Great Throughts Treasury

"When people talk about jobs in America today, they talk about cyclicality, outsourcing and off-shoring, taxes and regulation, and the wisdom and efficacy of different kinds of stimulus. We don’t doubt the importance of all these factors. The economy is a complex, multifaceted entity. But there has been relatively little talk about role of acceleration of technology."

"Whole eras of technical progress and economic growth appear to be driven by… GPTs, [which are] characterized by pervasiveness (they are used as inputs by many downstream sectors), inherent potential for technical improvements, and “innovational complementarities,” meaning that the productivity of R in downstream sectors increases as a consequence of innovation in the GPT. Thus, as GPTs improve they spread throughout the economy, bringing about generalized productivity gains. GPTs, then, not only get better themselves over time (and as Moore’s Law shows, this is certainly true of computers)."

"Why has the scourge of unemployment been so persistent? Analysts offer three alternative explanations: cyclicality, stagnation, and the “end of work.”"

"While the archetypal 20th-century multinational was one of a small number of mega-firms with huge fixed costs and thousands of employees, the coming century will give birth to thousands of small multinationals with low fixed costs and a small number of employees each. Both models can conceivably employ similar numbers of people overall, but the latter one is likely to be more flexible."