”85 From his first 1941 plan, Rotival had proposed positioning New Haven at the crossroads of highways, many of which became realities: a shoreline interstate that would eventually be I-95; the Connector (Route 34) that would transport people from there to a reinvigorated downtown and link the harbor to the Green; a north-south roadway (Route 91) that would tie New Haven to points northward; and a “circumferential route” to move traffic efficiently around the city, which would inspire much discussion but never be built. When the dramatic swirls of blue ink on his plans became new highways, Rotival promised, office buildings and retail stores would follow as the engine rooms for the city’s new postindustrial economy. And classic Corbusian “towers in the park” would replace blighted neighborhoods, housing residents in more modern and sanitary homes surrounded by green space.86 New Haven’s urban renewers unambivalently embraced Rotival’s recommendation to improve road access. In a 1959 article published in Traffic Quarterly Logue asked, “Is it possible for a city, any city, to make its peace with the automobile and to provide an environment where car and man can get along together?”

A shopping arcade that resembled a suburban-strip shopping center with parking was intended to serve as the new commercial heart of the Dixwell neighborhood. Improving automobile access to downtown New Haven became the linchpin of the strategy. Although retaining and recruiting manufacturers who offered good jobs to New Haven’s large working class were top priorities for the urban renewers, they recognized that they must simultaneously nurture a postindustrial economy. Businesses specializing in communications, television, hospitals, and medical research, they hoped, would eventually put down roots alongside the Connector, with its easy access to downtown, Yale, and the world outside via I-95. For now, their best hope lay with capitalizing on the city’s traditional importance as a market town for the region and reinvigorating its retail appeal. If mass consumption was driving prosperity in postwar America, then it should work in New Haven as well.93 Before the 1940s, New Haven had faced little commercial competition from the surrounding area.

pages: 265 words: 74,941

The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work by Richard Florida

banking crisis, big-box store, blue-collar work, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, congestion charging, creative destruction, deskilling, edge city, Edward Glaeser, falling living standards, financial innovation, Ford paid five dollars a day, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, McMansion, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Robert Shiller, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, young professional, Zipcar

Even if cross-border issues hold up a Toronto-Detroit high-speed rail line, a Toronto-Windsor link might very well do the trick: downtown Detroit can be easily connected via subway across the tunnel to Windsor. The blogger and urbanist Ryan Avent sees an important parallel between the revitalization of the Rust Belt and what’s occurred across the Bos-Wash corridor. “Along the northeastern corridor, there are cities that made the jump from industrial to postindustrial economy fairly successfully,” he writes, “namely, those that had developed knowledge-intensive industries like finance or technology even as industry was beginning to leave center cities. In between these successful cities are interspersed others that were heavily reliant on industry, and which didn’t fare nearly as well over the past half century.” The reason for the turnaround, he argues, is transportation, which increases connectivity and proximity to thriving markets.

For too many, the dream of home ownership turned into an economic trap, one of our own making. The most staggering damage caused by the housing crisis may not be the impact on the financial markets; it may be the long-run competitive disadvantage caused by the inability to relocate the labor force to where the jobs of the future lie. It’s not that home ownership per se is bad, it’s that home ownership on the scale it has grown to is plainly ill suited to today’s postindustrial economy. Letting go of it as the centerpiece of our collective aspirations might be among the healthiest, most liberating steps we can take. We are already beginning to see some signs of a shift toward renting. With all the turmoil in the housing markets, many people have put off buying. And with tightened credit standards (requiring a modest down payment and a reasonable credit rating), it’s become much harder for those who don’t have their financial house in order to buy.

pages: 309 words: 91,581

The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It by Timothy Noah

assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, Branko Milanovic, business cycle, call centre, collective bargaining, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Erik Brynjolfsson, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, feminist movement, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, industrial robot, invisible hand, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, lump of labour, manufacturing employment, moral hazard, oil shock, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, positional goods, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, refrigerator car, rent control, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, upwardly mobile, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

But women were much more likely than men to shift upward into higher-skilled jobs—from information technology engineer and personnel manager on up through various high-paying professions that require graduate degrees (doctor, lawyer, etc.).12 These findings reflect feminism’s victories in the workplace, but they also reflect something else: diminishing job opportunities for working-class males. The journalist Hanna Rosin, writing in the Atlantic in 2010, observed that three quarters of the jobs lost during the 2007–09 recession had been held by men. “The worst-hit industries,” she wrote, “were overwhelmingly male and deeply identified with macho: construction, manufacturing, high finance.” Picking through this wreckage, Rosin wondered, “What if the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men?”13 Source: David Autor, “The Polarization of Job Opportunities in the U.S. Labor Market: Implications for Employment and Earnings” (Washington, Center for American Progress, April 2010), 10. Autor’s source was data from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. That might seem counterintuitive at a time when the top of the economic heap is overwhelmingly male.

Among married couples in the United States, Schwarz calculated, earnings inequality would, from 1967 to 2005, be 25 percent to 30 percent lower were it not for that period’s growing correlation between spouses’ incomes.24 The Rise in Single Parenthood Earlier in this chapter I noted that during the Great Divergence family incomes increased by only 10 percent, even though families during this period were much likelier than they previously were to rely on two salaries, and even though women’s incomes were gaining on men’s. Part of the reason was a rise in single-parent households, which in most instances meant a woman raising children without a husband or male partner. Just as the Atlantic’s Hanna Rosin and The Full Monty’s Gaz wonder whether the modern, postindustrial economy has much use for men, so might we wonder about the modern, postindustrial family. The declining economic value of men as Ward Cleaver–style breadwinners is a significant reason for the rise in single parenthood. As male incomes became less reliable and social taboos were loosened against divorce and out-of-wedlock birth, women became less inclined to marry, or stay married to, the fathers of their children.

pages: 324 words: 92,805

The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification by Paul Roberts

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, business cycle, business process, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, double helix, factory automation, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, game design, greed is good, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, impulse control, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low skilled workers, mass immigration, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, performance metric, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

(The two had been evenly matched just fifteen years before.3) The rate of personal bankruptcies had tripled.4 You could blame other factors, such as a decline in financial literacy and increasingly predatory creditors. But looking at the research, one could also ask whether we’d crossed some sort of neuro-economic threshold where our high-tech consumer economy was supplying more individual “capability” than many of us could comfortably handle. This awkward possibility is part of a broader paradox at the center of the Impulse Society. In the last chapter, we watched as postindustrial economies, juiced up by technology, globalization, a more mercenary business model, and a less engaged government, offered consumers what amounted to a grand bargain: we would surrender much of our postwar economic security, but in return, we would receive some extraordinary new capabilities—manifest in everything from cheaper, faster food and more powerful cars to round-the-clock entertainment and, of course, ubiquitous, easy credit—that would let us continue our search for self-discovery and identity.

