Can a new cycle of technological innovation save the US from stagnation?

http://www.oftwominds.com/blogmar11/stagnation-innovation3-11.html

by winanga • 15 years ago

2 1 15 years ago

This is a bad article. At the risk of picking out particular points...

Minute power savings on power-eating devices are ignored, even if they cost 140 power plants, because apparently consumers' energy bills aren't high enough for them to care. It isn't because they're unsexy. Apparently there are better ways for companies to spend their engineering effort, like making features that save an hour of users' time instead of saving $1 of electricity. So it makes the fallacy of thinking that engineers have free time to worry about X, and that regulation to force them to care about X is a good idea instead of considering the opportunity cost. (On the other hand we could point out that consumers are going to be rationally ignorant of the cost while it would actually be worth a day of an engineer's time to improve such and such, so we should regulate that in the interest of optimizing the behavior of human beings. But then we'd have to worry about the externalities of such regulation, and <imagine a libertarian argument here>.)

> What we have is a bloated network of fiefdoms and cartels, all of whom are hoping that some new technology will enable their continued siphoning of the nation's wealth and income stream.

It's sentences like these that show this is not worth a second skim. The last thing that helps established income streams is new technology.

Can a new cycle of technological innovation save the US from stagnation?

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