by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright October 2015
In these post-2007 Crash years of the 2010's we are still searching for the next generation of NBT's. (Next Big Thing) They have not been found yet. This is why the economic growth has been so anemic throughout the developed world since the 2007 bust. Anti-terrorism, housing, and "green" are not positive feedback industries, so what we invest in these is not firing the economy. This means that, in fact, the last boom ended in the 1990's. The "boom" of the 2000's was a war-and-mortgage powered bubble, not an NBT-powered, positive-feedback boom.
What comes next in positive feedback has not been easy to find. That means that when it is discovered, it will most likely be on the "heavy" side and quite disruptive. We got off easy in the last part of the 20th century with the "medium" of the electronics and software boom. It is not likely to be so easy the next time around.
Here are some possibilities:
o Another round of intense industrialization that adds even more automation to manufacturing and service processes. This will let us make more kinds of things and services faster, better and cheaper -- very positive in its feedback. The gotcha is that it does so without increasing human employment, so the world gets more to consume, but people work less, and have less available to pay for this bounty. This sure qualifies as disruptive and it is not clear who the new winners will be. One loser will be the social thinking linkage between self-worth and a good paying job in service or manufacturing. Shouting "Get a job!" at someone is going to change its meaning a lot.
o Another transportation revolution built around driverless cars and other vehicles. This will involve not just redesigning cars, buses and trucks but also roads, road networks, and parking. The current light-rail-and-bicycle schemes that are popular in gentrifying urban cores are resource-saving but not positive feedback. These won't sustain a boom, but driverless vehicles will. They will when they transform the car-use culture into something much more transparent and effortless. Welcome to a world of ninety percent robot-driven taxis, buses and trucks, driving over a newly designed, much more efficient, road network -- one that doesn't routinely traffic jam. The difference this will make: Think of places like Boston, San Francisco and LA being transformed into Hollywood movie dream driving places. The losers in this transformation will be personal pride in owning a car, driving skills, and the existing style of road network that is so familiar to all who use it. The road network will change to suit driverless. It will be very different.
o A transportation revolution built around rationalizing air travel and air traffic. Getting on and off airplanes run by commercial airlines remains a seriously clunky process. Flying these airplanes through the air with existing air traffic control technology is equally clunky. The revolution here will transform flying. Getting on and off planes will get much simpler and quicker, and getting the plane from Point A to Point B will also get much simpler and quicker. The revolution will transform airports into something much simpler to deal with and more numerous. The loser here is current airport security rituals which are in place in the name of air flying security, but in fact are sustained because they are calming the fear-of-flying emotion that many passengers have. These rituals I call Worshiping at the Altar of the Holy Metal Detector, with the TSA being the priesthood. (This is covered in my Evolution and Thought book)
o A healthcare revolution. Healthcare is positive feedback. It helps a person work more consistently and for more years at what they are good at. We are rapidly learning so much more about how life works, but we are being slow at transforming this knowledge into tangible products that help humans stay healthier, which means the positive feedback is blocked. The revolution here will be delivering healthcare without the encumbrance of the existing professional guilds, regulations, and the insurance-centric procedural framework. The losers will be the existing healthcare-providing infrastructure, and the current rituals for getting healthcare -- health insurance as we know it today. I have written more about this as the concept "Patient Pays". (an article on the White World web site) The winners will be the more numerous health care employees. This will continue to be a growth industry for people as well as machines. Health care has a lot of emotion involved with it, so it will remain a place were people can still be valuable workers.
o Energy revolutions built around spreading both fracking and nuclear technologies. Cheap energy lets us get things done faster, better and cheaper. The constant media chatter about gasoline prices shows that we are quite aware of this concept. But because the oil industry is the object of a lot of emotion, a lot of mythology is also wrapped around the topic. The old, "I'm selling my breakthrough carburetor to the oil companies because they want to keep it off the market."-story, and the current fracking controversies, are examples of the potency of this mythology around oil. And the stark terror of nuclear has stopped us from exploiting the nuclear NBT opportunity for more than half a century now. I don't include wind or solar because they are not cheap enough, yet, to produce positive feedback. Until their pricing comes down dramatically, they are feel good, not positive feedback, technologies.
o An employment revolution made possible by dramatically simplifying employment regulations. Employment suffers deeply from The Curse of Being Important, and the suffering seems to be increasing with each decade. Way, way too many people have a say in how a job is conducted! Simplifying the employer-employee relation will be a huge step in allowing the new NBT's to be discovered and exploited. The "sharing economy" is an example of a step in this direction.
The next boom hasn't happened yet. Why?
There are barriers which much be overcome. Here is my list:
o Recognize and remove The Curse of Being Important. As mentioned above one of the big barriers is the complex employer-employee relation that every business has to deal with in the 2010's. As I like to put it, "Getting a job should be more like getting groceries and less like getting married."
o Recognize that growth is important. Another Roger truism, "Fairness is nice, growth is necessary." Communities get distracted. Community leaders tend to confuse spectacle with growth so they promote spectacle, and we get "bread and circus"-style choices rather than NBT-promoting choices. Hosting an Olympics is a good example of this. When the community leaders are picking winners rather than letting the marketplace pick winners, the community leaders are doing it wrong. We as communities need to focus again on promoting growth. We need to do what that takes, and not get distracted. We need to recognize that laissez-faire simplicity, and the transparent, level, legal playing field are usually the best NBT growth promoters. Conversely, bread-and-circus spectacle rarely is.
o Recognize that NBT growth is a messy process. Finding and exploiting NBT's involves lots of experimenting, and experimenting involves lots of failures and learning from failures. Again, this is disruptive and scary. It is not tidy and orderly. The community needs to train itself to believe that -- hopeless, messy, and useless as it may seem at the beginning -- this roller coaster ride of lots of experimenting will have an excitingly good ending.
o We have to figure out what to do with people. With more automation sure to be part of the coming NBT's we need to figure out what people will do that maintains their dignity and commitment to the system -- their enfranchisement. If we don't, we will create a spectacular neo-bread-and-circus lifestyle that would make even Nero blush. This will be a potent distraction, but it is not positive feedback.
Our economic growth will fire up again when we discover our next generation of NBT's and permit their rapid exploitation. These new NBT's are very likely to be heavy industries which means that lots of disruption will accompany their implementation. We should once again expect a boom which leads us down an exciting, rough, and surprising road. But the other end will be just as dazzling as our 20th century progress has been.
This 8 Aug 13 Economist article, Technology and our standard of living: Are we really better off than the numbers show?, is also making the point that this last boom has been different than previous ones and less disruptive.
This 17 Aug 13 Economist article, Net Gains and Losses, talks about how "The internet has not yet produced the hoped-for productivity miracle".
This 8 Sep 13 WSJ article, America Faces the Shock of the Old Future Economic Growth May Depend on Innovation by Justin Lahart, is another one fretting about the decline in productivity growth over the last couple of decades. From the article, "[Robert Gordon] argues that even with the boost provided by personal computers and the Web in the late 1990s through the early part of the last decade, innovation since the 1970s hasn't been as strong as in earlier decades when products like the internal combustion engine filtered through the economy."
This 16 Oct 15 WSJ Saturday Essay, The Politics of Distrust What explains the weird unpredictability of the 2016 presidential race? An anemic economy that has Americans questioning incumbents, doubting experts and worrying about their own prospects by Jay Cost, is about the frustration being felt in the search for an NBT in 2015 and how it is being expressed as Time of Nutcases politics.
From the article, "Until quite recently, our politics seemed to function much more smoothly. Most adults can remember a time when government actually seemed to work. Now we all struggle to explain what has gone wrong."
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