In a 1904 speech to British bankers, Joseph Chamberlain, England’s former colonial secretary, summarized the dilemma in harsh terms. “Banking is not the creator of our prosperity but the creation of it. It is not the cause of our wealth, but it is the consequence of our wealth.” England could not survive merely as the “hoarder of invested securities” if that capital were not being employed as the “creator of new wealth.”47 More than a century later, the leading postindustrial economies still seem determined not to learn that lesson. Not only has finance remained the dominant sector in the U.S. economy, but the players are more firmly entrenched than ever. The finance sector is even more concentrated today, with just twelve megabanks, including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo, holding more than two-thirds of all U.S. bank assets.48 Meanwhile, the limbic attributes of the sector continue to shape the culture at large.

pages: 344 words: 93,858

The Post-American World: Release 2.0 by Fareed Zakaria

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, global reserve currency, global supply chain, illegal immigration, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mutually assured destruction, new economy, oil shock, open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Washington Consensus, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

They read about computers, management theory, marketing strategy, and the latest innovations in science and technology. They speak globalization fluently. The result is a country that looks like no other developing nation. India’s GDP is 50 percent services, 25 percent industry, and 25 percent agriculture. The only other countries that fit this profile are Portugal and Greece—middle-income countries that have passed through the first phases of mass industrialization and are entering the postindustrial economy. India is behind such economies in manufacturing and agriculture but ahead of them in services—a combination that no one could have planned. The role of the consumer in India’s growth has been similarly surprising. Most Asian success stories have been driven by government measures that force the people to save, producing growth through capital accumulation and market-friendly policies. In India, the consumer is king.

“Tip,” 179, 284 Opium Wars, 81 Organization of American States (OAS), 268 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), 30 Orissa, 155 Ottoman Empire, 67, 68, 73, 75, 82, 84, 85, 117–18 outsourcing, 27–28, 50, 148, 203 “Pacific Century,” 245 Pakistan, 12, 13, 14, 145, 159, 165, 166, 172, 176, 241, 260, 263, 264, 271 Palestinians, 6, 246 Pampers diapers, 105 Parsley crisis (2002), 239–41 Patriots Alliance, 135 Patten, Christopher, 248–49 “peaceful rise,” 119–20, 127–36 peasants, 65–66, 100, 106, 112 Pei, Minxin, 106, 110 pensions, 212 Perejil Island, 239–41 Perry, William, 265 Pershing missiles, 251 Persian Gulf, 32 Peru, 26 Peter I, Emperor of Russia, 83–84 petrochemicals, 32 Pew Global Attitudes Survey, 59, 122, 166, 226 Philippines, 11, 28, 133 Philosophical Dictionary (Voltaire), 123 Pilhofer, Aron, 220 Pines, Burton, 235 Pinker, Steven, 9 Pitt, William, 82 Pizarro, Francisco, 80 platinum, 131 Plaza Accord meetings, 282 plutonium, 176 polar ice caps, 33 political parties, 59, 154, 156–62, 178, 179–80, 235, 255, 276–77, 278, 279, 283 “political risk,” 19 Poos, Jacques, 245 population growth, 22, 31, 32–33, 50–51, 66, 80, 100, 112, 144, 145, 148, 178–83, 191, 213–16, 236–37 Portugal, 69, 79, 80, 116, 151 “positive supply shocks,” 20 post-American world: anti-Americanism and, 13, 35, 39, 42, 60, 166, 241, 245, 251–55, 274, 283 asymmetry in, 142–44, 269–72 cultural change in, 1–5, 16, 39, 41, 62–99, 126–27 economic conditions in, 6–61, 93, 94, 97, 197–99, 241–43, 255 future trends for, 1–5, 94–99, 199–203, 204, 239–85 legitimacy in, 243–50, 273–75 multilateralism in, 246–55, 267–69 nationalism in, 34–42, 101, 134–35, 143, 145, 158–59, 180–83, 192, 274 power shift in, 20, 22–23, 29, 34–42, 47–49, 51–54, 93–94, 99, 127–28, 137–44, 241–42, 259, 266–67 “rise of the rest” in, xii, 1–5, 47, 55–56, 65, 96–97, 99, 101, 199, 219–22, 242, 257–59, 263, 267–69, 285 strategic approach to, 142–44, 255–75 unipolar vs. multipolar order of, 1–5, 39, 52–53, 233, 241–42, 243–50, 264–65, 266–69, 274–75 U.S. global role in, xii, 4, 48–61, 117, 120, 142–44, 182–83, 223–26, 235–85 see also globalization postindustrial economies, 151, 200, 204 poverty, 3, 22, 65–66, 100, 102, 106, 111, 113–14, 117, 121, 146, 149, 150, 155–58, 169, 177 Powell, Colin, 240 Pratt School of Engineering, 205 Premji, Azim, 155 price levels, 21, 30, 67, 70, 128 private property, 73, 150 private sector, 148–53, 160–61 privatization, 107, 110, 150–51, 152, 153, 222 Procter & Gamble, 105, 151 product development, 202–3 productivity, 21, 30, 33, 50, 71–72, 160, 200, 212, 281, 282, 283 profit, 72, 80, 128, 200, 203 Protestantism, 81, 97–98, 125, 262 Prussia, 191 Pudong financial district, 102–3 Punjab, 180 purchasing power parity (PPP), 18n, 21, 66n, 113n, 148n, 198n qi (energy), 126 Qienlong, Emperor of China, 69 Qing dynasty, 63–64, 81 quotas, 109 Raffles, Stamford, 185 Rajasthan, 180 Ramo, Joshua Cooper, 142–43 Ranbaxy, 153 Ratner, Ely, 38 Rattner, Steven, 230 Reagan, Ronald, 168, 251, 284 real estate, 43, 85, 152, 217, 218, 225 recessions, 25, 227, 232 regional governments, 145, 161, 178–83 regional powers, 257–63 Reisen, Helmut, 281 Reliance Industries, 149, 153 religion, 15–16, 74, 76, 80, 81, 87, 98, 122–25, 127, 169, 171, 172, 213, 262, 278 Renaissance, 68 Report of Phihihu (Frederick II), 124 Republican Party, 59, 235, 276–77, 278, 280–81 reserve currency, 267 “responsible stakeholders,” 257 retail sector, 203 Revolutionary War, U.S., 194 Rhine River, 77 Ricci, Matteo, 124–25 Rice, Condoleezza, 252–53 Richie, Donald, 92 Rig Veda, 171 Rise of the Great Nations, The, 120 Rivoli, Pietra, 203 Roach, Steven, 282 Roberts, J.

