The Coming Tech-led Boom | Hacker News Reader

The Coming Tech-led Boom

online.wsj.com

45 pointsarikrak10 comments

Its an interesting article. I've pointed out to a lot of doom and gloom types that historically the number of good changes and the number of bad changes are pretty evenly distributed so one has to consider the good things that will happen too.

The article sort of missed completely the change that is coming to medicine. Recent articles in the Economist and medical journals have been pretty amazing of late. One thing I read recently was the article on stem cells (http://www.economist.com/node/21543471) which talked about cultures of a patients cells, coaxed into becoming stem cells, and then allowing drug therapies to be tested against the patients own cells. That is a pretty radical change.

There will also be some interesting emergent systems. Watching the explosion of 'smart' things and their interaction is interesting. Saw the equivalent of a 'flash mob' at the theatre as the folks who tweeted they had seats available and then a bunch of their college buddies showed up.

When you add that to a huge backlog of stupid things that were patented at the turn of the century losing patent protection and suddenly everyone is ok with building tech again. Definitely a good time to be an engineer.

I do concur with this article, during the .com boom, there was a lot of things that just did not feel right, the infrastructure was not there, UPS and Fedx where not what they are now, there growth happened slower than it could provide capacity for the net. As such stuff like delivering a bag of dog food just did not have the economic argument. It still may not be there but it is much closer. Further organization like Amazon streamlined warehousing which took time. Bandwidth was also another issue, people where innovating but they where on pipes far bigger than was available to the consumer. This all lead to a premature start to what people saw coming as such it inflated far faster than the infrastructure at the time could compensate for.

Fast-forward to today, and much of those concerns have been addressed and mobile sparked a new wave of innovation. I believe that today looks much more like the industrial revolution (multi-sector advancements and convergence among them) than the .com era did as such I do believe that we are riding a bubble, just as the industrial revolution was, but it is a slower playing bubble than most people think it is. A lot of people see shades of .com era in the current atmosphere, but I shades of Marconi, Edison, Tesla and Ford. I don't think, this time it is different I just think we are comparing the this time to the wrong last time.

The parallels are very similar, a lot of disruptive technologies (lord forgive me for using that term) invented at the end of a gilded age, an economic collapse brought on by a society and economy in flux due in part by that disruption, all the while refinement, commercialization and consummation of that technology taking place followed by capital exploitation of the efficiencies gained in commercializing the technology. There is a lot different too, consumer debt was no where where it is now and we (at least America) was not involved in major warfare in the lead up to the crash. That being said, I think there is enough to be optimistic over. The convergence of technology being the one that makes me most optimistic.

The writer says that the US university system is awesomer than most people believe and that the awesomeness of our university system is unmeasurable. Then in the next paragraph he says we host "more than half of the world's top 100 universities". By what measure?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_ranking. By some international rankings many US universities are in the top 100.

Of course tech is/will lead the economy boom! Technology = doing 10x more with the same resources. This in turn creates massive wealth. The kicker is that this time technology startup costs are plummeting as the efficiency of creating new technology has a much quicker development cycle.

Big Data, Smart Manufacturing and Mobile.

Look at every industry and they are all ripe for disruption. Cut out the waste and make education more efficient. There are more incubators popping up every day to take advantage of this situation. Many "startup" will fail, but that is expected.

What is happening now is the 100 year storm. Jump on-board or get out of the way.

When you write something like "Of course tech is/will lead the economy boom" you give the impression that you don't know much economic history. In the USA the booms starting in 1983 and 2002 were both lead by real estate construction. The long boom of the 1960s was powered in part by spending on the Vietnam War. The limited recoveries of the 1970s were both brought about by partial relief regarding the price of oil. During the last 50 years, only the boom of the 1990s could clearly be classified as a tech-lead boom. Your words seem to suggest that it is somehow natural for booms to be tech-lead, when in fact that has been very rare. It is one thing to say that technology is contributing to the economy, it is something very different to suggest that technology is the primary driving force pushing growth.

Liked the article although I believe with the rest looking for their place in crowded sunbathing area I really think the United States, or any other country for that matter, will hardly match, in this century, the same type of success it enjoyed in the 20th century.

The US will be younger than both China and the Europe, but for me the best chances for spectacular growth will come from India[1] and Africa, their population will be much younger than the American and I think they are both natural candidates for industrial jobs once the average Chinese worker becomes older and begins to receive much more money for their work.

This is of course only an opinion.

[1]: Pakistan and Bangladesh probably should be included in this list as well.

Non-sensical and vague enough to be a astrology reading.

"This time it's different."

Great big picture specifics!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com