> I don't want to go back to a world where financial transactions are conducted based on hand-scratched notes and shouting on trading floors.
Seemed to work pretty well for a long time.
Seemed to work pretty well for a long time.
In 2007, GWP was ~50Trn USD.
In 2017, GWP is ~80Trn USD.
Of course, these increases have been concentrated among the poorest people in the world, so you don't see them in the US.
Some of our international globalisation tools assisted in that -- shipping (Maersk included), finance, and realtime shelf-to-factory inventory control. But a lot of it didn't.
As Gibson's noted, the future's already here, it's just not evenly distributed. You might also want to ask, from time to time, just which trends truly represent "the future".
The facts and statistics in history and economics appear to be 'politically incorrect' for every type of political belief system. Liberal, Left, Libertarian, Conservative, doesn't matter, there's some factor out there that hasn't been incorporated. I think the Google people say something like "unless you're God, bring data".
Yes, epistemology and ideology seem rather opposed.
If you're a libertarian, which some are here, this should worry you.
Obviously communication efficiency has real advantages. Some of what has been gained is lasting improvement. But humans have a nasty tendency to enforce order on chaotic systems and mistake legibility for growth. Everywhere from forest fires to housing prices, we create systems that delay, but concentrate, risk. Annual brushfires are extinguished, leading to decadal infernos. Credit default swaps enable high default lending at low risk, right up until they don't.
I'm darkly suspicious that many of the gains from communications technology, particularly in stock trading, fall into this category. They've allowed us to push concentrate and defer everyday risks, getting us growth over most time windows when the reality is that we've redistributed risk.
There are other, and frequently far more convincing, models, which suggest that humans frequently make poor decisions out of near-term exigencies, coercion, underappreciated risk (pretty much just what we're talking about here), or any number of other reasons.
See: Fallacy of composition, Logic of Collective Action, Tragedy of the Commons, Prisoners' Dilemma, Red Queen's Race, Complexity Trap, among others.