Microserfs by Douglas Coupland

car-free, computer age, El Camino Real, game design, hive mind, Kevin Kelly, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, postindustrial economy, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence

I mean, if I really think about it, Valley people work and sleep - work and sleep and work and sleep and somewhere along the line the dream border is blurred. It's as if there is a collective decision to disfavor a Godhead. It's not despair; they just want the Real Thing. The Beast. And the penny pinching! The nondisclosure forms! The extreme wealth of the high-IQ'ed genetic gift baskets who won on the Punnet Square of life! I suppose this is the birthplace of the new, postindustrial economy here amid the ghosts of apricot orchards, spinach farms, and horse ranches - here inside the science parks, industrial areas, and cool, leafy suburbs. Here, where sexy new technologies are being blueprinted, CAD'ed, engineered, imagineered, and modeled - post-machines making countless millions of people obsolete overnight. Palo Alto is so invisible from the outside, but invisibility is invariably where one locates the ACTION

You will be able to see the pyramid of the Luxor Hotel . . . " The 737 lurched sideways as its human cargo chugged like Muppets to view a Sim City game gone horribly wrong: the Luxor Hotel's obsidian black glassy pyramid, and beside it, the Excalibur's antiseptic, Lego-pure, obscenely off-scale Arthurian fantasy. Farther up the Strip was the MGM's jade glass box with 3,500 slot machines and 150 gaming tables representing the largest single concentration of cash points on earth - "the Detroit of the postindustrial economy," Michael declared. It was pleasing for me to see so many of the faces of the people in my life, lit by the glow of the cabin windows - Karla, Dad, Susan, Emmett, Michael, Amy, Todd, Abe, Bug, and Bug's friend, Sig - their faces almost fetally blank and uncomprehending at the newness of the world below into which we would shortly dip. Sig is an ophthalmologist from Millbrae who convinced Bug that he wasn't stereogramatically blind.

pages: 632 words: 166,729

Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by Natasha Dow Schüll

airport security, Albert Einstein, Build a better mousetrap, business intelligence, capital controls, cashless society, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, game design, impulse control, information asymmetry, inventory management, iterative process, jitney, large denomination, late capitalism, late fees, longitudinal study, means of production, meta analysis, meta-analysis, Nash equilibrium, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, profit motive, RFID, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, statistical model, the built environment, yield curve, zero-sum game

In the early 1980s, cultural critic Neil Postman said that one had only to look to Las Vegas to understand America.16 In the mid-1990s, casino tycoon Steve Wynn turned this pronouncement around, remarking that “Las Vegas exists because it is a perfect reflection of America.”17 Since then, journalists and academics alike have debated whether the rest of the country is becoming more like Las Vegas, or if, alternatively, Las Vegas is becoming more like the rest of the country. Some have called the city “the new Detroit” to signal its status as capital of the postindustrial economy, while others have pointed out that Detroit itself is now home to the popular MotorCity Casino.18 Running alongside the debate over whether Las Vegas is a mirror or a model for America is the question of whether to view the city as a shape-shifting marvel of human inventiveness and technological sophistication or as a dystopic instantiation of consumer capitalism.19 Whatever its relationship to the culture at large, it is clear that Las Vegas “has become a vast laboratory,” as urban historians Hal Rothman and Mike Davis wrote in 2002, “where giant corporations, themselves changing amalgams of capital from different sectors, are experimenting with every possible combination of entertainment, gaming, mass media, and leisure.”20 In the Las Vegas laboratory, machine gambling figures both as a means and an end of experimentation.

With the machine there’s no person that can talk back, no human contact or involvement or communication, just a little square box, a screen.” Machine gamblers like Lola frequently connect their preference for the asocial, robotic procedure of machine play to the hypersociality demanded by their jobs—in real estate, accounting, insurance, sales, and other service fields. In the 1970s, the sociologist Daniel Bell characterized the postindustrial economy as one driven by the provision of services rather than factory labor, exchanges between people rather than between people and machinery.15 Extending Bell’s insights, Arlie Hochschild argued in the 1980s that the shift from assembly-line production to service provision had been accompanied by a shift from physical labor to “emotional labor” in which “the emotional style of offering the service is part of the service itself.”16 While physical machine labor carries the risk of alienation from one’s body, emotional labor carries the risk of becoming estranged from one’s feelings and affects as they are processed and managed in the marketplace of social relations.

., O’Hare would park herself in front of a video poker machine, medicating herself with the rhythms of choosing and discarding poker hands.”17 “At the machines,” Josie elaborates, “I was safe and away. Nobody talked to me, nobody asked me any questions, nobody wanted any bigger decision than if I wanted to keep the king or the ace.” It makes a twisted kind of sense that in Las Vegas, a city that the urban historian Mike Davis has called the “Detroit of the postindustrial economy,” machines are less likely to serve as a means of production from which users become alienated and more likely to serve as a means of relief from the alienation of social labor.18 Patsy recalls her work as a welfare officer at the State of Nevada’s food stamp office: “All day long I’d hear sad stories of no food, unwanted pregnancy, violence. But it all slid right off me because I was so wrapped up in those machines.

pages: 320 words: 96,006


affirmative action, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, delayed gratification, edge city, facts on the ground, financial independence, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, meta analysis, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, post-work, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Results Only Work Environment, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stanford prison experiment, Steven Pinker, union organizing, upwardly mobile, white picket fence, women in the workforce, young professional

Indeed, the US economy is becoming a kind of traveling sisterhood: Professional women leave home and enter the workforce, creating domestic jobs for other women to fill. Our vast and struggling middle class, where the disparities between men and women are the greatest, is slowly turning into a matriarchy, with men increasingly absent from the workforce and from home, and women making all the decisions. In the past, men derived their advantage largely from size and strength, but the postindustrial economy is indifferent to brawn. A service and information economy rewards precisely the opposite qualities—the ones that can’t be easily replaced by a machine. These attributes—social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus—are, at a minimum, not predominantly the province of men. In fact, they seem to come more easily to women. Women in poor parts of India are learning English faster than men, to meet the demands of new global call centers.

In fact, one recent study found that African-American boys whose fathers are in jail have higher graduation rates than those whose fathers are around, suggesting that fathers have become a negative influence. African-American men and women have the greatest gender gap in college graduation rates, and Ebony magazine often laments how difficult it is for a black woman to find a suitable man. In 2010 I visited Kansas City to follow one of the court-sponsored men’s support groups that have sprung up throughout the Rust Belt and in other places where the postindustrial economy has turned traditional family roles upside down. Some groups help men cope with unemployment, and others help them reconnect with their alienated families. Many of the men I spoke with had worked as electricians or builders; one had been a successful real-estate agent. Now those jobs are gone, too. Darren Henderson was making $33 an hour laying sheet metal until the real-estate crisis hit and he lost his job.

