5 questions for … Erik Brynjolfsson, co-author of Race Against the Machine
Is America suffering from technological stagnation? Is a lack of innovation undermining economic growth and our standard of living? It’s a popular thesis right now, one outlined brilliantly by economist Tyler Cowen in his recent Kindle ebook, The Great Stagnation.
But MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee see things quite differently. In their new Kindle ebook, Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy, they highlight research that shows there’s been technological acceleration rather than stagnation — computers can now drive cars in traffic, translate effectively between human languages, and beat the best human Jeopardy! players.
But human skills have not kept up. And that’s the problem:
How America can have more Seattles and fewer Detroits
How can American cities be more like vibrant Seattle and less
like moribund Detroit? Certainly not by offering them government-backed
green jobs programs. Instead, says Ed Glaeser, unleash the entrepreneurs. And here is how:
The 6 killer apps of Western civilization: Part 1: Competition
Check out this great TED talk,
in which British historian Niall Ferguson explains his answer to the
question of why Western civilization achieved such a clear dominance
over the rest of the world.
The presentation is a summary of Ferguson’s book Civilization: The West and the Rest. I highly recommend reading it; it expands on the points from the TED talk and is thoroughly enjoyable. What I’d like to do here is investigate, one at a time, the state of the six “killer apps” in modern America.
Let’s start with Ferguson’s first “killer app”: competition. Here’s a little more background from the book:
The presentation is a summary of Ferguson’s book Civilization: The West and the Rest. I highly recommend reading it; it expands on the points from the TED talk and is thoroughly enjoyable. What I’d like to do here is investigate, one at a time, the state of the six “killer apps” in modern America.
Let’s start with Ferguson’s first “killer app”: competition. Here’s a little more background from the book:
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