John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930),” in Essays in Persuasion (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932), 358-373.
“We are suffering just now from a bad attack of economic pessimism. It is common to hear people say that the epoch of enormous economic progress which characterised the nineteenth century is over; that the rapid improvement in the standard of life is now going to slow down – at any rate in Great Britain; that a decline in prosperity is more likely than an improvement in the decade which lies ahead of us.
I believe that this is a wildly mistaken interpretation of what is happening to us. We are suffering, not from the rheumatics of old age, but from the growing-pains of over-rapid changes, from the painfulness of readjustment between one economic period and another. The increase of technical efficiency has been taking place faster than we can deal with the problem of labour absorption; the improvement in the standard of life has been a little too quick; the banking and monetary system of the world has been preventing the rate of interest from falling as fast as equilibrium requires…”
Joseph A. Schumpeter, “The Process of Creative Destruction,” in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (London: Allen & Unwin, 1943), 81-86.
“The theories of monopolistic and oligopolistic competition and their popular variants may in two ways be made to serve the view that capitalist reality is unfavorable to maximum performance in production. One may hold that it always has been so and that all along output has been expanding in spite of the secular sabotage perpetrated by the managing bourgeoisie. Advocates of this proposition would have to produce evidence to the effect that the observed rate of increase can be accounted for by a sequence of favorable circumstances unconnected with the mechanism of private enterprise and strong enough to overcome the latter’s resistance. This is precisely the question which we shall discuss in Chapter IX. However, those who espouse this variant at least avoid the trouble about historical fact that the advocates of the alternative proposition have to face. This avers that capitalist reality once tended to favor maximum productive performance, or at all events productive performance so considerable as to constitute a major element in any serious appraisal of the system; but that the later spread of monopolist structures, killing competition, has by now reversed that tendency…”
Michael Cooper, “Lost in Recession, Toll on Underemployed and Underpaid,” New York Times, June 18, 2012.
“Throughout the Great Recession and the not-so-great recovery, the most commonly discussed measure of misery has been unemployment. But many middle-class and working-class people who are fortunate enough to have work are struggling as well, which is why Sherry Woods, a 59year-old van driver from Atlanta, found herself standing in line at a jobs fair this month, with her résumé tucked inside a Bible.
She opened it occasionally to reread a favorite verse from Philippians: “And my God will meet all your needs according to the riches of his glory in Christ.”
Ms. Woods’s current job has not been meeting her needs. When she began driving a passenger van last year, she earned $9 an hour and worked 40 hours a week. Then her wage was cut to $8 an hour, and her hours were drastically scaled back. Last month she earned just $233. So Ms. Woods, who said that she had been threatened with eviction for missing rent payments and had been postponing an appointment with the eye doctor because she lacks insurance, has been looking for another, better job. It has not been easy…”
Michael Spence, The Next Convergence: The Future of Economic Growth in a Multispeed World, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 225-237.
“The modern electronic digital computer is a creature of World War II. Thomas Watson, the former CEO of IBM, famously estimated in the early postwar period that the long-run demand for computers would be about three a year. In fairness, the existing computers, which by today’s standards were considerably less powerful than your cell phone, were physically huge, they bristled with vacuum tubes that kept burning out in spite of the massive air-conditioning systems that were deployed to keep them cool, and they were very expensive. But Watson’s estimate was wrong mainly because he (along with many others) didn’t anticipate what would happen to costs, and to computing power.
With U.S. Defense Department funding, the semiconductor device was invented, and it successfully replaced vacuum tubes. The main objective really wasn’t cost so much as portability and durability. DOD wanted computers in airplanes, missiles, and tanks, not just on a full floor of a large office building. A major driver of growth and productivity was created for reasons that had nothing to do with either. This is not uncommon…”
Others…
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