Social Capital and Civil Society by Francis Fukuyama

Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, p-value, Pareto efficiency, postindustrial economy, principal–agent problem, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transaction costs, World Values Survey

Thomas argue that the development of formal property rights in England and Holland in the sixteenth century was critical to the creation of modern capitalism and the informal norms supporting it.10 Conversely, Diego Gambetta argues that the absence of state-enforced property rights is the source of the pervasive culture of distrust in Sicily.11 Outside of the family, education is the next most important arena for socialization. Education produces a blizzard of different norms: it can lead to the spread of new ideologies or systematic ideas, but for the most part produces norms on a smaller scale. One of the most important sources of norms in a postindustrial economy is professional education, where engineers, doctors, lawyers, accountants, or architects not only are trained in their particular field of specialty, but are also socialized to obey certain behavioral norms concerning professional standards. 10 Douglass C. North and Robert P. Thomas, The Rise o f the Western W o r l d : A N e w Economic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). 11 Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia: T h e Business of Private Protection (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). 464 Tanner Lectures on Human Values One specific use of law that plays a particularly important role in the shaping of social norms is public education.

pages: 371 words: 108,317



It led a greater percentage of the population to decide that humans were meant to be ballerinas, full-time musicians, mathematicians, athletes, fashion designers, yoga masters, fan-fiction authors, and folks with one-of-a-kind titles on their business cards. With the help of our machines, we could take up these roles—but, of course, over time the machines will do these as well. We’ll then be empowered to dream up yet more answers to the question “What should we do?” It will be many generations before a robot can answer that. This postindustrial economy will keep expanding because each person’s task (in part) will be to invent new things to do that will later become repetitive jobs for the robots. In the coming years robot-driven cars and trucks will become ubiquitous; this automation will spawn the new human occupation for former truck drivers of trip optimizer, a person who tweaks the traffic algorithms for optimal energy and time usage.

See also work environments on-demand expectations, 64–65, 114–17 OpenOffice, 151 open source industry, 135, 141–42, 143, 271 oral communication, 204 Oscar Awards, 187–88 overfitting, 170 ownership, 112–13, 117–18, 121–22, 124–25, 127, 138 Page, Larry, 36–37 Pandora, 169 parallel computation, 38–39, 40 passive archives, 249 passwords, 220, 235 patents, 283 PatientsLikeMe, 145 patronage, 71–72 PayPal, 65, 119–20, 124 pedometers, 238 peer-to-peer networks, 129–30, 184–85 Periscope, 76 “personal analytics” engine, 239 personalization, 68–69, 172–73, 175, 191, 240–41, 261–62 pharmaceutical research, 241–42 pharmacies, 50 phase transitions, 294–97 phones automatic updates of, 62 cameras in, 34 and clouds, 126 and decentralized communications, 129–31 and on-demand model of access, 114 directories, 285 and interactivity, 219 lifespan of apps for, 11 as reading devices, 91–92 in rural China, 56 and self-tracking technology, 239–40 and tracking technology, 239–40, 250, 253 and virtual reality technology, 215, 222 photography and images and artificial intelligence, 33–34 and classic film production, 198–99 and content recognition, 43, 203 and Creative Commons licensing, 139 democratization of, 77 and digital storage capacity, 266 and facial recognition, 39, 43 flexible images, 204 and Google Photo, 43 and lifelogging, 248–49 and new media genres, 195 and photo captioning, 51 and reproductive imperative, 87 sharing of, 140 Picard, Rosalind, 220 Picasso, Pablo, 288 Pichai, Sundar, 37 Pine, Joseph, 172–73 Pinterest, 32, 136, 139, 140, 183 piracy, 124 placebo effect, 242 platform synergy, 122–25, 131 PlayStation Now, 109 porn sites, 202–3 postal mail, 253 postindustrial economy, 57 “presence,” 216–17 printing, 85, 87. See also books privacy, 124, 253, 255 processing speeds, 293 Progressive Insurance, 251 Project Jacquard, 225 Project Sansa, 218 property rights, 207–8 prosumers (freelancers), 113, 115, 116–17, 148, 149 proxy data gathering, 255 public commons, 121–22 public key encryption, 260–61 publishing and publishers, 149 purchase histories, 169 Quantified Self Meetup groups, 238–40 Quantimetric Self Sensing, 247 quantum computing, 284 Quid, 32 Quinn, David, 17 Radiohead, 72 randomized double-blind trials, 242 reading, 89, 91–92, 94–95, 103–4.

pages: 219 words: 62,816

"They Take Our Jobs!": And 20 Other Myths About Immigration by Aviva Chomsky

affirmative action, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, call centre, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, European colonialism, full employment, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, invisible hand, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, mass incarceration, new economy, out of africa, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, thinkpad, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Generally, businesses seek to keep their expenses as low as possible, to achieve the greatest profit margin possible. One way of doing this is by moving workers, and moving production, around the globe. In the early days of the industrial revolution, factories brought workers to the point of production. Some came from local rural areas to the new industrial cities, while in the United States some came from halfway across the globe. In today’s economy—sometimes called the “postindustrial” economy—it’s been industries as well as workers that have relocated. The global economic restructuring since World War II has created what some have called a “new international division of labor.”1 Low-paid workers in the Global South used to produce and export raw materials, which fueled the industrial revolution in the north. The cheap raw materials produced by these workers—with great profits for investors—contributed to the prosperity of the United States and Europe, which was based partly on the artificially low prices made possible by their labor.

pages: 222 words: 50,318


addicted to oil, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, big-box store, centre right, commoditize, credit crunch, David Brooks, desegregation, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, full employment, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, McMansion, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, RAND corporation, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Seaside, Florida, the built environment, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight

The boredom of having only the option of drivable sub-urban life, including the unintended consequences of ever longer and more congested commutes and the running of nearly every errand in a car, is not to be underestimated. T H E M A R K E T R E D I S C OV E R S WA L K A B L E U R B A N I S M | 9 1 Alongside these demographic changes, the economy has made a fundamental change. The new economy has been called many things: the virtual economy, the service economy, the postindustrial economy, the knowledge economy, and the creative economy. This has come to mean a focus on the up front, creative portion of a product or service development and the back-end marketing and distribution of that product or service. The actual production may be outsourced abroad, or it may be accomplished with fewer employees in this country due to advances in technology, which lead to increased productivity.

pages: 283 words: 73,093

Social Democratic America by Lane Kenworthy

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, basic income, business cycle, Celtic Tiger, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, David Brooks, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, full employment, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, manufacturing employment, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, school choice, shareholder value, sharing economy, Skype, Steve Jobs, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, working poor, zero day

Stimson. 2002. The Macro Polity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Ermisch, John, Markus Jäntti, and Timothy Smeeding, eds. 2012. From Parents to Children: The Intergenerational Transmission of Advantage. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Esping-Andersen, Gøsta. 1990. The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1999. Social Foundations of Postindustrial Economies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2003. “Why No Socialism Anywhere? A Reply to Alex Hicks and Lane Kenworthy.” Socio-Economic Review 1: 63–70. ———. 2004. “Unequal Opportunities and the Mechanisms of Social Inheritance.” Pp. 289–314 in Generational Income Mobility in North America and Europe. Edited by Miles Corak. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2009. The Incomplete Revolution.

pages: 238 words: 73,121

Does Capitalism Have a Future? by Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian, Craig Calhoun, Stephen Hoye, Audible Studios

affirmative action, blood diamonds, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, creative destruction, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, distributed generation, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, full employment, Gini coefficient, global village, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Isaac Newton, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, land tenure, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, loose coupling, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, too big to fail, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks

So when the Earth has filled up, labor costs will be high everywhere and profits will fall. Capitalists will try nonetheless to reduce wages but they will now be dealing with a globally organized working class. It will resist, producing a global crisis of capitalism. This scenario will take a while yet. Only a part of the enormous populations of India and China have as yet been absorbed into a minimally regulated industrial or postindustrial economy. That will take more than thirty years. Moreover, the process hasn’t yet begun in Africa or central Asia so that such a fill-up may take up until the end of the 21st century, especially since population growth is projected to continue until near the end of the century and it will be biggest in the poorest countries. However, I find this model of an earth reaching the limits of economic markets difficult to understand.

pages: 281 words: 86,657

The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City by Alan Ehrenhalt

anti-communist, big-box store, British Empire, crack epidemic, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Frank Gehry, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Peter Calthorpe, postindustrial economy, Richard Florida, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional

As they do this, the center of the city becomes too expensive for the newest arrivals, and they settle in the neighborhoods just beyond and in the inner suburbs slightly farther away that are on convenient lines of transportation. These recently fading parts of town acquire a cachet, as Sheffield did in Chicago in the 1980s, and the poorer people who formerly lived in these communities move farther out to obtain cheaper housing. Demographic inversion has taken place. It’s not impossible to imagine this happening in Cleveland and Cleveland Heights. But it requires jobs—new ones in the postindustrial economy in numbers sufficient to replace the old ones in manufacturing. Cleveland has not been able to produce these jobs. In fact, the whole area has been losing them at an alarming pace. As the economist George Zeller reported from census data in mid-2010, in the years since 2000, Cleveland and surrounding Cuyahoga County had lost more than 130,000 jobs. There was little sign that well-paying jobs were emerging to replace them, as had happened in Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s.

pages: 324 words: 86,056

The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality by Bhaskar Sunkara

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, inventory management, labor-force participation, land reform, land value tax, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Occupy movement, postindustrial economy, precariat, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, We are the 99%

What young people understand as socialism is not clear, but when even basic welfare programs are denounced as “creeping socialism” by the Right, it’s no wonder that many are supportive of the idea. The pain is not limited to one generation. It’s widely felt. In the United States, hourly wages have grown by a paltry 0.2 percent since 1979. Things are actually worse in the United Kingdom, where wages fell by about 10 percent between 2007 and 2014, even as economic productivity grew by about the same amount. And in both countries, as in other “postindustrial” economies across Europe, increased flexibility for employers has meant increased uncertainty for workers. In the United Kingdom, about 9 percent of part-time workers reported being unable to find a full-time job in 2008, and that percentage more than doubled by 2013. The “involuntary part-timer” or “1099-er”—unseen in the postwar era—is now a feature of our economic landscape.2 You might think that a socialist movement would be inevitable in times like these.

pages: 286 words: 82,065

Curation Nation by Rosenbaum, Steven

Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, disintermediation,, future of journalism, Jason Scott:, means of production, PageRank, pattern recognition, post-work, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, Yogi Berra

Today Keen remains passionate about professionalism and expertise as it relates to both content and curation, saying, “I still have faith in the meritocracy, that most things require training and require hierarchy. And most people can’t do most things, so you need to examine systems and professional organizations, and gatekeepers, and all the other infrastructure that is necessary for meritocracy to operate. For people who fly planes or people who are heart surgeons, or journalists, or film directors, in a professionalized, industrial—particularly a postindustrial—economy, there is a need for some sort of collective agreement on what determines expertise.” The irony of Keen’s rant is that while we all agree that airline pilots should have training and expertise and licenses, it’s hard to see how those same concerns or agreed standards should be held up by journalists or film directors. For example, some would say that Keen shouldn’t have an author’s license.

pages: 843 words: 223,858

The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells

"Robert Solow", Apple II, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, borderless world, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, complexity theory, computer age, computerized trading, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, edge city, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, future of work, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, income inequality, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, intermodal, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Leonard Kleinrock, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, packet switching, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, popular capitalism, popular electronics, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social software, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the medium is the message, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

. —— and Borrus, Michael (1995a) Networks of American and Japanese Electronics Companies in Asia, Berkeley, CA: University of California, BRIE research paper. —— and ––— (1995b) Networks of Companies in Asia, Berkeley, CA: University of California, BRIE research paper. —— and Guerrieri, Paolo (1995) “The variable geometry of Asian trade”, in Eileen M. Doherty (ed.), Japanese Investment in Asia, Berkeley, CA: University of California, BRIE–Asia Foundation, pp. 189–208. —— and Zysman, John (1987) Manufacturing Matters: the Myth of Postindustrial Economy, New York: Basic Books. —— et al. (1985) Global Competition: the New Reality, vol. III of John Young (chair), Competitiveness: the Report of the President’s Commission on Industrial Competitiveness, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, p. 1. Cohendet, P. and Llerena, P. (1989) Flexibilité, information et décision, Paris: Economica. Colas, Dominique (1992) La Glaive et le fléau: genéalogie du fanatisme et de la société civile.

. —— (1997) “From partial to systemic globalization: international production networks in the electronic industry”, Berkeley: University of California, BRIE working paper. —— and O’Connor, David (1992) Competing in the Electronics Industry: the Experience of Newly Industrializing Economies, Paris: OECD. Esping-Andersen, G. (ed.) (1993) Changing Classes, London: Sage. —— (1999) Social Foundations of Postindustrial Economies, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Estefania, Joaquin (1996) La nueva economia: La globalizacion, Madrid: Editorial Debate. Evans, Peter (1995) Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fager, Gregory (1994) “Financial flows to the major emerging markets in Asia”, Business Economics, 29(2): 21–7. Fainstein, Susan S., Gordon, Ian and Harloe, Michael (eds.) (1992) Divided Cities, Oxford: Blackwell.

pages: 343 words: 101,563

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

"Robert Solow", agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, basic income, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, cognitive bias, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, endowment effect, energy transition, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, failed state, fiat currency, global pandemic, global supply chain, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, megastructure, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Plutocrats, postindustrial economy, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Whole Earth Catalog, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

And although what’s called “carbon outsourcing” means that a large slice of China’s emissions is produced manufacturing goods to be consumed by Americans and Europeans. Whose responsibility are those gigatons of carbon? It may not much longer be merely a rhetorical question, if the Paris accords yield to a more rigorous global carbon governance structure, as they were intended to, and add, along the way, a proper enforcement mechanism, military or otherwise. How and how fast China manages its own transition from industrial to postindustrial economy, how and how fast it “greens” the industry that remains, how and how fast it remodels agricultural practices and diet, how and how fast it steers the consumer preferences of its booming middle and upper classes away from carbon intensity—these are not the only things that will determine the climate shape of the twenty-first century. The courses taken by India and the rest of South Asia, Nigeria and the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, matter enormously.

pages: 319 words: 103,707

Against Everything: Essays by Mark Greif

1960s counterculture, back-to-the-land, Bernie Madoff, citizen journalism, collateralized debt obligation, crack epidemic, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, income inequality, informal economy, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, Ronald Reagan, technoutopianism, telemarketer, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, white flight

In Mogadishu; at Mazar-i-Sharif or Tora Bora; in Nasiriyah, Najaf, Baghdad, and now Fallujah, we’ve seen what had been hidden since Vietnam—the way the US military currently trains and arms its best soldiers to fight on the ground, especially in urban or unconventional surroundings. Human bodies still do the face-to-face work of killing for the United States, just as in so many spheres of the postindustrial economy small populations are still needed to do the skilled or filthy work that machines cannot reach. The military becomes reliant on a small number of frontline fighters, heavily equipped with technology, who are rewarded with a special kind of status. And unfamiliar trappings do surround them. US soldiers wear body armor of great technical ingenuity, flexible, miraculous. They fight with powerful, almost preternatural weapons, in episodes of virtuosic slaughter, until they withdraw to safety.

pages: 393 words: 91,257

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

Admiral Zheng, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, creative destruction, deindustrialization, demographic transition, don't be evil, Donald Trump, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y Combinator

—Voltaire CHAPTER 1 The Feudal Revival Feudalism is making a comeback, long after it was believed to have been deposited into the historical dustbin. Of course it will look different this time around: we wont see knights in shining armor, or vassals doing homage to their lords, or a powerful Catholic Church enforcing the reigning orthodoxy. What we are seeing is a new form of aristocracy developing in the United States and beyond, as wealth in our postindustrial economy tends to be ever more concentrated in fewer hands. Societies are becoming more stratified, with decreasing chances of upward mobility for most of the population. A class of thought leaders and opinion makers, which I call the “clerisy,” provide intellectual support for the emerging hierarchy. As avenues for upward mobility are diminishing, the model of liberal capitalism is losing appeal around the globe, and new doctrines are arising in its place, including ones that lend support to a kind of neo-feudalism.

The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy by Bruce Katz, Jennifer Bradley

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, British Empire, business climate, carbon footprint, clean water, cleantech, collapse of Lehman Brothers, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, double entry bookkeeping, edge city, Edward Glaeser, global supply chain, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lone genius, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, megacity, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, transit-oriented development, urban planning, white flight

When federal, state, and local agendas are in alignment, and distinct roles are clarified, the opportunities for success are dramatically increased.”30 TRADING ASSETS HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT What American leaders have going for them are communities with rich, mostly hidden assets, ready to be leveraged and exploited for global purposes. In a country that watches Black Friday retail statistics like baseball scores and is convinced that it has a postindustrial economy that produces little, the real productive and innovative economy has surprising strengths. Those strengths, captured in earlier chapters, start with the tremendous innovative capacity in the United States, concentrated in metropolitan areas because of the special mix of firms, workers, and institutions that foster innovation. This metropolitan capacity to innovate constantly on products and services is the essential foundation for trade and exchange.

The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape by James Howard Kunstler

A Pattern Language, blue-collar work, California gold rush, car-free, City Beautiful movement, corporate governance, Donald Trump, financial independence, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, germ theory of disease, indoor plumbing, jitney, land tenure, mass immigration, means of production, megastructure, Menlo Park, new economy, oil shock, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, plutocrats, Plutocrats, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Review, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

Unemployment climbed, especially in the building trades, and because of the gross overbuilding of the eighties, the government could not artificially stimulate more new construction with the same old tricks. Car sales plummeted-and anyway, half of American drivers owned foreign cars by now. In fact, most of the things that Americans bought, period, were manufactured elsewhere. The nation had entered what was being referred to as a postindustrial economy, but so far it was unclear exactly what that meant-perhaps people selling hamburgers and movie tickets at the mall to employees of other malls on their days off. This was a patent absurdity, of course, but without industries of some kind in America, the prospects for maintaining the consumer economy at the accustomed level seemed rather dim. The known global reserves of petroleum are expected to last roughly another thirty years.

Financial Statement Analysis: A Practitioner's Guide by Martin S. Fridson, Fernando Alvarez

business cycle, corporate governance, credit crunch, discounted cash flows, diversification, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, fixed income, information trail, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, negative equity, new economy, offshore financial centre, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, profit motive, Richard Thaler, shareholder value, speech recognition, statistical model, time value of money, transaction costs, Y2K, zero-coupon bond

Branded food and consumer goods producers are not the only ones with value based largely on intellectual capital. Like those companies’ expenditures aimed at building the economic value of their brands, the research and development outlays of technology and pharmaceutical companies are written off as incurred and consequently are assigned no asset value under GAAP. For these exemplars of the postindustrial economy, return on equity looks less stratospheric when equity is viewed in terms of market capitalization rather than historical cost (see “Pros and Cons of a Market-Based Equity Figure” in Chapter 2). VALUATION THROUGH RESTRUCTURING POTENTIAL A subtler benefit of the Du Pont analysis is the insight it can provide into companies’ potential for enhancing value through corporate restructuring.

pages: 463 words: 115,103

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect by David Goodhart

active measures, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, computer age, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, Covid-19, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, deskilling, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shock, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postindustrial economy, precariat, reshoring, Richard Florida, Scientific racism, Skype, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thorstein Veblen, twin studies, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, young professional

PART FOUR THE FUTURE Chapter Nine The Fall of the Knowledge Worker The urban, educated people who voted against populism will have a whole new attitude when globalization and automation get up close and personal. Richard Baldwin There are two fundamental reasons why cognitive ability has become so central to status and reward in modern societies. First, the industrial and then postindustrial economy and society has simply demanded more highly qualified professional people with above-average levels of cognitive ability. Second, appointing, promoting, and rewarding people according to their cognitive ability seems fair. This fairness, it is true, is qualified by the fact that cognitive ability is partly inherited and the IQ tests and exams we use to measure it may not be fully measuring what we want them to measure, as discussed in Chapter Three.

pages: 481 words: 120,693


activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, call centre, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, double helix, energy security, estate planning, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Gini coefficient, global village, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, job automation, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberation theology, light touch regulation, linear programming, London Whale, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, open economy, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Solar eclipse in 1919, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

This is what economists call the “superstar” effect—the tendency of both technological change and globalization to create winner-take-all economic tournaments in many sectors and companies, where being the most successful in your field delivers huge rewards, but coming in second place, and certainly in fifth or tenth, has much less economic value. The triumph of the nerds is intuitively obvious in the postindustrial economies of the developed West, where brains have had more value than brawn for a couple of generations. But in today’s era of the twin gilded ages, the triumph of the intellectuals is a global phenomenon. The highly educated are in the vanguard of India’s outsourcing miracle; the intellectuals, especially their “technical” branch, are very much in charge in communist China; and even the Russian oligarchs, who are better known in the West for their yachts and supermodel consorts, overwhelmingly have advanced degrees in math and physics.

pages: 440 words: 128,813


carbon footprint, citizen journalism, deindustrialization, fixed income, ghettoisation, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, longitudinal study, loose coupling, mass immigration, megacity, New Urbanism, postindustrial economy, smart grid, smart meter, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, urban renewal, War on Poverty

Journal of Communication 43:51–58. Erikson, Kai. 1976. Everything in its path: Destruction of community in the Buffalo Creek flood. New York: Simon and Schuster. . 1994. A new species of trouble: The human experience of modern disasters. New York: W. W. Norton. Esping-Anderson, Gøsta. 1990. The three worlds of welfare capitalism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. . 1999. Social foundations of postindustrial economies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ettema, James, and Theodore Glasser. 1998. Custodians of conscience. New York: Columbia University Press. Fallows, James. 1996. Breaking the news: How the media undermine American democracy. New York: Vintage. Farmer, Paul. 1999. Infections and inequalities: The modern plagues. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Federman, Maya, Thesia Garner, Kathleen Short, W.

pages: 462 words: 142,240

Iron Sunrise by Stross, Charles

blood diamonds, dumpster diving, gravity well, hiring and firing, industrial robot, life extension, loose coupling, mass immigration, mutually assured destruction, phenotype, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, RFID, side project, speech recognition, technological singularity, trade route, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

The exiles hadn’t simply been dumped on any available world; in almost all cases, they’d been planted in terrain that was not too hostile, showing crude signs of recent terraforming. And the Eschaton had given them gifts: cornucopias, robot factories able to produce any designated goods to order, given enough time, energy, and raw materials. Stocked with a library of standard designs, a cornucopia was a general-purpose tool for planetary colonization. Used wisely, they enabled many of the scattered worlds to achieve a highly automated postindustrial economy within years. Used unwisely, they enabled others to destroy themselves. A civilization that used its cornucopia to produce nuclear missiles instead of nuclear reactors — and more cornucopias — wasn’t likely to outlast the first famine, let alone the collapse of civilization that was bound to follow when one faction or another saw the cornucopia as a source of military power and targeted it.

pages: 462 words: 129,022

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"Robert Solow", affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, greed is good, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, late fees, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, meta analysis, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Peter Thiel, postindustrial economy, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working-age population

Today, we are a postindustrial society, with manufacturing comprising less than 10 percent of our labor force. These changing economic circumstances necessitate a changing role for government. Not only what the government does has had to change, but also how it does it. The reason that regulations and public expenditures increased is not a power grab by politicians, but because we had to, if we were to have a dynamic, well-functioning twenty-first-century innovative, urban, postindustrial economy. None of our successes in managing these issues arose from each individual going it alone. All involve cooperation—and in time, that cooperation has expanded from the folkloric American image of the community getting together to raise a barn, to more systemic ways of working together, including agreeing to certain rules, regulations, and compromises of unbridled personal liberty. Still, the kinds and extent of cooperation that our twenty-first-century economy requires are new and unprecedented.

The America That Reagan Built by J. David Woodard

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, colonial rule, Columbine, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, friendly fire, glass ceiling, global village, Gordon Gekko, gun show loophole, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, Live Aid, Marc Andreessen, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, postindustrial economy, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Ted Kaczynski, The Predators' Ball, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, Y2K, young professional

The president realized that the spirit of the nation was more important than any monthly statistics measuring economic progress, or poll results showing presidential popularity. Reagan’s job was to inspire confidence in the future and reassure the country that things were going to work out. The optimism was not a trivial quality; instead, it was an essential approach to life that had carried him from Dixon, Illinois, to Hollywood and the White House. With him as actor the country was one vast stage. He translated the complexities of a postindustrial economy into phrases and stories that people could understand. Often the stories, while compelling from a political standpoint, were pure fiction. Reagan confused scenes from movies with real events. The most famous of these gaffes was a story he used in the 1976 and 1980 campaigns, and 42 THE AMERICA THAT REAGAN BUILT repeated in 1983 at the annual convention of Congressional Medal of Honor winners.

pages: 523 words: 148,929


agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Asilomar, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, blue-collar work, British Empire, Brownian motion, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, DARPA: Urban Challenge, delayed gratification, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter,, friendly AI, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hydrogen economy, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John von Neumann, life extension, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, mass immigration, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Murray Gell-Mann, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, telepresence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Turing machine, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, Wall-E, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Review, X Prize

Many high-paying, skilled service-sector jobs go unfilled for lack of qualified candidates. Often, the educational system does not produce enough skilled workers, so companies have to cope with a less-educated workforce. Corporations go begging for skilled workers whom the educational system often does not produce. Even in a depressed economy, there are jobs that go unfilled by skilled workers. But one thing is clear. In a postindustrial economy, many of the old blue-collar factory jobs are gone for good. Over the years, economists have toyed with the idea of “reindustrializing America,” until they realize that you cannot turn back the hands of time. The United States and Europe went through the transition from a largely industrial to a service economy decades ago, and this historic shift cannot be reversed. The heyday of industrialization has passed, forever.

pages: 339 words: 57,031


1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, game design, George Gilder, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, new economy, Norbert Wiener, peer-to-peer, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, theory of mind, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Yom Kippur War

In the late 1960s, many ﬂed Haight-Ashbury for the hills of New Mexico hoping not only to found an alternative society but also to ﬁnd a way to escape having their own lives shaped by the forces of society at large. Across the 1970s and 1980s, as the communes of the back-to-the-land movement crumbled and disappeared, Stewart Brand and the entrepreneurs of the Whole Earth group preserved these hopes by welding them to the computer technologies and ﬂexible organizational practices of the rapidly emerging postindustrial economy. By the 1990s, it seemed to many as if the digital networks on [ 256 ] Chapter 8 which that economy increasingly depended would in fact bring to life the New Communalist dream of breaking the bonds of institutional power and freeing individuals to pursue their own holistic lives. Even today, discussions of digital technologies and the network economy continue to invoke New Communalist ideals.

pages: 527 words: 147,690

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman

23andMe, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, basic income, Brian Krebs, California gold rush, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, game design, global village, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, license plate recognition, life extension, lifelogging, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, meta analysis, meta-analysis, Minecraft, move fast and break things, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, optical character recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, pre–internet, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent control, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, social web, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, telemarketer, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Through the phone’s sheer materiality, it reminds us that data is now encoded into the air around us, ready to be called upon. We live amid an atmosphere of information. It’s numinous, spectral, but malleable. This sense of enchantment explains why every neoliberal dispatch from a remote African village must note the supposedly remarkable presence of cell phones. They too have access to information, that precious resource of postindustrial economies. All of this is part of what I call the informational appetite. It’s our total faith in raw data, in the ability to extract empirical certainties about life’s greatest mysteries, if only one can deduce the proper connections. When the informational appetite is layered over social media, we get the messianic digital humanitarianism of Mark Zuckerberg. Connectivity becomes a human right; Facebook, we are told, can help stop terrorism and promote peace.

pages: 585 words: 151,239

Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Robert Solow", 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, global supply chain, hiring and firing, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Plutocrats, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Paradoxically, America’s decision to reduce its links with the European labor market helped to integrate the northern and southern labor markets. 2000 The most striking thing about the U.S. labor force was how much it depended on brain work rather than physical work: most workers manipulated symbols rather than fashioned objects. Thirty percent of workers had a college degree and fewer than 10 percent had not completed high school. Over half of the workforce worked in white-collar work—in the professions and in the service sector. The flip side of the expansion of the postindustrial economy was the contraction of the old industrial economy. Only 13 percent of the labor force worked in manufacturing and 2 percent in agriculture. Trade unions withered: only 13 percent of the workforce belonged to unions, and union penetration was bigger in the public sector than in the private sector. At the same time, both agriculture and manufacturing became more knowledge intensive. Farmers planted high-yield crops.

pages: 519 words: 148,131

An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000 by John Steele Gordon

accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, California gold rush, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, failed state, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, global village, imperial preference, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, margin call, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, postindustrial economy, price mechanism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, Yom Kippur War

It greatly enlarged the percentage of the population that had college degrees. In 1950 some 496,000 college degrees were awarded, twice the number of a decade earlier. Between 1945 and 1952 the federal government spent $14 billion on GI educational benefits but added far more than that to the human capital that would power the postwar economy. Considered as a “public work,” the GI Bill proved to be the Erie Canal of the new, postindustrial economy that was then, quite unrecognized, coming into being. The GI Bill also powered a social revolution. It opened up high-level jobs to many segments of the population that had rarely known such jobs before, thus greatly enlarging and diversifying the country’s economic elite, which had long been dominated by people with British or northwest European names. Because children in this country have historically received on average two years more schooling than did their parents, these benefits have continued generation after generation.

pages: 1,015 words: 170,908

Empire by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, colonial rule, conceptual framework, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global pandemic, global village, Haight Ashbury, informal economy, invisible hand, late capitalism, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, Scramble for Africa, social intelligence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, urban planning

Whereas the process ofmodernization was indicated by a migration oflabor from agriculture and mining (the primary sector) to industry (the secondary), the process ofpostmodernization or informatization has been demonstrated through the migration from industry to service jobs (the tertiary), a shift that has taken place in the dominant capitalist countries, and particularly in the United States, since the early 1970s. Services cover a wide range ofactivities from health care, education, and finance to transportation, entertain- ment, and advertising. The jobs for the most part are highly mobile and involve flexible skills. More important, they are characterized in general by the central role played by knowledge, information, affect, and communication. In this sense many call the postindustrial economy an informational economy. The claim that modernization is over and that the global economy is today undergoing a process ofpostmodernization to- ward an informational economy does not mean that industrial pro- duction will be done away with or even that it will cease to play an important role, even in the most dominant regions ofthe globe. Just as the processes ofindustrialization transformed agriculture and made it more productive, so too the informational revolution will transform industry by redefining and rejuvenating manufacturing processes.

The Origins of the Urban Crisis by Sugrue, Thomas J.

affirmative action, business climate, collective bargaining, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Ford paid five dollars a day, George Gilder, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, job automation, jobless men, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, New Urbanism, oil shock, pink-collar, postindustrial economy, rent control, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Hospitals and universities, buoyed by large-scale federal expenditures and often unionized, proved to be the only reliable source of job growth in northern cities in the wake of deindustrialization. City government employment, often forced open by civil rights activism in a story that still needs to be told, became an increasingly important employment niche for minority workers left behind in the postindustrial economy. Still, meds, eds, and government jobs are particularly vulnerable to state and federal budget cutting. Urban hospitals are jeopardized by the unavailability of health insurance, an influx of impoverished patients, skyrocketing malpractice and equipment costs, and by the gradual suburbanization of health care. City governments have been cutting jobs under fiscal pressures. Universities have increasingly outsourced employment, and those that are publicly funded also face serious budget cutbacks.18 American cities have long reflected the hopes as well as the failures of the society at large.

pages: 726 words: 210,048

Hard Landing by Thomas Petzinger, Thomas Petzinger Jr.

airline deregulation, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, cross-subsidies, desegregation, Donald Trump, feminist movement, index card, low cost airline, low cost carrier, low skilled workers, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, price stability, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, the medium is the message, The Predators' Ball, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, yield management, zero-sum game

Every other airline in America was either bankrupt, in business against British Airways, or already hitched up with a European counterpart—except for USAir. It was, if nothing else, a survivor. USAir by 1992 was the last of the original local-service operators. Few airlines had been more brilliantly managed or more consistently profitable in the years immediately preceding and following deregulation. Much of its success was due to its near-monopoly of Pittsburgh, which flourished as a medical and high technology center in the postindustrial economy of the 1980s. Pittsburgh was also one of the country’s most valuable hubs, perfectly situated among the Great Lakes, New England, and mid-Atlantic regions. USAir was a short-haul airline, Chairman Ed Colodny liked to say, “because that’s the way the country’s built east of the Mississippi River.” Colodny assiduously resisted major acquisitions until, in the late 1980s, it was clear that USAir either had to begin swallowing other airlines or be devoured itself.